Notes from the Museum of the Middle Class

No more churches!

2010-08-25T08:56:00.000-07:00

From sea to shining seas, the land of the United States of America is scarred with the blood of martyrs, people who fell before a force bent on power and world domination. These cruel destroyers also pledged faith to a religion, and they claimed that this religion demanded that all other religions be expelled in the name of their one true God. More than that, they claimed their religion entitled them to the land of others, and required that they slaughter those who would not submit. Admittedly, even some of the more fanatical members of this religion would find genocidal slaughter unpalatable today. Nevertheless, I feel that all followers of this religion should be held responsible for the cruelty of particular individual adherents. These so-called "Christians" should be prohibited from building any more "victory churches" on the land of those who suffered, even if some surviving family members of the honored dead now consider themselves to be "Christians."

I write this to be sarcastic and facetious about the current debate over the Park51 project in Lower Manhattan. While I can imagine no better memorial to 9/11 than to erect a Sufi community center that honors and demands religious tolerance, the particular affiliation of Park51 is beyond the point. All religions are entitled to practice their faith freely as long as it does not involve murder. While I wish that I did not have to be harassed by Jews for Jesus on the New York City subways, we are supposed to tolerate the religious faiths of others, even if we don't like them or we object to activities undertaken by their followers. Although I was disappointed in President Obama's backtracking, I felt the need to post today because I was moved by Mayor Michael Bloomberg's speech last night on the Park51 project, the rights of Muslims to worship anywhere in Manhattan (rights hard-won by previous religious minorities including Jews, Quakers, and Catholics), and his send-up of Dumbledore. I believe that we are called to religious tolerance, and that Christians, of all people, should be realistic about, and sympathetic toward, the plurality of individuals who can adhere to one broader religious faith. More than that, the Constitution of the United States, which continues to rule over the blood of innocent individuals conquered in its name, nevertheless guarantees such freedoms. If you love the Constitution so much, then you have no choice but to support the building of a Muslim center anywhere, especially if it is, as Keith Olberman pointed out, not in fact at Ground Zero.

Anosognosia, Errol Morris, and a Failure of Imagination

2010-06-28T06:21:00.000-07:00

Last week, I was reading a New York Times blog post by Errol Morris, who had made one of my favorite documentaries, The Fog of War. In a series of blog posts, Morris explored "The Anosognosic's Dilemma". In his first post, Morris defines anosognosia as "a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability." Morris then expands this definition to include studies that demonstrate how our own incompetence generally blinds us to that same incompetence. For instance, students who are bad at grammar often don't understand why they are getting bad grades and believe that they are really good at grammar. (I admit, certain public figures like Sarah Palin come to mind). Morris's anosognosia puts an interesting twist on the old quote attributed to Mark Twain, Artemis Ward, and a few others, "It ain't the things we don't know that gets us into trouble. It's the things we know for sure that just ain't so."

What matters most is that we think we are competent, and we fail to imagine the possibilities for our incompetence. While on a personal level, such a perspective can send me into a panic over my own potential incompetence, I was reminded of Morris's anosognosia today while I was reading another series of articles in the New York Times. One looks at the fraying social safety net in Spain. Another describes the way that civil employee allies have now turned against labor benefits. The third is Paul Krugman's editorial on the start of the third depression. One of the pair profiled in the article on Spain observed that the bankers should be paying for this bad economy, not him. The second article, profiling New Jersey, struck me with the early proposal that benefits for police officers (you know, those people who can make terrible mistakes, but upon whom we ultimately depend for loyal and uncorrupt service to the common good) be cut because they cost New Jersey too much. Then there was Krugman's ultimate point that tightening government spending will only lead to further unemployment; he doesn't mention bankers, but he does note that it is the unemployed who will suffer. I would like to add so will the underemployed as I have an overeducated, overqualified good friend working in a gift shop because she can't find a job in her field.

Why do I connect these economic crisis pieces to Morris's anosognosia? In a republic populated with Tea-partiers decrying our exploding budget and our government spending while still demanding social security checkes, I have been intrigued by our unwillingness to pay more taxes (and our unwillingness even to suggest anything reasonable sounding to do about the economy). I do not think taxes should be raised on everyone, but those of who are gainfully employed and economically stable should be willing to pay more. I think Joe Biden was right that paying taxes is a civic duty, and one we should take pride in. I have also been intrigued that, as Krugman describes, despite historical examples, our world seems hell bent on repeating past mistakes and reducing government spending when we need it most. But I have been most intrigued that our government was willing to spend money to bail out banks but not to restart say the Civilian Conservation Corps, which my grandfather, who recently past away, prized as among the best experiences of his life. I understand that we don't want to pay more money for tax bailouts, and I still want heads to roll Marie Antoinette style from the banking industry. But why on earth would we cut the benefits of police officers in order to address the economic crisis? Why on earth wouldn't we demand the creation of more jobs?

These questions then led me to wonder about the acrimony of our current political climate, and that is where I return to anosognosia? What are the alternatives we have failed to consider, either because of political divisions (an inability that I share, an inability to think outside of certain political ideologies about acceptable economic responses), or because we are no longer deep thinkers in the age of the iPhone? Where has our imagination failed us? Is our incompetence so grave that we cannot recognize the possibility that we could be grotesquely wrong? Will historians in some distant era be left to ponder what we could have done differently if only we had broadened our frame of reference? Will they diagnose us with a collective anosognosia?

Of imperialism and expansionism

2010-03-18T06:45:00.001-07:00

As a child, one of my favorite films was Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. In ways that I did not fully understand at the time, I enjoyed its meditations on the end of the Cold War as much as its special effects and Klingon make-up. In one scene, a Klingon delegation is dining aboard the enterprise, conversing about what it might mean for there to be a peace agreement between the Federation and the Klingons. Having played a bit where one Klingon character quotes "to be or not to be" and another character cites Shakespeare's Hamlet as the source, the conversation turns to the challenges before the Klingons in making peace with the Federation. Christopher Plummer's General Chang states that "We [the Klingons] need breathing room," to which Captain Kirk responds by suggesting that same statement was made by Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.

I have taken this little jaunt because Kirk's response intimates the fine line that exists between a people stating they "need breathing room" and a people heading out upon a campaign of imperialist expansion. I note this because after reading about the Texas School Board's curricular alterations, it became clear that some of these Texas schoolboard members seem to think that "American expansionism" is somehow benign, noble, and patriotic, while "imperialism" is somehow bad and therefore not an apt description for the U.S.'s nineteenth-century campaign across the continent. I offer up Kirk's observation that to need "breathing room," which as Frederick Jackson Turner long ago described as the undergirding drive of frontier settlement, may also entail "bad," viral, imperialist expansion. While the Texas schoolboard both wishes to rewrite history (and to write out important figures like César Chávez), they are also making semantic distinctions that must mean something in their particular subculture, but they are semantic distinctions that can seem meaningless from another point of view (like say you are Arapaho, Apache, Navajo, Cherokee, etc...U.S. expansionism is the same as imperialism and still has the same consequences). My point here is that the Texas School Board is so concerned with (white) liberal misinterpretations of history that they miss the ways that their own words and views can be misinterpreted by people different than themselves.

In a recent Los Angeles Times editorial, Jonathan Zimmerman notes that we all read history from our particular, biased location, and perhaps it would be fair to demand that U.S. history courses teach "both sides" of U.S. history. Yes, I agree that we all interpret history from a biased standpoint, and that multiple perspectives on history should be presented in class; that more importantly, students should be taught how to think about history and how to read historians critically. That said, I have not fallen so far down the postmodern rabbit hole that I think all readings of history are equally valid because some are just wrong by virtue of what they intentionally hide and leave out. I am also more of a postmodernist than Zimmerman because I think any approach to U.S. history that presumes an overarching narrative can't be good history. In his editorial, Zimmerman posits that there are two sides to the history of the U.S., when in fact there are more, and the only two sides he presents are conservative and liberal patriotism. There are many other perspectives besides just these two, both of which are guilty of eliding certain historical particularities in service of a greater grand narrative. Zimmerman is correct that there are many problems with how U.S. history is currently taught in high schools, but the solution is not to teach less history as the Texas standards suggest.

Rather we must ask more of the generations ahead than have been asked of the generations behind; they must learn the histories we have known while also being taught how to read them critically and how to craft their own perspectives. I think that is some of what Zimmerman is getting at, and that would be a good idea as long as it doesn't presuppose that there are two simplistic sides to U.S. history, a (white, elite, male) liberal view and a (white, elite, Christian) conservatie view. Then perhaps students can critically read the myth of expansionism for what Captain Kirk knew it to be; just because someone claims they need "breathing room" doesn't mean they aren't imperialists. It means that they have a semantic universe where expansionism is somehow neutrally valued while imperialism is valenced negatively, even while an outsider to that semantic universe would not see such a distinction.

Give to Haiti

2010-02-17T13:15:00.000-08:00

In reading up on responses to that fascinating "We are the World" video, I discovered the tragically ended "ill doctrine" blog of Jay Smooth and the new "nil doctrine" blog. It's good stuff. The video above says more, and better than I could say, about giving to Haiti. The video below is the most appropriate response to John Mayer that I've seen.

Massachusetts, please vote for Martha Coakley

2010-01-18T07:41:00.000-08:00

What is up with Massachusetts? I get that the Democrats are often too lily-livered, that the Healthcare bill lacks the teeth we would want, that they did not go after the banks hard enough, that they did not spend enough money bailing out our economy, and that we continue to fight a losing war in Afghanistan for reasons Rudolph Giuliani can't even remember anymore (how many terrorist attacks happened under George W. Bush, Rudy?).

