Friday, October 09, 2009

What was the Nobel committee smoking?


If you know me and read this blog, then you know that I strongly support President Barack Obama, even though I don't always agree with him. I would love to see Barack Obama achieve many of the goals he has laid out: withdrawal (not just a draw down) of U.S. troops from Iraq, peace in Afghanistan, the closing of Guantanamo Bay and a U.S. that adheres to international human rights law, increased global dialogue as part of diplomacy, increased understanding between different religious communities, and the elimination of nuclear weapons. I believe that he could accomplish some of this in the next fifteen years as president and as a past-president, but I'm not sure that his mere presence on the world stage is enough to deserve the Nobel Prize. More than that, I think it ill-advised for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded to any sitting president in charge of a major military power (U.S., China, Russia, Israel, etc.) unless they really have brought about total world peace in the last year. But the U.S. has the largest military of any country in the world and is fighting a war on two fronts while Guantanamo remains open. Barack Obama is not a private citizen as Jimmy Carter and Al Gore were when they won their Nobels. He is the leader of the United States of America, in charge of the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, and that office should not be rewarded.

That said, Barack Obama gave a terrific and gracious speech this morning. He seems to recognize that he hasn't earned this honor yet, and hopefully the Nobel Peace Prize will spur him on in pursuit of peace, nuclear disarmament, and dialogue as he suggests.

Even though I don't think that he deserves it quite yet, the U.S. should reckon itself lucky to have a president that others find symbolic of the ideals of peace. After eight years of war-mongering leadership, that is a pretty fantastic change. Felicidades to us!

Sunday, September 06, 2009

Melrose Place, 1992. What happened?

When I was in New York last month, I ran across several ads on bus stops and phone booths for the new Melrose Place. These ads had charming, subtle catch-phrases on them, like "Tuesday's the new hump day" or "Tuesdays are a bitch." I admit, I didn't recall the old Melrose Place to be a particularly subtle series, but I thought these ads were tacky even by Melrose Place standards.

Because I hadn't seen the original Melrose Place since I was a child, I decided to watch the first season for free on CBS.com. I was shocked to discover that the show didn't actually start off as the crazy prime time soap opera filled with wicked villains that existed in my memory. The characters were full of ordinary brokenness, sad childhoods, unfulfilled dreams, and lots of ABC after-school special plotlines. The show starts with the sexually harassing boss that gets sued in the end. The offending harasser was not even a resident at Melrose Place; it's one of the poor young residents who has to cope with being harassed by her boss and rescued by her roommate. When some of the characters do something bad, it's out of stupidity or irrationality or accidental cruelty, but deep down they are all good people capable of apologies and redemption. Even the doctor, Michael Mancini, whom I remember as viciously evil, is just a kind of goofy and insensitive husband in those first episodes, capable of being devoted and loving when required. And the sex, well, there was some sex early on, but it wasn't exactly steamy. And the show tried to tackle serious topics like discrimination against Matt because he's gay, tensions between African American and Anglo Angelenos in the wake of the riots (the show first aired in 1992), domestic abuse, student loan repayment in a weak job market, and twenty-somethings lacking health insurance. It was amazing to see that the characters were realistically struggling to make ends meet. Of course, virtually none of the original characters could live in the apartment complex now in a much more expensive Los Angeles (even in a recession). A taxi driver, a receptionist, an aerobics instructor, a waitress, a mechanic.

So how did Melrose Place go from the ABC after-school special for twenty-somethings to the prototype of soap opera? I don't know; I haven't watched that far into the show. I do wonder if it's when Heather Locklear shows up, but I also wonder about what caused the shift (besides the beautiful blonde vixen). Was it a move to get better ratings? Or did viewer tastes change leaving behind the 1980s and moving into the 1990s? Was it about Bill Clinton and the end of Reagan-Bush; did the change in presidents signal a change in era, a higher desire for steamy subplots and catharsis watching truly wicked villains? What about 90210? Was 90210 a family-friendly drama once upon a time too that became the master of melodrama only after a while?

I haven't seen the new show; I doubt it's premiered yet. But the ads suggest that it will start out with high melodrama, outrageous villains, and plenty of sex from day one. What was the shift in popular culture that accounts for the very different series starts?

Saturday, September 05, 2009

Blaming the faculty yet again

So I'm not completely sure what it is about professors that makes other professionals despise them so much. Maybe it's their narcissistic smug superiority, a characteristic that makes me despise spending time with many academics. Whatever it is, it may lead to the end of what's good about university life, because it seems like activists from the "liberal media" through to conservative bloggers are determined to make college faculty members into hyper controlled high school teachers, with no time for research or the life of the mind. Only teach what we can measure empirically. We live in a society that has fallen so in love with corporate capitalism, even though it has royally screwed most of us at least as often as it has helped us, that we refuse to allow that there are things we do, like police, healthcare, and education that probably shouldn't be profit driven.

Today, the New York Times questioned why college tuition goes up even in a recession, and never goes down. This is certainly a question I would like an answer to, but I'm baffled as to why the New York Times focuses the first part of the article on how cutting university costs is so difficult because of those pain-in-the-ass faculty (instead of wealthy donors or over-paid bureaucrats, let's say). So, damn those faculty because they fight for a life of the mind, for intellectual engagement that may not have tangible measures, like profit, but has other measures of success. So damn those professors for keeping us from cutting the art budget, which is expensive and brings in no wealthy donor alums.