I have been away from the blogging both because I've been busy, but also because I've been tired of watching us all act like idiots. People on the right demonstrate an ideologically driven short-term memory, people in the center demonstrate an even greater short-term, fly-by-the-seat-of-one's-pants sensitivity, and people on the left have a short-term memory, lack-of-common-sense about how to fight on, unite, and compromise when necessary. After a couple of great months at the end of 2008, I returned to being sick of being a U.S. citizen, or being member of the human race really.

This sudden turn of events that are pro-Brown in Massachusetts made me even sicker. This weekend John McCain sent out a brief email soliciting support for Brown by saying "one of America's first colonies started in Massachusetts with a small group of citizens determined to lead and resolved to make a difference. Together they made history and overcame impossible odds when nobody thought they could. On Tuesday, we have an opportunity to do it all over again." Are we really going to let conservatives write the history of Massachusetts? I would like to remind Massachusetts readers that they made the mistake of sicking Mitt Romney on the world, but they were also home to some of the greatest liberal thinkers and actors in U.S. history. For all their scandal, the Kennedys served the U.S. faithfully, loyally, intelligently, and, yes, liberally for so long. Don't let Ted Kennedy's dreams of healthcare reform die with him. Don't forget that John F. Kennedy was a liberal who called Martin Luther King, Jr. in prison. Don't deny the radical visions of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Massachusetts first legalized gay marriage, proving that some states in the U.S. really could support equality for all. Instead of caving to the inchoate babble of the rest of the U.S., Massachusetts should show what the rest of the U.S. can learn from the legacy of Massachusetts liberalism.

Really, do you want to return power to the do-not-tax, but spend-in-debt-to-China, cowboy-diplomatic, socially asphyxiated Republicans who got us into two wars and a global financial meltdown? Our economic, military, and terrorism woes are the fault of Republicans, a party whose 2008 vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, didn't think Massachusetts was "real America." The Democrats' problem is that they have no ability to stand together and fight for what needs to be done to turn this country around, and so yes, we have a compromised healthcare reform bill. But some reform is better than nothing. Please, for the love of that "America" that fought for equality and justice for all, please vote for Martha Coakley.

And this is why I haven't been blogging in months. Listening to the political conversations in the U.S. makes me sound just as angry, sound-byte, simplistic, and trivial as everyone else. Please let 2010 be a better decade.

What was the Nobel committee smoking?

2009-10-09T12:20:00.001-07:00

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!

Melrose Place, 1992. What happened?

2009-09-06T18:02:00.001-07:00

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?

Blaming the faculty yet again

2009-09-05T07:53:00.000-07:00

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.

Dick Cheney is a War Criminal

2009-08-31T06:34:00.001-07:00

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.

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

2009-08-28T07:24:00.000-07:00

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.

I'll miss Ted Kennedy

2009-08-27T06:28:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2009-08-16T07:35:00.000-07:00

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).

Of Health Care, Socialism, and Economic Recovery

2009-08-15T06:35:00.001-07:00

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.

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

2009-08-06T13:58:00.000-07:00

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.

Life in the Racialized United States of America

2009-08-02T08:51:00.001-07:00

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.

Birthright Citizenship and White Paranoia

2009-07-20T07:05:00.001-07:00

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.

Barack Obama has long thought about nuclear disarmament

2009-07-05T10:19:00.000-07:00

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.

Fighting for Democracy

2009-06-15T12:57:00.000-07:00

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.

Obama's Latina/o Outreach Week

2009-05-27T20:52:00.000-07:00

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.

More Stupid Catholic Tricks for the Easter Season

2009-04-12T08:22:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2009-03-10T13:59:00.001-07:00

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.

President Obama - Please save the Persepolis Fortification Archive

2009-02-24T14:27:00.000-08:00

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.

Pope Rehabilitates Holocaust Denier

2009-01-30T08:05:00.001-08:00

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.

Papal Damnability

2008-12-24T15:44:00.001-08:00

Fluffing up the Christmas spirit of love and giving as he always does, once-Cardinal-Ratzinger-now Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church (otherwise known as Pope Benedict XVI) decided that environmentalists can care about the earth, but we also need to care about the future of human beings. In papal estimation, nothing is more dangerous to human beings than, wait for it, gender theory! That's right, Judith Butler, you're doubly dangerous to the future of the human race. Ideas about the social construction of gender, ideas that also accommodate and accept homosexuality and transgender identities, these are real threats to humanity. (For more details, read the BBC articles on papal statement and responses to it).

Of course, as Virginia Burrus has argued, the great bishop known for converting Augustine, Ambrose of Milan, depended upon the power of gender bending revealed by gender theory. And all Catholic popes, bishops, priests, and other monastics have likewise drawn power from this gender bending ability.

And speaking of dangers to the future of the human race, if the Pontiff's concern is reproduction, maybe he should look into his own lifestyle choices, which have certainly terminated any tangible role he could have had in the propagation of the human race.

I, for one, think the monastic lifestyle has been a great thing, something for which the Catholic Church is to be commended rather than reprimanded as many Protestants and seculars like to do (see for instance How the Irish Saved Civilization for a sense of some of the benefits of Catholic monastic life for the future of humanity, even if few scribal monks produced actual offspring). Especially in the earliest Christian centuries, monastic life provided women a way to escape the pervasive ownership of patriarchal marriage (still a problematic institution as elucidated by Breanne Fahs in the latest issue of The Public Sphere, an issue worthy of review for its three other pieces querying marriage and sexuality in the U.S. today). So why is it so difficult for the leader of such an institution to offer up some love and welcome to the peoples who live within the complexities of gender and sexuality? If anyone should understand the important role of non-reproducing populations to the future of humanity, then he should.

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Image taken from The Public Sphere's article by Fahs. The Public Sphere supplies the following information about the image: "Image: Allusion aux Agences matrimoniales, Croquis californien par Cham. Wood engraving from the New York Public Library collection. Created by Cham (1819-1879), originally published in Le Charivari magazine."

Litigious Ridiculous

2008-12-08T09:23:00.000-08:00

In Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President." Well it seems pretty clear that you have to have been born a citizen of the U.S. to run for president. Too bad for Governor Schwarzenegger. But apparently there is some ambiguity in interpretation. I remember as a child reading this passage of the Constitution in elementary school and being taught that I could not ever run for President of the United States. I was born a U.S. citizen to a mother who was a natural-born citizen (though my father was not a U.S. citizen), but I was not born in the United States or on U.S. soil . But this is where the ambiguity of the passage seems to confuse some people; Senator John McCain was not born in the U.S., but he was born on U.S. soil in a section of Panama then controlled by the U.S. government. I wonder if he had won the presidency if people on the Left would be pursuing legal cases to bar his installment as President?

Well, two separate individuals have pursued legal cases to bar the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama, though these cases appear, thankfully, to be getting very little traction as reported in today's Los Angeles Times. In one case, Leo C. Donofrio of East Brunskwick, N.J. did in fact sue against both McCain and Obama. In another case Philip J. Berg of Lafayette, Pa. sued against Obama specifically. Of interest to me is that, in my view, where McCain might occupy something of the muddy ground I occupy in my own birth location, Obama's birth certificate clearly locates him in Hawaii, when it was already a state in the United States. While both cases have been largely ignored because you can't just bring a suit unless you can prove personal harm, it still gives me pause: what did the founding authors mean by "natural born Citizen"? Surely, all historical legal precedents recognize Obama to be one because he was born on U.S. soil, which has always been enough to make someone a citizen. You add to that the fact that his mother was a natural-born citizen, and you would think his citizenship should be unassailable. That's the beauty of the U.S. as opposed to a country like Kuwait where you and your children could all have been born there, and you would still not be citizens. Why is it that people in this country need to persist in imagining U.S. citizens to be something they have never been (except in the case of the original Americans who predate Plymouth and Jamestown), people whose ancestors have all lived and died on this land? What does it mean to be a citizen of the U.S. now or ever?

I guess because of my own background, I think that being a U.S. citizen is an enforced choice. Most of us have no choice but to be here, but some of us do actively choose it. Putting aside the specific desires of some to make Obama an absolute other, a non-citizen, what is the deeper desire to disinherit those who think differently about being a U.S. citizen? Whose very ancestry may show up the complexity of calling oneself a citizen of the U.S.?

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Image of Article II, Section 1 taken from the U.S. National Archives website.

If you tanked the world economy, would you deserve a bonus?

2008-11-16T10:56:00.000-08:00

If you work for a major bank in the industrialized world, from Tokyo to New York, then the answer to the question should be an outright NO. Do you deserve a bonus for tanking the world economy? No. Do you deserve a bonus in the U.S. where the average individual is now in increasing peril of filing for bankruptcy because of your stupid mismanagement of the housing market, mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, or any number of bad banking decisions that led to the current situation? No, you do not. You get bonuses for a job well done, not for drunk driving the world headlong into the worst financial disaster since October 1929.

I could not believe it when I read about the estimated bonuses for bankers working at top companies. I have to agree with another web user, JLP: some people claim bonuses are necessary to keep top talent, but I doubt that's true. I think it's more likely the people saying that want their own bonuses. I also feel like Joe Mysak described in his editorial, I want the bankers heads after even the suggestion that they should get bonuses. First of all, the extreme bonus system of big investment banks was probably a bad idea to begin with and needs to be reformed as both Mysak discussed in his editorial (and as William D. Cohan suggested in today's New York Times). Second, if a bank was just given some cash by the U.S. government, I don't care if the bonuses come from a different pile of money, you don't get bonuses when you need to borrow money.

Once I had a friend who was sick and in financial straits. She asked me if she could borrow $50 to buy her medication. Of course I willingly lent her money I figured I wouldn't see again. My willingness to help though was tinged with anger when I learnt that she had gone to a tanning salon the day before. Sorry, but if you have money for a tanning salon then you don't need a loan from me for medication, end of story. People with the kind of thinking evidenced by my friend then and bankers now have met grim fates in past troubled times. Just think Marie Antoinette and Revolutionary France. You can eat your cake, but if you're not careful, your head may in fact roll as Maureen Dowd suggested. So all that money these banks have stashed away for bonuses, they may want to view that as a source of cash flow and bailout funds, rather than turning to the U.S. government for handouts.

Kansas Congressman Dennis Moore (Democrat of course) keeps an update on his website about the size of the U.S. debt (as of October 15, 2008, that would be $10,326,055,380,264.11). That is $33,807.90 per person in the U.S. So, bankers, if you get your bonuses, perhaps some small redemption might be sought by paying down your and several others' share of the national debt. Or, perhaps you can bail out the educated classes, as suggested by one Facebook group, by paying off all $17 billion of outstanding student loans. Or maybe they can have a lottery of homeowners to bailout so that fewer people have to live out of their cars come spring. But if bankers give themselves these bonuses and keep it, they better hope it's enough to purchase a hideaway in a remote location where the angry mob can't show up with torches, pitchforks, and a guillotine.

You are asked now to stand on a question of love

2008-11-11T18:44:00.001-08:00

This video of Keith Olbermann was sent to me, and it did bring me to tears. His reflections on Prop. 8 eloquently capture many of mine. I had to pass it on in the small ways I can.

Perhaps Our Long National Nightmare is Finally Over!

2008-11-06T07:16:00.001-08:00

I was sitting in the lovely Wisconsin home of another Obama volunteer on Tuesday night. We had spent the afternoon knocking on doors, supplying people with the information on where they could go vote. That afternoon had left me cautiously optimistic of the results. Though Wisconsin was no longer an official swing state, there were enough McCain-Palin signs in the neighborhood to suggest that it had once been an area with strong Republican tendencies. Yet it was also a neighborhood with a large number of "For Rent" and "For Sale" signs as well as blatantly vacant and foreclosed upon homes. Many of the people we encountered were so fed up with President Bush, whom they equated with Senator McCain, they could not wait to vote for Senator Obama. After talking with them, seeing that neighborhood, and living in the U.S. as I have for most of the last eight years, it was with great relief that at 10pm CST, I watched the numbers tick up next to Obama's name. He went from being the front-runner to being Mr. President-Elect as soon as the polls closed in California, Oregon, and Washington.

While I cannot express to you my complete joy and relief at the outcome of the presidential election, I find myself dismayed by the outcome of California's vote on Proposition 8, which bans gay marriage. This dismay was increased when I learned that a friend of mine went to vote in the Vista Samoan Seventh Day Adventist Church. Let's leave aside the momentary question of why churches are valid polling locations (as opposed to public institutions like say, schools). My friend informed me that this church actually violated California Elections Code Sections 18370-18371. All over the polling location, inside, next to the voting booths, the church had local newsletters advocating for Proposition 8, and the logic of these newsletters made false suggestions, like somehow gay marriage will threaten their tax-exempt status (which only would have increased my support of gay marriage were it true, but alas it is not). No advocacy for anything on the ballot should take place inside or within 100 feet of the polling location, and this is a law I am familiar with as someone who has volunteered on previous campaigns.

So though Colorado stepped up and voted down an amendment defining human life as the moment of conception, California proved itself home to homophobic bigots willing to lie and break the law in order to prevent gay couples from experiencing the same marital miseries as the rest of us. When I looked over the list of reasons given for support of Proposition 8 on that website I linked to earlier, I couldn't help but wonder why these groups were so willing to lie. I also couldn't help but wonder about how their mind works on such domino-effect logic, that if "A" happens, it will topple through the alphabet and destroy "Z." If you oppose gay marriage, then don't marry a gay person, but it has absolutely nothing to do with your daily life. And, I also need to comment on one final thing said by Orange County's own Rick Warren: "For 5,000 years, every culture and every religion – not just Christianity – has defined marriage as a contract between men and women...There is no reason to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2% of our population." This is actually historically inaccurate. First of all, marriage has in much of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world been defined as a contract between one man and multiple women. Secondly, even in the state of California, cultures have existed within the last five hundred years with different views. Certain indigenous Californian tribes actually had chieftains who married transvestite men, and these men were believed to have special powers and were selected as one of the chief's "wives" to bring blessings upon his household. In his book Converting California, James Sandos eloquently describes many of the customs of indigenous Californian tribes regarding marriage that Warren would no doubt find scandalous. But just because they scandalize Warren doesn't mean that these practices did not take place.

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photo from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/world_news_america/7712138.stm

Please Vote If You Can

2008-11-03T21:25:00.000-08:00

The McCain/Palin campaign sent out one last effort at over-simplification and pure lies today, so I attempted to make my own corrective.

I was recently helping someone study for U.S. naturalization, and while the booklet does not necessarily contain the questions I would chose, Question 93 suggested one thing: the most important right granted U.S. citizens is the right to vote. Please vote.

Barack Obama is Not a Muslim OR a Terrorist

2008-10-05T18:08:00.000-07:00

Since the disastrous economy has left the McCain-Palin campaign with no other options, Governor Sarah Palin, font of wisdom and knowledge that she has proven herself to be (that would be sarcasm for the rest of you, as this particuar governor can't name a newspaper she reads or a supreme court case besides Roe v. Wade when pressed by Katie Couric) accused Senator Barack Obama of hating his country so much that he hangs out with former terrorists. Truth: Senator Obama served on a charity board with a former member of the Weather Underground, someone who is now a respectable college professor. That's like accusing me of supporting backroom arms dealing because I went to school with a current Democrat who once voted for Ronald Reagan under whose watch the Iran-Contra affair transpired.

I think, however, that this is part of a coordinated attack, one that nurses doubt about Senator Obama's background and patriotism. Today, at Walmart, I saw that the National Examiner found "proof" that Senator Obama is a Muslim. In case you were wondering, he's not.

While I do wonder why people should care whether Senator Obama knows a former radical or whether his father was a Muslim, I realize that people do. Nicholas D. Kristof reminded me in today's New York Times that a lot of decisions are unconsciously racist. I know more than a couple of former Senatory Hillary Clinton supporters who just don't trust Senator Obama. While I'm sure that he lies as much as your average politician, I can't help but wonder if their distrust has a lot to do, unconsciously, with the dueling terror figures of the U.S. nightly news - the black man and the Muslim terrorist. Personally, my support for Senator Obama was partially compelled by his biography, and as the daughter of a Kansas woman who married someone from the global South, I related to his story and his struggles, trying to place himself in a world that still likes to see things in terms of black and white. Yet I realize that for those people who see the world in black and white, even unconsciously, that biography is too dangerously filled with unfamiliar terms. Kristof points out that Senator Obama might have as much as 6% more of the electorate if he were white, according to a Stanford-AP-Yahoo study. I just hope that enough of the electorate can see past those unfamiliar terms and realize that our situation is just too dire to support a familiar biography, one that got the U.S. into this colossal mess in the first place.

Just again, for the record, Senator Obama is not a Muslim, a terrorist, or friends with terrorists. He would never have made it this far if any of those things were true (which is really sad because I bet there are plenty of American Muslims who would make good presidents, but apparently we aren't that ready for liberal Catholics like John Kerry yet). And please, if you don't support Senator Obama, make sure your reasons have to do with genuine policy concerns and not your lack of familiarity with people like him.

Ministers to defy IRS

2008-09-26T07:02:00.000-07:00

According to a New York Times article, a group of ministers are going to defy the IRS, challenge the law, and endorse a presidential candidate. This takes place after the IRS seriously investigated the liberal All Saints Episcopalian Church in Pasadena, CA for supposedly endorsing John Kerry by having a sermon critical of the Iraq War immediately prior to the 2004 election.

I hope these ministers go forward with their plans, wielding their power to influence the weak of mind who can't make their own decisions. But then maybe we can start taxing their, and everybody's, religious organizations who feel the same way. I'm sorry but Rick Warren and the Catholic Church are not not-for-profits. And in 2004, the Catholic Church tacitly endorsed George W. Bush when it sought to deny Kerry, and other like-minded people, communion because of his pro-choice stance.

Where was the welfare plan when we needed it?