On the other hand, let's never question why most private colleges spend so much money on sports, when very few sports are a profit revenue except at large schools (most $50,000/year small private liberal arts college spend a lot of money on sports that they certainly "lose" money on; though personally I think it's good the students have the sports to play and engage them physically. I think it's often money well spent, but it's not "profitable."). And let's not question that schools need large bureaucracies and overpaid bureaucrats, or that parents expect their children to have access to top-of-the-line technology, and professors are all expected now to teach in powerpoint and online. No, instead, let's question the comparatively small part of college and university budgets that pay for faculty to take research leave, or let's focus on the fact that professors only teach a few classes a semester. Surely they can teach more classes.

Of course, most faculty, even those at liberal arts colleges where they only teach two or three classes a semester, work 60 hours per week between teaching, working with students, and service to the university; that doesn't include their research time, which they are expected to do to get tenure (which most people working in the academy can no longer aspire to because 50% of professors teaching teach as adjuncts or contract laborers, and not as these tenured faculty anyways), but which the New York Times seems to think is fun hobby work that doesn't really make faculty into better teachers (yeah, I would certainly prefer learning biology from a sixty-year-old professor who still teaches from the biology textbook he learned from forty years earlier in graduate school). And they certainly don't get paid what a less well-educated lawyer or corporate executive gets paid. And the only reason a college professor teaches (especially in the sciences) instead of doing something else more lucrative is to have time in the winter, the summer, and every seven years to do more research, to keep up with their field. So, let's just eliminate the incentive for great scholars to teach as well, and maybe that will fix the university system in this country that we all think needs so much repair. Wouldn't it be better if all those smug brainiacs went and worked in finance too so we could tank the world economy that much faster next time?

And one more thing, I like how the New York Times and others care about the high cost of quality private education now that it is pricing upper middle class students how and hitting their pocketbooks. Twenty years ago, even public education became beyond the reach of much of the lower middle class, but now we have to fix these super expensive private schools because well-to-do parents may have to send their kids to the local public college instead.

Universities do cost more than they should, and there are a million reasons for that, a million things that could and should be changed about that, but why are faculty the first targets of all criticism? They are not likable people, but they are more often than not, hardworking and caring teachers whose research life makes them better at teaching students. There is another danger about really good faculty as James Baldwin observed a long time ago; if they teach too well, then yes, people do tend to question the things about society that are unjust or don't work. So, maybe we should pay faculty less to teach more. Maybe then everyone in this country will get the quality of education that will truly make the U.S. the idiocracy it is already becoming. Well at least we won't have to talk about those pain-in-the-ass, life-of-the-mind faculty since they will no longer exist.

Monday, August 31, 2009

Dick Cheney is a War Criminal


I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the former Vice President is a war criminal, and he should be brought to justice. This past Sunday, Dick Cheney took aim again at the Obama administration's investigation of CIA abuses. In his comments (see today's New York Times piece for a rundown), Cheney freely admitted that he knew about waterboarding as a general technique, and that he supported officers who used unauthorized techniques because they did so to protect the U.S. Cheney also claimed that the Obama administration's investigation was partisan motivated.

How about responsibility motivated? Normally I'm a fan of complexity, but there is no gray area on this issue, and if you think there is, I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for you (and by hell, I mean I hope you accidentally go for a hike in a civil-war-torn part of Pakistan and get kidnapped and tortured by the Taliban). After millennia of countless human cruelties, the Geneva Conventions set up a framework for how we can treat prisoners of war (and I don't care how you class the people interrogated by the CIA, they deserve to be treated the way you would want to be treated if you were captured). Torture is wrong. It is wrong when done to U.S. citizens, and it is wrong when undertaken by U.S. citizens.

First, we have the fact that "enhanced interrogation techniques" achieve limited success, even in the rare "ticking-time-bomb scenario." The most successful long-term interrogation techniques involve making someone feel safe, not abused. I don't know about you, but I would say anything you wanted me to if you started waterboarding me, whether it was true or not. Second, Cheney, and that weaselly Dianne Feinstein (see Los Angeles Times piece today) both suggest that this investigation may harm the U.S.'s current fight against terror. As far as I can tell, things like Abu Ghraib increased hatred of the U.S. and thus made terrorist recruitment that much easier. Perhaps if we proved that we were a country that respected international law, that we're willing to hold our own citizens accountable (no matter how wealthy or powerful), then we would gain back some of the international respect lost in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. In both of those locations, people were detained and abused because they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's right, U.S. interrogators didn't just torture terrorists, they also just tortured random people. Obviously Cheney defends these torture techniques (and they are torture, whatever words he uses) because Cheney never has to worry about an al-Qaeda operative capturing and torturing him, unlike our soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan who do have to fear these things. Ultimately, however, whether abusive interrogation techniques work is beyond the moral point. That Cheney is willing to justify torture policy proves that he is precisely the imperialist barbarian, the Great Satan, that al-Qaeda recruits against, and it proves just how much he believes himself to be above international law. The U.S. Constitution is based on the premise that, unlike medieval European monarchs, no person in the United States, including the president and vice president, should be above the law. We haven't always honored that ideal, but in a case as clear cut as this, we should.