2008-09-25T06:27:00.000-07:00

The list of things I wish my tax money did not pay for is so long, war in Iraq, Afghanistan, most of the defense department, most of the corporations that work for the defense department, etc. What I don't mind paying for, public education, road repair, social security, medicare, and welfare, are the things half the country seems to hate paying for. My question now, as President Bush himself warns of economic disaster, is do I really want my tax money paying to bail out these huge investment firms. I do not. Having read and listened to other significant economic thinkers on the subject (like the wonderful 9/19/08 program on Bill Moyers Journal), I am not certain our tax dollars can actually save the faltering financial system. Oddly, I find myself sounding like a more traditional Republican, we should allow them to go out of business because the time to use the $700 billion has passed. Where was that money when ordinary people were losing their homes? Where was corporate welfare when it could have saved ordinary people and not Wall Street? A year ago we could have saved this financial system if we also brought in tools for greatly increased regulation. But since we have a deregulated financial system, it should be allowed to fail in a deregulated fashion. More than that, I am certain that several people have done some illegal things somewhere, so CEOs and other prominent executives of these companies should be arrested, their assets liquidated, and all that money should be put toward bailing out the industry they screwed up with their idiocy and greed. But greed is human nature, which is why some people aren't libertarians - human greed cannot be trusted to moderate itself. The time to pass this sort of reformation on the finance industry also has passed, and as Ron Suskind reminds us, the warning bells were Enron if only we had had an administration who would listen. But at least their colossal screw-up allowed me to be amused by this phony spam message.

If we do bail out the financial system, as we inevitably will since both political parties are owned by Wall Street, let's hope it's with careful government oversight that builds in safeguards against corporate and government greed. This government must do more than bailout the current financial system; it must rebuild it as something other than it has been.

By the way, I bet you wish we hadn't gone into Iraq now because where are we going to get $700 billion? China. And then we are in debt to a not-very-nice rising superpower, throughout our generations forever.

Denying women's rights to equal healthcare

2008-09-19T06:38:00.000-07:00

As a woman, I have often stated I would have no interest in living in most of the world before New York in 1968. My reasons for this are pretty straight forward. Most women throughout the recorded history of the world did not have equal rights before the law, and in the modern world they have certainly been denied equal rights to health care and health research. It is only in startlingly recent times that the medical establishment figured out that women might get heart disease for reasons different than men and that maybe they needed to research women as well. While I don't want to deny there were probably some societies and some wealthy women within certain societies that had privileges that equaled or exceeded that of some men within those societies, I do not feel that is true of most of my ancestors, and I am concerned about how little access to fair healthcare women get today.

Most disturbing to me at present is the death throes of the Bush administration and its attempts to deny women equal healthcare on the basis of "morality." Hillary Rodham Clinton and Cecile Richards described this attempt today in a passionate and important editorial for The New York Times. A pharmacist should, as described by the great Stephen Colbert, be allowed to dispense viagra unchecked but can choose not to fill a birth control prescription. That's no big deal if you live in Manhattan because there is bound to be another pharmacist who will, but if you live in the middle of Mississippi or Western New York or any other place that is more sparsely populated, you are out of luck in having the freedom to choose the pill. And the birth control pill is not just useful as a contraceptive. I was a teenage girl who had incredibly irregular and painful periods, and the pill straightened that out. The pill has also been proven to help prevent certain forms of cancer.

But that's not the point, the point is that taking the Hippocratic Oath means you must provide me the healthcare I request and not what suits your morality, if that morality conflicts with healthcare if that healthcare is necessary and broadly approved by my own cultural and moral traditions. What if a white supremacist doctor felt that all non-white people didn't deserve healthcare treatment, that morally he was degrading the world's population by helping them live? We would have a problem with that wouldn't we?

So, that said, I want to at least leave you with Stephen Colbert's now, to me, classic meditation on this subject.

Thank you Saturday Night Live!

2008-09-15T17:12:00.000-07:00

They captured so many things I had been thinking. And Tina Fey is brilliant. But now, I hope we can all follow Arianna Huffington's suggestion. Let's stop talking about Sarah Palin and instead focus on the issues that really matter, like the collapsing finance industry.

Sarah Palin runs for student council vice president

2008-09-04T07:14:00.000-07:00

At the end of my college years, I found myself having dinner with the president of the student council. We chatted as he discussed his own plans to go on to Washington and eventually, hopefully, head into elected public life himself. I can't remember all the details of the conversation, but I remember being left with a strongly depressing realization. The leaders of our nation didn't get there because they felt any special call to serve and help other people through public policy. Basically they were all previous student government members who decided to move to something bigger because winning popularity contests was what they did. And while student government no doubt helps you sense if politics is for you, isn't it disturbing to think how few members of Congress may recognize the substantive difference between legislating the U.S. government and allocating student organization funds on a college campus?

I was reminded of this last night as I watched Sarah Palin, certainly the most energetic member of the Republican party, campaign for point guard of her high school basketball team (yes, I read that posting on several newspaper sites by a Wasilla resident). I don't think her qualifications are at issue for me, but her lack of quality as a human being certainly is at issue. Her speech took what BBC reporter Justin Webb described as "parliamentary-style jabs" at the Democratic Party.

First of all, what is so wrong with being a community organizer? I know it doesn't qualify as "executive experience," but it shows a desire to help people fight for what they know they want; instead of assuming you can just tell people how to live their lives as Governor Palin seeks to do. Community organizing also demonstrates a character of community service, something sorely lacking in Governor Palin's own record, which demonstrates a history of serving her ambition and her personal vendettas. And how is Harry Reid's hatred of John McCain an endorsement of him for president? That's a good joke for a blog post but completely unsuitable to a responsible public speech. Of course, all the Republicans act a bit medieval in their tendency to boo and laugh publicly and disrespectfully (and this at a convention who lauded how nice people are in Minnesota and in "America" in general - really all I was reminded of was my own Midwestern childhood, where people are nice to you when they need you but happy to stab you in the back if it helps further their own agendas. That's not nice; that's crueler than just being rude from the start). But what I learned most about Governor Palin last night is not that she is some Reformer who is being criticized because she's a woman outside the Washington mainstream. Her cold ambition, cruel jabs, and pure partisan focus should help her fit right in with all the other Republicans in D.C., the rest of whom never figured out that serving the people of the United States of America is a bigger task than being student council president.

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image from about.com

The Many Sides of Barack Obama vs. John McCain's One

2008-08-30T20:02:00.000-07:00

I received my Time magazine special Republican Convention edition yesterday. The contrast with last week's Democratic Convention edition was clear. The second and third page of the main article on Barack Obama was populated with odd pictures of pieces of Obama. The article also implied that there were five ways people read Obama if not all those ways together. By contrast, the article on John McCain had one big word up top "hon-or." And the image montage of McCain on the article's third page was that of an "all-American" military son in classic black and white photographs.

I am not blaming Time solely for this. Obviously, we as a public are responsible for our inability to peg Obama down (while assuming first and foremost that he is "a black man," or at least that is what Time's list of Obama facets told me I assume) while we tend to place McCain in a one-stream narrative of honor. The managing editor's note introducing this issue of Time made an important point: McCain and all presidential candidates are more complex than we think. And maybe in some ways it's a privilege of Obama's liberal multiracial self that he gets to be more publicly complex. But Time's own editorial suggested that it is politically expedient to fit a simple singular narrative that eradicates complexity. And I can't shake the nasty feeling that the public inability to navigate complexity, perhaps even a public distaste for complexity, is somehow bound up with that albatross of "race." If it wasn't, why would "black man" be the first descriptor of Obama listed in the article lead?

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images are all of Time, September 1 and September 8, 2008 issues.

who took my obama bumper sticker

2008-07-14T15:00:00.000-07:00

With the FISA bill and everything, I have not been the biggest fan of Barack Obama lately. Maybe it's appropriate that I should remove all labels supporting him from my surroundings. Yet, I was quite shocked last night when I came back to a parking lot and found that someone had torn off my Obama bumper stickers. I admit that for years when I saw those "W" bumper stickers, I was filled with the desire to ram my car into the other cars sporting them. But guess what, I am a human being, which means I can exercise some limited self-control. I may rant online, but I can avoid defacing other people's stuff.

My bigger question about the person who tore off my bumper sticker is this: what did you think ripping off my bumper stickers would accomplish? If you are just angry about Barack Obama fine, but you know I'm going to buy more bumper stickers, which means more money for the Obama campaign, which just encourages him. So other than remind me that I share this country with some uncivilized ogres, what did you accomplish? You actually made me more committed to voting for Barack Obama this fall during a month when my support for him has been flagging. Good work.

Okay, just a light ramble into cyberspace this afternoon.

Reflecting on Democracy

2008-07-03T23:46:00.000-07:00

Tonight I was watching P.O.V., and it aired a fascinating documentary about the 2004 election called Election Day. More than once a Republican-inclined voter or poll worker described voting as a "privilege, not a right." I have been reminded before that we live in a representative republic, not a democracy, which somehow also means that we're not entitled to vote. I find this ironic as the people who argue this also supported bringing "democracy" to Iraq at the point of a gun. So which is it? Democracy? Republic?

But putting that aside, is voting a right? The constitution is actually difficult on this one. Amendment 14 makes it clear that any man votes in elections, unless he has been involved in "rebellion, or other crime." This is one level of a problem that still plagues us. What kind of "crime" keeps one from being able to vote? If one is no longer in prison, if society has determined that one has been rehabilitated from one's crime, is one still considered a rebellious or criminal participant? And of course Amendment 15 and 19 had to make it clear that voting was open to all citizens regardless of race or gender. And Amendment 24 removed the financial (and racial) barrier of a poll tax. So in theory all citizens never convicted of a crime have the right to vote. But maybe it seems like a privilege because it took until 1964 for some constitutional guarantee of what is still not universal suffrage? Maybe it seems like a privilege because the organization of our elections clearly does not enable every citizen to vote? Watching voting in poor urban neighborhoods of St. Louis sure hits home that voting is a lot easier if you live in a wealthy suburb.