Some have advocated for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that will lay bare the tragic mistakes of the Bush administration. I would be happy for such a thing to work through what lower level interrogators did at the behest of and with the support of the Bush administration's Justice Department, but for someone like Cheney, we have no choice but to prosecute him for his crimes against a Constitution he swore to defend. And as punishment following such a case, Cheney should be delivered to the Hague and made to answer for his crimes before the International Criminal Court, because his crimes were not only against the citizens of the U.S., but against those citizens of the world who were detained and abused while they were, unlike Cheney, not guilty.

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On a side note, I am terrible at smiling in photographs, but I have always been amazed that in Dick Cheney's official White House photo, for which you know they took at least 200 shots, that this leer was the closest to a smile he could approximate. I mean seriously, the man is his own cartoon.

Friday, August 28, 2009

Saint Teddy vs. Saint Junípero. I vote for Teddy.



Yesterday I blogged my sorrow over the loss of Ted Kennedy. Reading Religion Dispatches today, I realized this may have a lot to do with my U.S. Catholic background. Frances Kissling describes Kennedy as a Catholic we could canonize because he really did take up the fights for social justice, even when they were unpopular. Kissling linked to another blog post in America: The National Catholic Weekly that pointed out how special Kennedy was to U.S. Catholics, many of whom have pictures of the Kennedy family hanging in their homes next to the cross. My birth name speaks to my mother's love for the Kennedy clan. So yes, my fondness for Ted Kennedy no doubt owes to my U.S. Catholic context.

Was Kennedy a saint? Yesterday, I would have answered, certainly not. Yet today's Los Angeles Times reminded me that all it takes to become a saint is a little bit of luck and a really good campaigner. The fight to get Junípero Serra, unintentional co-perpetrator of genocide (and just because it's unintentional doesn't make it okay), canonized lives on. The founder of the Alta California (the contemporary state of California) mission system in the late eighteenth century, Serra was one intense character. He regularly whipped himself with chains, beat himself with a stone and a crucifix, and burnt himself with flaming candles. Publicly. As a follow-up to sermons to get his point across; a congregant actually died while trying to imitate Serra during a Mass. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Serra had no problems with the use of corporal punishment against indigenous Californians in his missions. These same missions basically imprisoned thousands of native Californians, and Serra strove his whole life for their spiritual and cultural conversion, which maybe some people think is a good thing, but I quite disagree (and so does Native American scholar and theologian George Tinker in his book Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide). Serra is one official miracle shy of sainthood, and there is a Panamanian artist, Sheila E. Lichacz, who says she can prove the venerable Serra saved her life. People have fought for Serra's sainthood since shortly after his death when Francisco Palóu, his confessor, friend, and pupil, took up the cause for Serra's sainthood in his hagiographical biography published in 1787.

Palóu's work coupled with the fact that California became California are the only reasons that anyone discusses Serra's sainthood. If Serra had spent his whole life in the Sierra Gorda, we would not have this conversation; it's just so California can have a saint. Fr. John Vaughn continues the fight to this day, telling the Times that you just can't judge someone from the eighteenth century by our standards. His rebuttal being that the Founding Fathers had slaves. And they did, and no one is fighting for Thomas Jefferson or George Washington to be declared a "saint," which, as scholar James Sandos points out to the Times, is a category for someone whose holiness can transcend time. I think Jefferson's owning slaves would disqualify him for sainthood, but at least with him, as with Ted Kennedy, I would say that the long-term effects of his work have indeed made the world a better place. I'm not sure that is saintly "holiness." Yet, we should all be grateful that Jefferson and Kennedy lived the lives of public service they led. I just can't say the same thing about Serra. I don't think we're better off for his life of service, and the Catholic Church should be ashamed to canonize someone just because he was a religiously devout man (unless they want to send the message of rah rah, religious mania and genocide) who happened to found missions in a now wealthy and famous place. Of course his religious devotion was more in an al-Qaeda-style maniacal character (Mike Davis made that comparison first, not me); Serra hoped to die a martyr (his words) converting indigenous Americans, and his main goal in life was the spiritual and cultural conversion ("conquista," conquest, would be the actual word Serra used in his own writings) of indigenous peoples. Conquest is not now, nor should it ever be again, viewed as saintly behavior. Worse than that, to make Serra a saint is to insult anyone on this continent descended from indigenous Americans by spitting on the graves of their ancestors.

So, today, do I think the late Edward Kennedy is a saint? Given this information about Serra, I say, let's fight to canonize Ted Kennedy. Surely politically minded, Irish American Catholics deserve their own icon as much as California does. I'll get started on the hagiography. My mother would be the first to testify to the miracles he wrought in her life. Plus we probably already have an image somewhere, making him easy to pray to for aid. Sure, he killed one person in a car accident, but if Serra can be a candidate for sainthood in the face of a 90% drop in native Californian population in the eighteenth century, I think one person in a car accident is no big deal. So here's to Saint Teddy in 300 years!

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Image of Junípero Serra comes from the PBS page, New Perspectives on the West. Kennedy's image comes from Kissling's Religion Dispatches essay.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

I'll miss Ted Kennedy



It is not often that I really care if a U.S. senator lives or dies (a cold statement I know, but really, I don't find them to be a terribly admirable crowd). For the last year, we have all known that Ted Kennedy only had a short time to live, that soon John Kerry would be the senior senator from Massachusetts. Still, living a day without Ted Kennedy in this world has been sadder than I was prepared for. I join the rest of the liberal wing of this country in mourning a great legislator. For all of my life (he had been a senator since well before I was born), Kennedy was a uniquely powerful senator, championing legislation that helped people, and fighting with backbone while other Democrats cowered in corners. I think he was an admirable senator despite some significant human shortcomings, especially in those years before I was born. Ted Kennedy's passing does truly mark the end of an era (not just because he was a "Kennedy"), and some of us miss him already.

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Picture from abc.com's slideshow of Kennedy through the years.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

When walking around New Jersey is a crime and other strange news



Yes, that's right, Bob Dylan got stopped by New Jersey police just for walking around a neighborhood and killing time before the show. Apparently, he was super polite and everything, but I want to know, when did taking a walk become the kind of suspicious activity that requires the questioning of a 68-year-old man?

Oh, and one other random piece of news today, I was not the least bit surprised to see Charles de Gaulle top an informal internet survey of worst airports to sleep in. While I think Paris is a great city and that people in the U.S. should make fewer jokes at the expense of French citizens, I have to admit, Charles de Gaulle is hands down the worst airport I have had to travel through. I was also not surprised to see Amsterdam near the top of the list; that is one super nice airport (which is kind of ironic since Air France is an infinitely better airline than KLM).

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Of Health Care, Socialism, and Economic Recovery

I had a student once who critiqued an article's incorrect use of capitalism. She defined capitalism as the non-interference of the state in corporate interests. Since her definition did not mesh with mine, I realized that defining capitalism is tricky business, and I went to an economics professor. He pointed out, and I quite agree, that capitalism is like many terms in the English language, too dangerous to define specifically. It's best just to highlight general characteristics but try not to pin it down too neatly. That said, I want to sit briefly with a broad definition that must be widely held in public as it is on the public encyclopedia, wikipedia: "Capitalism typically refers to an economic and social system in which the means of production (also known as capital) are privately controlled; labor, goods and capital are traded in a market; profits are distributed to owners or invested in new technologies and industries; and wages are paid to labor." My student's definition of capitalism would certainly fit under this rubric, but so would a number of other definitions that might not sound like hers. Every term in that definition is debatable, but generally capitalism is opposed to "socialism," which supports some form of public or shared ownership of resources and means of production. Since preserving "capitalism" against "socialism" seems to be part of the healthcare debate, I think that the problem we have is this: can a system still be capitalist and involve government control? And if not, do we really want to live in such a capitalist system?

Based on the recent healthcare debates, obviously a significant and vocal portion (though, polls suggest, not a majority) of this country seems to think that the slightest slip toward socialism would damage our great capitalist tradition (while crying keep your government hands off my Medicare, the government-run program; and while I could talk about the use of race-baiting and fear of change in these town hall meetings, I will leave that to other commentators). First of all, Democratic Party Health Care proposals have so far left out the proposal I most support (to paraphrase Jimmy Smits from the final season of the West Wing), removing "over 65" from Medicare, thus making Medicare available to everyone. Why have they avoided this? Because somehow it might be socialism to have a government, single-payer health insurance option that competes with private insurance and that regulates health care costs. Socialism, by the way, would mean complete government control of the health care system, from nurse to hospital to insurance. No Democratic proposal supports a socialist health care system; the hospitals and doctors remain private, and private insurance options would remain (and if they think they can't compete with a public, single-payer option, then that should tell you something about what kind of crappy job your private health insurance does for you). In the 1100-page House bill, there is no mention of "death panels" or "communal standards." The bill and many health care reformers do advocate government regulation of health care. If you're a libertarian, that will piss you off, but for the rest of us, that should be fine. It is not socialism, it barely qualifies as a mixed economy, it's just government intervention in the capitalist market place for the sake of the consumer, something that we should support if we think that cars should be safety-tested before they are sold.

If we are to accept the libertarian definition of capitalism, and we think the U.S. should be a pure capitalist state, then there should be no tax-payer-paid police, no state-supported military, no public schools, no public libraries, no regulation on any industry whatsoever (including the FDA that tries to keep lead out of baby formula), and we, as individuals, should pave our own roads. If you are a libertarian, then you would find the U.S. government has disgustingly indulged in a "mixed economy" since its inception. If capitalism means a complete lack of state intervention in anything, I don't think most of us, when it comes down to it, want to live in such a country. If you like that a government agency won't let poison be packaged as medicine, then you like the FDA, and you like government regulation in the pharmaceutical industry (and I wish there was more of it, personally). So the debate should not be how to keep socialism out of our capitalism, rather how mixed should our economy be and in what places. This, of course requires that "socialism" not be treated as a demonic concept; it requires that we live in a world filled not with black (capitalism) and white (socialism), but shades of gray where we pick which blend works best for us as a nation and a society.

Just so you know, countries that have been sporting more mixed economies are faring better than us these days. The WHO rankings are well known; the U.S. healthcare system comes in at a staggeringly low 37 (if you consider how much richer the U.S. is than #36, Costa Rica). France is #1; the U.K. is #18. While conservatives in the U.S. have been making digs at the British NHS, the British blogosphere has fought back in defense of their system. It is imperfect they note, but a hell of a lot better than the U.S. system. Even Canada is ranked higher, at #30, than the U.S.