So as I brace for the U.S.A.'s celebration of its republic, I can't help but maintain that voting is a "right not a privilege." It is a right as long as a country purports to champion global democracy. If a country champions mere oligarchy, then fine, said country should admit this; in an oligarchy, its fine to describe voting as a "privilege."

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The above image is taken from Election Day's page on P.O.V.'s site.

Ronald Reagan was not a great president

2008-06-17T09:38:00.000-07:00

So yes, I was listening to the news again today, and when discussing historians' views of President George W. Bush, historians were accused of leaning too far left. As an example, historians' negative view of Ronald Reagan twenty years ago was contrasted with a positive view of him today, and apparently now we see him as one of the greatest presidents of the 20th century.

I have a few rants about this. A man is not a great president just because he's a likable fun guy. If that was the case, then my brother should run for president and be considered "great." So my first point of critique of the "great" Reagan, and I admit I was a kid in the 1980s so maybe I don't remember it that clearly, but when did people decide that an evil empire rhetorical, Iran-Contra, trickle-down economic failing president became great just because the Cold War happened to dissipate during this president's second term? So many of our domestic problems in education and yes, health care, owe themselves to the Reagan-era and Reagan-mismanaged economics. And I am tired of people giving Ronald Reagan all the credit for the end of the Cold War. As if the presidents that preceded him since Truman did nothing and as if the Berlin wall came down just because he said it should. The Reagan administration had its role, but try not to over-exaggerate his role.

Second, if he comes out as one of the better presidents of the 20th century, maybe that's because we're not grading on much of a curve. Even so, I would think that any historian could conclude that the following presidents, in chronological order, were all better presidents, leaders, policy geeks, etc., than Ronald Wilson Reagan: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and William J. Clinton. I would even contend that Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson were probably better presidents when one looks at the higher points of their records and leadership choices. Yes, I realize that I'm naming all the democratic presidents of the 20th century as better than Reagan. Too bad it's true. Reagan comes in just ahead of George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford, and Calvin Coolidge. What this means is, that even grading on the curve of 20th century presidents, he still doesn't come out as one of the "greatest" unless by "greatest" you mean he was elected president twice, wasn't assassinated, and didn't resign.

Hillary-McCain supporters suck

2008-06-10T09:16:00.001-07:00

On Saturday, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a really classy endorsement and concession speech. I thought this was promising for the Democrats heading toward the fall. But apparently her powerful words were not enough. Okay, you know what is really getting under my skin right now. The 1/4 of Hillary Clinton supporters who say they are going to vote for John McCain. Hillary Clinton gave a ringing endorsement of Barack Obama, has pledged herself to support them. But these people who supported her so fervently now contend that they would be better served by voting for John McCain. It would be like me arguing, were the tables turned, that Hillary Clinton is just too polarizing a figure for me. I just want someone that can appeal to both Democrats and Republicans, so I'm going to vote against everything that made me a Democrat, everything that made me support Barack Obama, and vote for John McCain. I wonder what Hillary Clinton supporters would think of such childish behavior were their candidate the nominee. The other Democrats didn't give me the one I want so I'm going to punish the planet by voting against them.

I want to be clear that I am proud of the behavior of Hillary Clinton supporters, like those in my own family, who have immediately turned around as Obama supporters, or at least McCain opponents. The problem is that there are far too many Democrats who supported Hillary Clinton, and who strike me as being racist. So I am listening to this idiotic attorney in Atlanta this morning on NPR. That's right, I am talking to you Barbara LeBey. She claims that she is going to vote for John McCain in the fall. Her first reason for jumping ship on her lifetime voting history as a Democrat: her opposition to Obama's tax increase plan. Yeah, you know, the plan that is identical to Hillary Clinton's plan. But when she is confronted on that issue, she then claims that Obama is too inexperienced, and that quite frankly she's afraid of him. You're afraid of him, Barbara LeBay. I think this is the most revealing thing you said. Is that because he's a black man named Barack Obama? I think it is. It's fine that you claim it's because he's a "blank slate," and an "upstart" who is too willing to talk with terrorists, but I don't think that any of that really matters. So what would you think if I had reacted to a Hillary Clinton nomination by saying I was just too concerned she would cry at crucial moments? You would say I was a sexist, and you would be right about such a comment.

LeBay claims to have marched for the Equal Rights Amendment and for Civil Rights. It seems a bit odd to be willing to support an opponent of abortion rights and Martin Luther King, Jr. day then. I understand that racism is something we all suffer from in some direction or other in this country. But if we claim to be self-critical, self-conscious, intelligent people, then we owe it to ourselves to at least try to think rationally about why we are making the choices we make.

I know this has been a rant and that calling these people who voted for Hillary Clinton and refuse to vote for Barack Obama stupid racists won't do any good. But this is just so upsetting to me because this is the future of the world we're talking about, and some of you want to put that in the hands of a man who thinks we can spend 10,000 years in Iraq, a man who can't differentiate between Sunni and Shiites. I leave you with the words that were said on the same NPR show yesterday. Comedy duo guest, "Frangela" spoke with Madeleine Brand on "Day to Day" yesterday. Angela Shelton, part of the duo, was a strong Hillary Clinton supporter, and she said, that "this is about making sure John McCain is not our president." Fracis Callier, her colleague, spoke of these new McCain supporters and said the following about them, "It makes me feel as though you didn't support Hillary. You were supporting something else. Because if you are for her ideas and platform, and the things that Hillary Clinton was about, you couldn't be supporting John McCain."

My cynical view of the week, ending May 3, 2008

2008-05-04T15:42:00.000-07:00

Girl A is friends with Guys C, D, and E. Girl B befriends Girl A. Girl B has past relationships with Guys D and E and claims confusion over Guy E but also claims to have no interest other than compassionate friendship for Guy E. Girl A, in a fit of gossipy self-loathing, relates confidential information about Guys D and E, information which Girl B then uses to garner one more night with Guy E. Moral: We are all guided by our particular psychoses and rationalize every other choice we make in service to our guiding psychoses.

1950s Redux at Harvard

2008-04-01T15:49:00.001-07:00

This Sunday I was treated to 1950s sexual politics masquerading itself as an article in The New York Times written by someone who has the liberal credentials of actually having written for Mother Jones. The article, "Students of Virginity" by Randall Patterson, decided that, fifteen years or more after this movement really took off, it was time to talk about celibacy on college campuses because Harvard University finally happens to have a chapter, dubbed "True Love Revolution." Problem one, then, this didn't matter when other, less famous and less wealthy schools had chapters?

Myriad are the questions and concerns this article brought up for me. Instead of reading a journalistic examination of this complex issue, I felt like I was reading a propaganda piece for the virtues of Victorian era femininity but recast as a feminist stance. First you have your main figure, a girl from a town in Colorado where supposedly no one had sex, who finds herself in the midst of "godless Harvard," where apparently hook-up style sex is rampant. She is then contrasted with her colleague, the male co-chair of Harvard's True Love Revolution. While, and I ask you to consider the images above as I write this, she is rendered as sexy, strong, and smart, her male colleague is rendered as creepy. That's right, chastity is sexy in women, but in men, it's just creepy. Why can't a normal, sexy man make a respectable choice for abstinence?

But of course the 1950s propaganda doesn't stop there, our white-middle-class heroine is then pitted against a "harlot"/"vixen" in complete uniform, a mini skirt, a lack of self restraint in her love of food, and a seeming idiocy about her own opinions in the one paragraph she gets to express them. Oh, and one other thing, our vixen happens to be Asian American. That's right, now I feel like it's a classical virgin vs. harlot with the added colonial overtones that all non-white-middle-class women are completely sexually available and so lustful they cannot control all their hormonal habits. Coincidence?

Putting aside these questions about the overt ways race and gender interplay in an article that seems to support the position of the virgin, I am left with several other questions. Why are chaste women always pitted against a rival whose sexual preferences resemble those of pornography? Why wasn't her opponent in debate a woman who takes a more moderated position towards sexuality? We may feel overloaded in this society by images of Paris Hilton and Girls Gone Wild, and I might be with the Colorado virgin in seeing the danger to feminist strength in those women as well (always being sexually available porn style is being just as much controlled by men and being just as much an object with no subjectivity as the virgin, if not more so; I must agree with that). The choice is not virgin vs. harlot. In fact, both the virgin and the harlot, as archetypes in this dichotomy, are women who package themselves for patriarchal society's desires, not their own. A woman's sexual choices are much more complicated than that, and the one thing this article can remind is how much these choices, for both men and women, should be about self-respect and meaning, not just hormones, lust, and the images peddled to us by the media and other communities. And every man or woman should be self-conscious about why she chooses what she chooses about sexuality.

And how snide a name is "True Love Revolution," assuming that gays for one (whom the group only accepts if they are celibate), and other people who do not marry somehow do not experience "true love," but people who married experience true love, people who often did so throughout history as part of economic contracts not love? Also, haven't we learned the dangers of valorizing marriage as a kind of perfect utopian home life? Isn't that a lesson we can take from the 1960s even if we didn't live through them? And what was with the publishing of letters to Harvard's Crimson that implied the "vixen" was just not the wifely material that the "virgin" was? Not only does that yet again replicate 1950s mentality but it assumes our "vixen" wants a traditional monogamous marital relationship, which she may very well not.

I can still imagine that some (I know not all, and that the virgin and harlot imagery exists because some people have made choices that look just like that) women and men can and have over the centuries chosen to be neither virgins nor harlots; celibate freaks nor virile dogs. That there is a much more complicated path in between that does justice to the full personhood of all the women and men involved in a sexual exchange. What is significant about now, and better about now than the 1950s, is the the freedom to choose for oneself without society setting up the old stereotypes. But this article felt like a step backwards instead of the step forwards it was presenting itself as.