And those mixed economies of France and Germany have actually exited the recession. We are still in a recession for reasons similar to the BBC's explanation for the U.K. Finance was too big a chunk of our economy, but, and the BBC notes this as well, our economy was not the right mix of capitalism and socialism in a time like this. France and Germany's mixed economy had social safety nets that better protected their economies, and so their economies are growing again. Ours is still shrinking, and there are people for whom unemployment protections are running out. So the next time someone demands that we preserve pure capitalism at all costs, I hope that they can also think about their support for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan (paid for by that socialist defense budget of ours) and how we got stuck in a recession longer than states with more mixed economies.

Thursday, August 06, 2009

On the plus side (responding to my own previous post)

Both Sonia Sotomayor and Miguel Diaz have been confirmed and now go out to their respective posts. The first Latina on the Supreme Court, and the first Latino Ambassador to the Vatican. President Obama's Latin@ Outreach moves have had some marked success.

Sunday, August 02, 2009

Life in the Racialized United States of America



In case some of you out there still want to argue that we are somehow "post-race," I have found events of the last few weeks to be quite instructive on this front. Famously, of course, we have the beer summit attempting to resolve a conflict between a black academic and the white police officer who arrested him, a police officer who apparently survived a bunch of racial sensitivity training yet was unprepared to face an angry black academic. That Glenn Beck can then call Barack Obama "racist" for saying the Cambridge police acted "stupidly" (and by the way, there is no other way to describe Officer Crowley's arrest of Gates, aside from either "acting stupidly" or "acting on the basis of testosterone and ego," i.e. acting without consulting one's rational faculties, i.e. acting stupidly) is proof that we are a long way from the postracial utopia.

But nothing has galled me more than the "birther" controversy, in which a collection of idiotic conservatives appear intent on proving that racism is still a severe problem. It seems to me that they refuse to admit that someone who isn't white-enough-looking can be a natural-born citizen (to which I refer you to the Fourteenth Amendment or the 1898 Supreme Court decision regarding Chinese Americans or the 1917 law making Puerto Ricans into U.S. citizens for the purpose of the draft). So there can be absolutely no doubt as to where I stand on this, I have included a picture of Barack Obama's birth certificate, certifying his birth in Hawai'i (on U.S. soil) to a U.S. mother, both of which make him incontrovertibly a natural-born U.S. citizen (see the Los Angeles Times "Top of the Ticket" blog post from which I pulled the birth certificate if you don't believe me). And no, I do not think the state of Hawai'i, currently governed by a Republican, could be conspiring with Kenya to keep a non-U.S. citizen in the White House. I am writing because I am taking up Bill Maher's challenge to do what I can, in my small way, to fight this absolute inanity.

The question of whether Barack Hussein Obama, now president of the United States of America, is a "natural-born citizen" is possible only because of the racist and xenophobic history of this country. As much as I would never want Governor Schwarzenegger to be president, I do think it's plain xenophobia not to allow a naturalized citizen, someone who has probably had to express more commitment to this country and its ideals than your average "natural-born citizen," to be president. But the constitution says "natural-born citizen," so then who is naturally born a citizen? Well, U.S. legal history is complicated on this issue because of a history of racism, racism about whether formerly enslaved Africans were citizens, about whether Mexicans resident in territories stolen from them were citizens, about whether Native Americans were allowed to vote in a land wrested from their own ancestors as part of U.S. conquest, of whether people born to Chinese or Japanese parents on U.S. soil actually could consider themselves to have the same rights as U.S. citizens born on the same soil to European parents. These are all questions that laws or supreme court decisions have been issued to decide. So no wonder some crazy right-wing nutjobs feel the need to protest that Kenyans, in some long-term strategy reaching back to the era of Jim Crow, conceived a plan to hijack the U.S. presidency by impregnating a "white" U.S. citizen. The U.S. has had a long history of not recognizing anyone as a U.S. citizen who doesn't look like George Washington (and that means women too, who couldn't vote, and thus couldn't be president either before 1920).

That said, the facts are simple. Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawai'i in 1961, which is one of the 50 United States of America. And even if he wasn't, he is the son of a U.S. citizen and has lived his life as a U.S. citizen, receiving a U.S. passport because no one at the state department ever found reason to question his citizenship. He was never naturalized as a U.S. citizen because he was naturally born one. That "birthers" refuse to recognize that Barack Obama could possibly have been born a U.S. citizen is because, on some level, they are racist and xenophobic, and they are just sore losers. And I can't help but feel, as I have felt before, that we idealize different things about this country. I, for one, think it speaks well for the U.S. that the president can have a mixed ancestry and specifically does have relatives from a small town in Kansas and a village in Kenya.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Birthright Citizenship and White Paranoia

Writing in today's Los Angeles Times, Mitchell Young advocated the end of "birthright citizenship" in the United States, firmly established by the Supreme Court in 1898, a right the Irish voted to end in 2004. Young suggests that birthright citizenship is a product of feudal law, and is just untenable in a land of 11 million undocumented immigrants. What he is too educated and polite to say is what undergirds any problem with "birthright citizenship." Seeking to end "birthright citizenship" speaks, on one level, to a policy opposing state responsibilities to undocumented immigrant parents of U.S. citizens. I don't have much sympathy for that line of argument either, but at least it's a rational view from a policy standpoint.

The bigger issue is that Young and others are looking at the first president to have a father hailing from the 2/3 world, whose mother was an Anglo U.S. citizen, though a few conservatives have sought to prove that President is somehow not a citizen of the U.S. President Obama speaks symbolically to a larger truth. If birthright citizenship and current immigration trends continue, traditional "white" U.S. citizens will be a minority in a country they believe is theirs. The fear that this country will belong to people who no longer phenotypically resemble the "Founding Fathers" undergirds Young's real concern. Even if birthright citizenship originates in English feudal common law, it is practiced by most respectable countries in the world who attempt to be non-racist in their legislation from Costa Rica to Germany. Japan and Ireland, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are the places who would deny birthright citizenship, and most people understand that racism undergirds most of their reasoning. I would be pretty disgusted if the U.S. decided to join their ranks out of fear.

But Mr. Young, let's run with your point. I will support denying birthright citizenship if every single adult person (under 70) living in the U.S. is required to take the exact same citizenship test that those who become naturalized citizens are required to take. I'm not sure what poor country should be given the large swath of U.S. citizens who won't pass the test. Maybe they should just spend their life in detention facilities, dying of a heart attack without care and being erased from legal memory like Pakistani immigrant, Ahmad Tanveer.

Sunday, July 05, 2009

Barack Obama has long thought about nuclear disarmament



A recent New York Times piece highlights how President Barack Obama thought about nuclear disarmament even in his youth, you know when he was a college student, the same age as those ASU students interviewed for The Daily Show. It's just nice to discover that a president has given long-term thought to these things, that he wrote about them in 1983 as a senior in college, that he even wrote a seminar paper on how to negotiate nuclear disarmament with Russia while a college student.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Fighting for Democracy



I have been intensely interested in the Iranian protests this past weekend. While I cannot know the truth about the election, such an uprising suggests that while President Ahmadinejad still has strong support, it cannot be as strong as the official numbers purported. What is amazing to me, having lived through the U.S.A.'s 2000 election, is how much votes matter to people. Here are millions of people rising up and demanding their votes be counted; when 5 Supreme Court justices decided an election here, all we did was grumble. Ahmadinejad has compared the protesters to angry soccer fans and to dirt on the street. Well, it would seem these protesters are taking their vote a little bit more seriously than a soccer match (not to belittle soccer), but they are now risking their lives to have their votes counted, and I doubt millions of people would do so, for several days, after a bad referee's call at a soccer game. I think the problem is that people in the U.S. treat our politics like they are nothing more than football games, like they don't really matter that much. We could all learn a lesson from Iranians this time around; sometimes politics do matter.

Of perhaps even greater interest to me, though, is the way that Iran shows itself to share some of the significant statistical divides one sees in the U.S., that the more urban and the better educated tend to support Mousavi in Iran, just as the more urban and better educated tend to support the Democrats here. I do not mean to ove simplify the issues at stake in Iran (or the ones in the U.S. too; there is crossover and division within each conglomeration, even here); they are a complex society, with an even more complex political system that is not directly parallel to ours. But I am fascinated and disturbed, given the recent dramatic increase in gun and ammunition sales in the U.S., that we are staring down the mouth of our own potential civil war, one between urban and rural cultures (more people now live in cities than in the country now, globally, which is a dramatic cultural shift in the history of human civilization) and that Iran may be facing such an internal struggle right now too.

One other note of concern I need to sound though, despite my simplistic comparison there, is that we need to think complexly. Roger Cohen of the New York Times has done such a striking job with that. Disappointingly, most of the comments on Cohen's editorial, "Iran's Day of Anguish," missed his complexity entirely. Many of the people seemed incapable of perceiving that members of the Iranian establishment, which Mousavi was a definite member of, are divided among themselves, that the brutality is one wing of an establishment against another. That what is going on is enormously complex, that Iranians are complex and reflect a range of opinions on the world, on life, on the best course for their own future. To some extent I also think a global culture war now exists between those capable of seeing shades of gray and those who see things in black and white (not to cast the world into too many camps of two; I think we all exist in several competing camps at the same time, but at certain nexus points in history some views seem to predominate and divide us; we may be approaching such a moment).

Another excellent piece was posted today on The Public Sphere. Mohammad Razi points to both the promise and the potentially horrific failures of revolution.

Finally, I need to express my shock at discovering that Twitter is not just a self-indulgent narcissistic personality disorder self-publicity invention. It has actually played a critical role in the Iranian protests this weekend. Apparently the revolution will not be televised, but it might be tweeted.

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Image from an Iranian American graphic designer, popularly circulating around the web right now.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Obama's Latina/o Outreach Week



President Barack Obama not only named the first Latina nominee to the Supreme Court this week. He also just named Latino Catholic theologian, Miguel Díaz, as Ambassador to Vatican City. Díaz will be the first Latino to serve in that post since Ronald Reagan first started sending an ambassador there.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

More Stupid Catholic Tricks for the Easter Season

So yes, after my last blog post, the Catholic church continued to produce confusing spectacles of itself, like the Pope weaving together a tricky explanation for how condemns worsen the spread of AIDS by protecting the sinful consciousness responsible. A Vatican official did come out in defense of the poor Brazilian mother who saved her daughter's life by taking her to get an abortion.

In the U.S., some conservative Catholics decided to make a political farce over Barack Obama and Notre Dame. The University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, once home to a great NCAA football legend, but always known as a Catholic university, has invited President Obama to speak at commencement and receive an honorary degree. As Notre Dame has done this to several presidents, including Ronald Reagan, surely there would be nothing odd about inviting Obama to Notre Dame and giving him an honorary degree?