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Images of True Love Revolution leaders Leo Keliher and Jamie Fredell, taken by Katherine Wolkoff for The New York Times

Navigating Difficult Waters

2008-03-20T08:43:00.000-07:00

In the last two days, I have read four editorials from the New York Times and three in the Los Angeles Times exploring how landmark was Obama's speech on race this past Tuesday. Obama's speech made me teary eyed at moments, but somehow it still left me feeling empty, like drinking a diet soda. I still think he's the best choice we have for the next president of the United States, in large part because anyone who voted for the Iraq War should be removed from public office (and should definitely not be president). I think that these authors were so impressed by Obama's speech only because of the depressing lack of deep, thoughtful, and constructive public conversation that currently transpires around the complexities of race, not just in this country, but in this hemisphere.

I did read one editorial of different tenor in today's Los Angeles Times from Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. Meyers believed that Obama blew it, that he had the opportunity to point that we are all just members of the human race, and that people like Jeremiah Wright must step aside and make way for a "color blind" America.

I disagree with Wright's take much more than those that laud the speech. Being mixed white and Latina (which are already "racially" mixed and oddly fraught terms), I have learned to distrust anyone who claims they are "color blind;" that's usually a way of stating "I have unexamined racial biases." Obama did not make that claim, and yet I also disagree with Nicholas D. Kristof's editorial that Obama misspoke originally when he claimed there was just America and not a black one and white one.

So this is just a meandering post. I can't tell you something other than that I just need us to be somewhere else right now. And part of getting there is about changing who can be president of the United States, and that's only one reason why it's essential that either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton be the next president (even if my clear and unequivocal preference is for Obama).

television paradox #14,285

2008-02-15T10:29:00.000-08:00

I am really tired of the U.S. obsession surrounding what words cannot be said on television. We all know these words, so not showing them on television is not going to protect us from learning what these words are. It's okay for us to watch blood gushing out of patients on innocuous romantic dramas like Grey's Anatomy, but it's completely unacceptable for Jane Fonda to use the word "cunt" on The Today Show, even when that word is the title of a play and is not being used in a specifically profane or insulting manner? Meredith Vieira then apologized to the nation, claiming they would never want to offend the audience. Well, I'm offended that a word that appears in the title of a play is considered offensive. If Fonda had been using it in a derogatory manner, then maybe we could argue about whether it belonged on a morning talk show. Maybe. I think that if The Today Show really wanted to apologize, they could focus on how empty their programming generally is and how they contribute to a kind of national malaise.

Paul Krugman and the Obama cult of personality

2008-02-11T10:49:00.000-08:00

Below is the email I contemplated sending Paul Krugman of the New York Times today because of his views on Senator Obama's supposed cult of personality. I decided it was too long a rant to send in an email to someone I don't know, so why not publish it in cyberspace for a bunch of people I don't know (or all five of you I do know) to read it at their leisure? The column in question was "Hate Springs Eternal" in this morning's paper.

Mr. Krugman:

I do want to say first that I have long admired your column, and that I will continue to admire and support your work by reading it long after this campaign season has ended.

I am writing in response to your column and subsequent blog post because I wanted to let you know that our experiences of this campaign season starkly contrast each other. I currently live in California, and I support Hillary Clinton but my preferred candidate this season is Barack Obama. While you assign the Democratic campaign's vitriol to Senator's Obama supporters who supposedly worship the cult of his genius Roman style, my observations tend to place more of the vitriol in Senator Clinton's camp. I have heard some horrible things said about Senator Clinton, but mostly from people who blanket oppose Senator Clinton and would campaign for a ficus rather than support her (and these people really bother me, but that's another issue). I admit that my circles may incline me to hear from moderated rational people and not fanatical fascist supporters of Senator Obama, whom I am certain do exist (and yes I saw the video). Nonetheless, my experience of Senator Clinton supporters was that they were the overly antagonistic ones. A number of women I spoke to, including family members, tended to view me as a traitor to all women for supporting Senator Obama. By contrast, the one time a person on my district's Obama listserv sent out an email blanket insulting Hillary Clinton, the listserv was filled with emails distressed by such behavior. They viewed supporting Senator Obama as a choice they had made, but they respected Senator Clinton as a Democrat, a leader, and a candidate.

On your blog, you brought up the race issue. Now, as you alluded to in your blog, perhaps I believe what I believe because I do actually believe that in a legislative way Al Gore "invented" the internet. The thing about racism is that it survives because it is capable of behaving in ways that are inexplicit but significant at the same time. Tying Senator Obama's victory in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson's is about as explicit as you can get while still claiming plausible deniability, but we'll give Bill Clinton the benefit of the doubt and say it was a subconscious racial connection rooted in historical facts. Dolores Huerta, whom I have also been a great admirer of, attempted to portray Senator Obama as someone who has no interest or concern for Latina/os. Frank Rich, your fellow columnist, made clear in his Sunday piece that the Clinton campaign has actively played on the race issue, especially between Latino/as and African Americans. A Clinton campaign pollster claimed that Latina/os would not vote for African Americans (as a footnote to this piece: you can't say any one ethnic group always votes one way - as it turns out some white men are willing to vote for people outside their own immediate racial-ethnic group). Senator Clinton then supported this statement to Tim Russert by claiming it was a "historical" fact when, as Rich pointed out, plenty of Latina/os have voted for African Americans at local levels in both California and across the country. Though not explicit, I cannot doubt that at some level, even if merely a subconscious one, that was meant to work as race-baiting between Latino/a and African American voters. Such behavior did factor into my ultimate decision to support the campaign of Senator Obama (among a range of factors).

If Senator Clinton is the fairly elected nominee, I do intend to support her in the fall. If Senator Obama is the nominee, I do expect that attacks will be made against him and his character that will dwarf anything stated so far by Senator Clinton's campaigners. For some reason, U.S. voters do like living in "Nixonland" as you cleverly called it. While I have long admired your keen and insightful wit on issues like this, I think this time your support of Senator Clinton, like others' support of Senator Obama, may have kept you from seeing that Senator Clinton's campaign has made some serious missteps with regard to race, and more specifically that what antagonism exists in the Democratic race runs on both sides and has its own strong expression in the Clinton camp.

Thank you for your time,
sister t

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Photo taken by Josh Haner for the New York Times

Remaking Romeo and Juliet

2008-02-09T11:58:00.000-08:00

This is just a random shout out to the internet-verse. A couple of weeks ago, I read this piece on Patrick Stewart in the New York Times. In there he mentioned, with what seemed a small tinge of regret, that he will never play Hamlet, Romeo, Orlando, or Benedick. I saw Romeo and Juliet in New York's Central Park last summer, and I realized I had never really taken to that play before because I had not liked the actors and actresses I have seen as Romeo and Juliet. This memory connected in my head with the fact that I also have long admired Stewart's ability to act, even if he wasn't always provided the best cinematic roles.

So, here is what I'm asking of the universe. If you have or know anyone who has the ability to produce Romeo and Juliet, might I suggest you turn the story around? Make Romeo and Juliet the parents instead of the children. I think that would be a fascinating turn on the play. And then you can cast Patrick Stewart, and that would be amazing to watch. Just let me know where you are going to produce this so I can find a way of seeing it.

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The above photo was taken by Steve Forrest/Insight-Visual, for The New York Times in London's Gielgud Theater, and it can be found with the Jan. 23, 2008 article linked above on Patrick Stewart.

This blogger endorses Barack Obama

2008-02-03T13:24:00.000-08:00

On her deathbed, my Missouri-born, Kansas-residing grandmother asked my aunt to read Bill Clinton’s autobiography to her. Yes, on my mother's side, I come from a long line of cradle-to-grave working Kansan Democrats. That’s right, Democrats in Kansas, and they’re not from some liberal elite bastion of a place. I spent much of my childhood in my grandmother’s mobile home, in a trailer park along the Kansas river.

This election is a big deal. For those of us on the left side of the political oval, it does feel like another Republican in the White House could certainly spell the end of the United States of America that could be. And we have reason to be excited about our top contenders. Democrats in the United States do, by and large, have no qualms about electing a woman or an African American man, knowing that their biographies might actually give them added knowledge and skills presently lacking in our president.

But one day in December, I woke up with the conviction of supporting Barack Obama for president. My decision to support Senator Obama was entirely mercenary. I saw his popular polling among independents and evangelicals, and meanwhile one of my own friends vowed she would never vote for Hillary Clinton because she hates her so much.

I have to take a break from endorsing Senator Obama for a moment to support Senator Clinton. Why do people hate Senator Clinton so much? Hate is a strong word and stronger feeling, and I own I am filled with a certain writhing disgust every time President George W. Bush or Vice Present Dick Cheney open their mouths or even appear in photographs greeting me as I enter LAX on a return flight from Latin America. Nonetheless, I can put that feeling aside and listen to them, and if I had to choose between Adolf Hitler and George Bush on a ballot, I would not stay home that day just because I loathe the Bush administration.

But people hate Senator Clinton with a kind of fervor that I thought was reserved for someone who had killed your family, scalped your dog, and made you eat your poor puppy for dinner. That kind of hatred does not reflect well on them. In the case of my friend, I could not help but wonder if it was because Senator Clinton was a strong woman on parity with her husband but certainly not controlled by him. If somehow, my friend who had been intelligent and capable but chose a much more dependent role in relationship to her husband, if maybe she could not stand the cognitive dissonance of that choice when faced with the likes of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Admittedly Senator Clinton is not always the most likable of people to watch, but she is a strong, capable, intelligent, and decisive human being, all qualities we supposedly like in a president. I really believe her when she says she has committed her life to small daily victories that make people’s lives better. So you can find her annoying, but hate her, what is wrong with you? If, in this day and age, you are afraid of a strong woman who is smarter than you are, you bring the human race down as a species.

So back to how I wound up with Senator Obama. Partially, it is a matter of our somewhat mirror biographies, in that we are both the descendants of mothers born to the state of Kansas and fathers born to countries in the global South. I can see that Senator Obama has struggled with his African American identity in ways that evoke my own struggles with being Latina but looking “Greek”. I also agree with arguments made in the New York Times and by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek. Senator Obama’s biography does make a difference to the kind of leader he can be. The rest of the world would look at us differently if our president was half Kenyan. And his intimate familial knowledge of Kenya, his childhood experiences in Indonesia, change the way he looks at and interacts with the rest of the world. The future of this country demands we have a president who can work with the rest of the world better than the last one. For those of you who did not get the memo, the United States is not the only important power on this tiny blue planet. We need a president who can do more than transcend the divisions of Republican and Democrat. We need a president whose very being can transcend the divide between the United States of America and the rest of the world.

Of course I read Time this week, and much to my chagrin, I discovered I am part of some soapy idealistic movement of people under 30 who believe in politics again. That is not it; I think a lot of us just believe that we are in a perilous situation, and we desperately need the right person to help us right now. It would be a grave misstep to elect a Republican, even one as honorable and heroic (at least in his youth that is) as John McCain. Republican fiscal policy has failed the bulk of us whenever they have been in charge since 1980, and most of us under 30 know that. McCain offers no alternative. Republican social policy erodes the possibilities for the poor, minorities, and women, or well basically everyone who is not wealthy, white, and male. Since that is 98% of us, you would think we could have no trouble voting them out of office. Republican foreign policy has generally alienated even our allies, especially the policy of this current administration. As we face an uncertain future, we are much more dependent on the good will of friends and neighbors than we have ever been before. That makes either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama a no-brainer kind of choice against any Republican, or so I would think, but then I thought Al Gore was a no-brainer kind of choice over George W. Bush.

Democrats should be happy with either of our top candidates, excepting some rabid Hillary Clinton despisers. Their differences are not so much those of substance but of style. This is not to say their policy differences are insignificant, and for you Obama critics out there, he does have some quite substantive policy initiatives to consider. As a Democrat, I consider it my obligation to castigate Senator Clinton for her vote authorizing the Iraq war, and I do so with this post. She, and many of her fellow Democrats, betrayed our party and our country on that day. Senator Obama guarantees that we will leave Iraq within 16 months of his taking office, but Senator Clinton has offered no such guarantee.

I also believe the difference of style is an important one. Mark Leibovich’s recent New York Times article on this issue paints the distinction in stark contrasts that echo what I have seen in the campaigns. Professor Lani Guinier, in this piece, observes that Senator Clinton “is the talented lawyer serving her clients” while Senator Obama is a community organizer to his core “who sees the source of his power as the ability to inspire people to mobilize.” Here in California, my experience of the Clinton campaign is one of an admirably committed civil servant, but the Obama campaign has an army of committed volunteers who are always inspired to help organize others in support of him. Less-than-wealthy Clinton supporters are left more out in the wilderness; my own mother just today found out how she can support Senator Clinton in the caucuses back home in Kansas.

These are just a few of the reasons I have chosen to support Senator Obama, though it is an admittedly close election in my mind, with two superior candidates. Let me just say, however, that all politicians will betray their own best intentions. They are politicians because they are power-hungry individuals who can bend in the wind when need be; the rest of us aren't politicians because we can't compromise our ideals that much. I do not believe that either Senator Obama or Senator Clinton can completely heal the country of the Bush ills. But I do believe that Senator Obama has a slightly better shot at doing so and an even better shot at defeating Senator McCain. If you are in a Super Tuesday state, please be sure to do the rest of us a favor and vote. If you’re voting Democrat, you should strongly consider Senator Obama’s claim that he has the right experience to govern our country right now.

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This was a really long post, but I have a couple of additional side notes:

The music video above should be a little clearer on the fact that it is also saying, "Sí, se puede," as well as "yes, we can" in so many languages that people speak in the United States. I was pleased to hear Spanish and see American Sign Language, but what about others?

Those of you spreading emails that claim Senator Obama is a Muslim should be ashamed of yourselves. Not only is that email an out and out lie, it is playing on ignorant religious fears that degrade our whole country. While I would have no fear of electing a Muslim for president were she or he the right person for the job, I know that is an opinion not shared by much of the country. I know politics is about dirty trickery, thus why I am not a politician, but come on people, even Senator McCain, whose adopted Bangladeshi child was used against him in 2000, would probably find that a low blow.

Killing to Be Famous

2007-12-06T11:53:00.000-08:00

But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.
--Paul, 1 Corinthians 1:27-29

Yesterday, possibly the deadliest shooting in the history of Nebraska took place in an Omaha shopping mall. Myriad horrible reasons can lead a person to shoot fellow humans en masse a la Columbine or Virginia Tech, and I don't believe any one reason can explain a complex situation. But the BBC news coverage included information about the shooter's suicide note not found in other news I read. Rumored to have lost his job that day at McDonald's, the gunman's note apparently also described his desire to be famous.

I refuse to write his name in this blog for that precise reason. While I am certain that a desire for fame could not be the sole reason that he committed an atrocity prior to suicide, the possibility of its contribution to this occurrence hangs heavy on my head. We as members of this culture are guilty in our support of fame over excellence. My friend Valerie, a Gen X-er, often challenges that those of us in our 20s tend to value fame over the excellence that should be a natural predecessor to fame. While excellence may have led to Meryl Streep's fame, it certainly had nothing to do with Paris Hilton's. What does it mean to seek fame for fame's sake?

I began this post with a quotation from Paul, not because he has the most psychologically stable advice to offer us today, but because its rhetorical valuation of what is dishonorable to the Roman world popped into my head today. Robert Jewett draws on this quotation from Paul in Saint Paul Returns to the Movies: Triumph Over Shame in part as a call for people to seek themselves in things other than those deemed great by the world. Excellence is not something the outside world can measure for us as individuals. I can only assume that we seek fame, at least in part, to relieve the existential quandary of human existence, but, though not myself famous, I am certain fame alone cannot solve that quandary. And if we, in that cultural space that somehow transforms individual psychology, cannot learn to value an excellence completely unmeasurable by how often our youtube video is played then we may all end up killing ourselves in Nebraska shopping malls.

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On a completely unrelated note, I just had to note that NewsCorp bought beliefnet.com, citing, at least in the Financial Times, the Pew study finding that 82 million people in the USA turn to the internet as part of their faith. What will Murdoch controlled online religion look like? And to what purposes will it be put?

Where have all the funny girls gone?

2007-10-21T10:22:00.000-07:00

This is really just a short follow up on an earlier post. Today, the Los Angeles Times has a really good piece" on the dearth of strong women in comedic roles on the big screen. Carina Chocano makes some excellent observations about recent comedic films, and her observations should prompt further questions about why these movies have unappealing men playing opposite women with no character to speak of. Is it just money in the movie industry? Does Hollywood doubt that comedies with strong female characters and flawed male heroes can make money? Could they be right? Is there something more going on in our culture? I think it is worth noting that the U.S.A. may be the only film industry with such a problem. The film Persepolis suggests that France is capable of launching a solid film about a strong and complicated comedic female lead.
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Image still comes from the website for Persepolis.

Superhero is Super-zero

2007-08-30T22:11:00.000-07:00

Last summer, on this blog, I claimed that the Sci-Fi Channel's Who Wants to Be a Superhero? was the answer to the reality show genre. I thought that a show that forced people to be good people in order to win did, in some small way, redeem the reality show genre.

I am sorry to say it. I was wrong.

The first season was charming, but the second season clarifies how much Superhero is just another reality show. A second season does not serve as a referendum on the genre, but a perpetuation of much that is wrong with the reality show genre: play-acting old scripts with a cast of characters far less compelling than the first.

Watching tonight's episode, I found myself wondering how they cast women for this season. Perhaps strong women don't need to be fake superheroes? Then, watching the treatment of the one woman left, it is clear that the show does reward a certain kind of behavior more common among the show's men: taking charge even when you're not really paying attention to how other people are reacting. Hygena, the woman left, does not take charge, but she also knows when she may not have the skill set that others have and that it might be good to let them air out their ideas.

On the other hand, she was not eliminated. The openly gay superhero, Parthenon, who has been a strong contender and the most compelling character for much of the season, was eliminated because he failed to inspire children. The winner from last season, Feedback, also failed that challenge, but he went on to become the superhero. I can't help but wonder if sci-fi feels children aren't ready for a gay superhero?

This leaves one superhero for whom the competition is his to lose, and that is Hyperstrike. The sad thing though, if he does win, is that he is the character who, at least on camera, has seemed the most scripted and least well acted. But then reality shows tend to reward those who follow the script best.

This season of Superhero has proven itself to be ruled by certain normative scripts. Even if they are scripts more to my liking, I still can't help but wonder why we (and obviously I am included here) want to watch "reality" shows that just perpetuate old scripts instead of helping us to create our own new ones.