Well apparently there is, if you think Notre Dame should act more like an arm of the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops than a university. Never mind that Notre Dame as a university should have some freedom from the stranglehold of Vatican teachings that do not mesh with academic discourse in non-Catholic institutions. Never mind that Notre Dame has a complex history and complex cast of alumnae, many of whom aren't even Catholic, and many of whom are pro-choice. Notre Dame alum and Reagan staffer, Richard Allen, sought a compromise in today's New York Times by saying that Obama should still serve as a commencement speaker while being denied an honorary degree.

I appreciate Allen's Reaganesque approach at a compromise emptied of all meaning or recognition. Allen even attempts to use the example of President Ronald Reagan, whom Notre Dame honored with a commencement address and honorary degree, supposedly in part because of his brave stance on Roe v. Wade. Why wasn't anyone up in arms about letting a remarried divorcee speak at Notre Dame's commencement? The Catholic Church has institutionally opposed divorce for a lot longer than it has opposed abortion (for your information: the institutional church has taught that divorce was a bad idea since the Gospel of Matthew was written some time in the late first century; Catholics have debated whether abortion was murder and at which point one could have an abortion until the late 19th century; St. Augustine did not belief a human soul could reside in an unformed body, and thus abortion was not murder if done in roughly the first trimester). So it would seem to me divorce should be a bigger issue. Just as I queried in my last post, what is so damn special about abortion, that the institutional church feels the need to fight against it over all other sins (like say repeated raping a girl between ages 6 and 9)? My only guess is that abortion prevents white Catholics from reproducing at the rate they would like, and that all birth control prevents women from getting pregnant thus allowing them to pursue other careers, like becoming an Episcopalian priest since the Catholics won't ordain them. My other guess is that Catholic bishops think they gain something from focusing on this one issue, but as far as I can tell, all they look like are automated tools for right-wing politics and pundits, many of whom aren't even Catholic. Try being independent for once and go protest capital punishment, something Catholicism has equally strong opposition to.

If Obama is receiving an honorary degree in Catholic ethics, then perhaps there would be some basis for denying him this degree or for denying him a speaking engagement at Notre Dame's commencement. But that's not the case. Notre Dame graduates many students whose ethical views diverge from that of the established church, and they support many speakers on campus with different views. That is how it should be. First of all, neither is Obama, nor are many of the other degree recipients or speakers, a Catholic, and no 21st century Catholic educational institution should have a theological litmus test for someone who is not Catholic (it would be better for them not to have them at all, but let's compromise for the moment). Second, the Catholic church would do well to remember that university institutions are spaces of free inquiry, and that such free inquiry is essential for the survival of religious minorities, as Catholics are in the U.S. Perhaps the bishops should think about one other thing. Their opposition to free inquiry may also explain why there has only ever been one Catholic president of the U.S.A., and he got there by promising he did not really listen to the Vatican.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Too bad we can't duct tape the Vatican's mouth shut

I can't take it any more. If the Vatican manages to enunciate one more stupid thing in the month of March, I may have to duct tape an effigy of the papal mouth. It's like they haven't read a book since 1852 (or earlier) and they don't speak to anyone who isn't an unmarried male patriarch (oh wait, that's probably true). I have previously commented on some profoundly stupid statements from the current Bishop of Rome, Joseph Ratzinger, and his team of crazy fries. There was the time he said the indigenous peoples of the Americas secretly longed for imperialism (er, uh, Christianity I guess) because it saved their souls. There was the time the Vatican opposed gender theory while wearing a dress (well in fairness, a lot of priests wear dresses, and I think that's cool, so long as they get gender theory). Then there was the kerfuffle of un-excommunicating and re-excommunicating the Holocaust denying bishop. Of course this denial of gender theory was followed up by an aging Vatican scholar contending that women and men sin differently based on the confessions he's heard (it, naturally, never occurred to him that maybe gender theory might help him rethink his methodology for assessing how people sin; as far as I can tell, he just assessed what women and men are more likely to perceive and confess). And then last week, the Vatican supported a truly heinous act by the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife. A 9-year-old girl had been repeatedly raped from the age of 6 by her step-father. Pregnant with twins and her life in peril, her mother took her to have an abortion, which is only legal in Brazil in exactly her situation - cases of rape or where the mother's life is in in danger - and the girl's situation fit both cases. The archbishop then proceeded to excommunicate the mother and the doctors for doing what they did. Of course, what is the bigger and more unforgivable sin here? Is it, as the Vatican seems to think (since they didn't excommunicate the abusive step-father), saving a 9-year-old girl's life at the cost of unborn fetuses who probably would have died and taken the girl with them; or is the bigger sin (as I believe) raping a 6-year-old-girl for three years until she was 9 and could get pregnant? This is why I appreciated the responses of both Mary Hunt and Frances Kissling.

The Vatican, though, not satisfied with its recent tragic misdiagnosis of sin, thought that it should throw a statement out there just for laughs. Since the Vatican hates birth control and women working, (really girls, if you don't want 10 kids and to be a stay at home mom, become a nun so we can continually undervalue your labor and place in our church), a semi-official Vatican newspaper wanted to make sure everyone knew that the washing machine was the most liberating invention of the 20th century for women. Yep, being able to throw the clothes in the laundromat and sip lattes while gossiping with girlfriends, that's liberation for you.

Seriously, it's like the Ratzinger administration is trying to prove that the hierarchy is idiotic, offensive, and irrelevant. I mean why aren't they out there pounding the pavement with the same enthusiasm about the dire state of the world economy? Or trying to fix poverty, end wars, fight hunger, provide universal healthcare access with the same attentive efforts? Well, I wish those fellows the best of luck at saving whatever they think they're saving.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

President Obama - Please save the Persepolis Fortification Archive

Where is UNESCO when you need them? In the complex landscape surrounding the trade and museum storage of antiquities, another bizarre case has added its name. While scholars strive every where to fight black market dealings that sell global antiquities making it that much more difficult to study the past, while countries fight to have valuable national treasures like the Elgin Marbles returned to their homelands, a judge in Washington D.C. decides to distribute priceless Persian antiquities to survivors of a suicide-bombing in Jerusalem's Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall.

Don't get me wrong. I am sure that surviving a suicide bombing is horrible and traumatic, especially when one has sustained lifelong and debilitating injuries, so traumatic that no price tag can be placed on recuperation. Yet a U.S. court has decided a pricetag can be placed on their suffering, and they have chosen a path (after the attorney for the victims, David Strachman, suggested it) that comes at great cost to world heritage, to scholars, and cultural critics, none of whom can be held responsible for the original victims' suffering. Because Hamas claimed responsibility, and the survivors believe Hamas did this with financial support from Iran, the survivors have sued Iran for reparations. Oddly enough to begin with, they were awarded, in Washington D.C. (thousands of miles from Jerusalem, Iran, or Hamas as far as I can tell, but that's another issue), a sum of $412 million. Since there is no way of collecting such money, their lawyer convinced a judge that antiquities on loan to the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute is how they will collect the money.

The tablets of the Persepolis Fortification Archive are just bureaucratic information, but they still require years of study in order to understand the Persian empire prior to Alexander the Great. Legally, the Persepolis Fortification Archive belongs to Iran, but the collection has been on loan to the University of Chicago for study since the 1930s. Technically, the Archive belongs to the government of Iran, a government under a shah in the 1930s, not even the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nonetheless, it is Iran's heritage specifically, but more than that, these tablets are world heritage and do not belong to anyone. They cannot and should not be sold to the highest bidder. It sets a dangerous precedent in already murky waters when it comes to antiquities dealings.

More than that, the people who feel punished are European and North American scholars, as well as Iranian scholars no doubt, but you know who doesn't feel punished by such actions? The Islamic Republic of Iran. So, while the victims have indeed suffered, how can their suffering be alleviated by profiting off tremendous sacrifices to the study of world heritage? Imagine if we had found newly discovered manuscripts from the Mayflower voyage, manuscripts for which there were no other copies, and we sent them for study at a school in Austria. Imagine that while there, Austrian citizens who had been victims of Pinochet's regime in Chile sued the U.S. government for the CIA's role in Pinochet's ascendancy to power, and they won reparations in an Austrian court that our government refused to pay. Would we find it acceptable that these victims, who no doubt suffered and survived horribly painful disfiguring torture, were allowed to sell off individual pages of these manuscripts to the highest bidder? Imagine how much worse it is when we are talking about the documents of an ancient nation who no longer exists, and when understanding that nation's history is about world heritage not just the heritage of the nation only tangentially responsible.

So please President Obama, keep the Archive in the hands of the Oriental Institute because Iran has no real rights to them; the scholarly world community does. World cultural heritage cannot and must not be sold piecemeal to the highest bidder.

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The European Iranologists' Society has a petition for President Obama requesting that he stop this crazy act, that Obama must not allow the U.S. to become involved in the sale of world cultural heritage. If you are an archaeologist, even remotely, please go to this link and sign.

The National Iranian American Council also is sending form letters to President Obama, which you can sign.

Information for this post was taken from the recent Associated Press piece published in the International Herald Tribune.

Friday, January 30, 2009

Pope Rehabilitates Holocaust Denier

Okay, so again Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI, has managed to botch the historically significant works of Pope John Paul II toward interfaith dialogue. My list of complaints about Ratzinger's narrow view of the world certainly doesn't begin here (I have a previous post complaining about his views on the Christianizing of indigenous peoples). What most of this list have in common was correctly identified today by another blog with Religiondispatches.com. On that blog Professor Louis Ruprecht correctly, in my estimation, notes that the former member of the Nazi Youth has not in fact been roaming the world seeking to alienate Jewish, Muslim, and Amerindian populations. The papal axe to grind is about modernity.

Years ago, I heard Israeli scholar Emmanuel Sivan speak about fundamentalisms. He said the one thing they all had in common was that they were a response to modernity. At their core, they were a response to the possibility that people could live in their midst as atheists. Fundamentalisms express a fundamental insecurity in the heart and mind of a religious believer. They cannot handle the rational challenge to the very foundation of their faith and identity. Ratzinger/Benedict would do well to recognize that his anti-modernity and religious fundamentalisms share a common thread. That common thread suggests it is no mere coincidence that a rehabilitated (or no longer ex-communicated, just in case you're unfamiliar with oddities of Vatican law here) anti-modern bishop would also be a Holocaust-denier. Anti-modernity (as opposed to post-modernity and the others who exist along a modern spectrum) has as its core a fundamental rejection of others in their midst, others who threaten carefully constructed, dare I say "modern" identities. Perhaps the Pope would be well-advised to visit his own anti-modernity for the ways in which it is constrained by peculiarly modern limitations, like all strains of fundamentalist anti-modernity.