Settling for Less

2007-08-24T15:06:00.001-07:00

I just read a movie review for Dedication in the New York Times. It was a relief to read Jeannette Catsoulis' opening remarks. I haven't seen the film, but I have seen Knocked Up, which she references. Good humor aside, I was really struck by the completely flat portrayal of women in the film. Not only that, but I have always assumed successful, intelligent, and beautiful women don't generally settle for whatever random man they find in a bar. Whatever happened to the being alone, having friends, and having cats option? Oh wait, I just remembered, these are movies being made by men. I suppose it is a certain ever-adolescent male fantasy to somehow find a woman capable of standing on her own two feet and yet choosing to add this man to her life. And somehow, these same men would like to imagine they don't actually have to mature past the age of 20 in order to convince this woman to stay with them. Well, girls, I hope that you don't let these movies convince you of that. We all have to grow up and maybe the best thing to do in a situation like this is to grow up alone.

Hook a Canuck and Get Free Healthcare

2007-07-09T09:37:00.000-07:00

I just saw Sicko, and I wanted to testify to my own experience that there is better healthcare in other countries who believe in socialized medicine. As Michael Moore tracked us down the list of WHO rankings, I noticed that the #36 spot, just above the U.S.A. was occupied by Costa Rica. Having actually been treated in hospitals in Costa Rica as well as the U.S.A., I would say that this feels accurate. Costa Ricans do get better (and guaranteed) healthcare than the average person in the U.S.A.

So I also ask, what is so wrong with the term "socialized"? Sometimes, it's a good thing to have if it works better than what we've got.

As tear-jerking and over the top as Sicko could be at points, it is a good reminder of the devastation that a for-profit health care system leaves behind. The logic of the free-hand globalized capitalist marketplace is not, in fact, always the best logic for everything. Those of us who have health insurance in the U.S.A. can generally testify to the hassles of dealing with our insurance companies just to get the basic coverage supposedly guaranteed to us by our insurance policies.

The next president will probably not revamp the system the way we need (which is to remove the "over 65" from Medicare and convince companies, business executives, and the middle class that they will all actually save money by supporting a socialized health care system with taxes). So I can see why, even jokingly, there would be some appeal in marrying a Canadian for a good health care system as proposed in the video above from a website advertised at the end of Sicko.

Catholics didn't play fair in American colonization

2007-05-23T12:57:00.000-07:00

Or so the Pope admitted, after he had claimed the indigenous peoples of Latin America were "silently longing" for Christianity. Having been criticized for that statement by a number of people including Brazilian leaders and Venezuela president Hugo Chavez, the Pope responded "It is, in fact, not possible to forget the suffering, injustices inflicted by the colonizers against the indigenous population, whose human and fundamental rights have often been trampled." This is not actually an apology for the statement, just an acknowledgment of certain historical facts.

I find this whole story quite amusing. In my undergraduate school's daily paper, there was once a profile of a Latino janitor. The title included the terms "Spic and Span." Admittedly, these students came up with this title at 2AM. But what the titling reveals is the difference between their contexts and those of Latino/as, especially the janitor they profiled. While not intending to offend, the editorial staff of the paper did apologize for their limited vision that had led to the offensive title.

The Pope's initial comment in Brazil reflects a similar situation. An aging German man living in the Vatican, his context is radically different than that of the majority populace of Latin America. An apology is not to be expected from the Vatican. But maybe the Cardinals should consider, in the next papal election, someone whose context is more representative of the Church's faithful. Maybe next time around they can look to the descendants of those colonized by Christian Europe, i.e. Latin Americans, Africans, and Asians who make up the bulk of the Church's population now.

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Photograph from Reuters.

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Lies

2007-04-30T10:57:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to post a short montage of our favorite booths at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Thank you Katy for the appropriate title for these photos.

Warning: Don't Try Theology at Home

2007-03-14T22:20:00.000-07:00

I have been away, and pretty uninspired to blog by the world around me, but a small news item came to my attention this morning. I am by no means an expert on liberation theology, but I am quite certain something important happened in the last few days. The Roman Catholic Church's inquisitory arm, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has officially admonished Jesuit priest Jon Sobrino. Though of Basque heritage, he lives and teaches in El Salvador where he has been forbidden to lecture on theology.

The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith made clear that Sobrino's teachings were "incorrect." Intriguingly, they focused not only on his emphasis on the humanity of Jesus but also upon his teaching that the "Church of the Poor" is the true setting for understanding who Jesus is. While the Congregation wished to make it clear that they of course share Sobrino's concern with the poor in Latin America, they sought to remind people not only of Jesus' divinity but of the Church hierarchy's own intractable authority in these matters because "it is only the apostolic faith which the Church has transmitted through all generations that constitutes the ecclesial setting of Christology and of theology in general."

I definitely believe that people should seek education in all forms and think critically about the world around the. But in essence, this statement is telling people that they can only think critically about certain things in so far as they accord with what more qualified thinkers believe. For right and for wrong, for better and for worse, the Church wanted to remind those who might follow Sobrino that certain issues of faith are up to the deciders. The Church is not liable for the dangers of engaging in theology in your own home, especially if that home is poverty in Latin America, and that home might lead you to conclude things that differ in small and large ways from what important powerful people tell you. In other words, theologizing is to be done by a chosen professional on a closed course. Don't theologize at home.

China supports genocide in Darfur

2007-02-02T17:03:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I went to see Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka deliver a lecture in Claremont, CA: Deities for a Secular Dispensation. In the lecture, he acknowledged that while religion had been invoked for horrible atrocities, it may have been a restraining factor in human history. Perhaps without religion, the human species would have been even worse.

While I am plagued with concern over the role of religion in contemporary global politics, I thought of Wole Soyinka today when I heard that China is strengthening its economic ties with the genocidally criminal government of Sudan (see BBC article, “Chinese leader boosts Sudan ties”, from which the above image was taken).

The Sudanese government has committed unpardonable atrocities in Darfur, carrying out an ethnic cleansing that involves a religious dimension (just in case you thought I was letting religiously motivated murder off the hook). But for a major political and economic power like China to support such a regime is equally unpardonable. Of course, the Chinese government likewise has its own horrendous record of human rights abuses (consider, for example, the ways in which the Chinese government silences the dissent of its own people).

Yet this decision on China’s part combined with its own history of human rights abuse does remind us of the need for universally accepted (and enforced) ethical standards for the treatment of all human beings (something the USA would benefit from having as well). What would be remarkable in the real adoption of universal ethical standards like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the decreased emphasis on national boundaries in dictating the application of such universally recognized standards. I know this is a complex issue, and I don’t mean to talk about it overly simplistically. Yet we as citizens of the world are over a half-century too late. We should already have recognized the universal appeal of truly adopting these standards.

In cases like China economically supporting the Sudan, or the USA economically supporting apartheid South Africa under Reagan, one can recognize that the lack of any ideology higher than nationalism is indeed the problem. In both cases, these decisions were not made for the good of Communism or the good of Christianity (although one cannot deny the atrocities committed in the names of both); they were made purely for the economic and political power of the nation. Nationalism has often colluded with what it likes from a particular religion or ideology in perpetrating horrific violence. Yet as dangerous as fundamentalist religious and/or ideological views have been and continue to be for the world, perhaps it is unchecked nationalism that still poses the gravest danger to the future of humanity.

“I’m not racist because I’m an ignorant fool.”

2007-01-22T18:54:00.000-08:00

Today I was forwarded this really disgusting email, and I just felt the need to post a reply on why this supposedly “non-racist” post is in fact really really racist. The email is in quotations, and my responses are not.

“You call me "Cracker", "Honkey", "Whitey", "Gringo" and you think it's OK.”

First of all, the very use of “you” as though the author can speak about anyone, of whatever ethnic/racial background as a giant conglomeration operating as a unit not only proves that the author of this text is racist (because it’s a racist move to make these generalizations), but it also proves the author's complete inability to recognize how racism operates. It’s not just about the terms a person uses (and I’m not condoning the use of racial slurs against “white” people either); it’s about a system of thinking that sees people as stereotypes instead of individual people. Then that system, in order to be truly racist, requires power. And whatever the author of this might think, “white” people are pretty much in charge, i.e. the people with the power to perpetrate racist violence tend to be "white" (though I admit this is not always true). Condoleeza Rice may be Secretary of State, but the people in charge are still pretty much “white” men as far as I can tell

“....But when I call you Kike, sand nigger, rag head, Towelhead, WOP, Camel Jockey, Gook, nigger, slant eyes or Chink you call me a racist.”

‘Cause “you” are. Oh, and by the way, according to the US Census, Jews and Middle-Eastern Americans are “white.”

“-You say that whites commit a lot of violence against you, so why are the ghettos the most dangerous places to live?”

Two things here – uh, the history of the USA and European colonialism would bear out that most violence across dynamics of power and crossed ethnic/racial lines was perpetrated by “whites.” This violence was then embodied in a system of slavery and after that a socio-economic system that made it very difficult for the descendants of enslaved Africans to live anywhere other than the ghettos. And by the way, some “white” people do live in the ghettos. So, dear author, may I recommend that you move to a neighborhood that government services have pretty much abandoned and tell me how happy you are to be there.

“-You have the United Negro College Fund."

And when the systemic imbalance has been corrected and definitively made it just as possible for African Americans (specifically the descendants of the USA's enslaved Africans, who by the way are not being well represented in the USA's universities) to succeed in the USA and to get a good college education, then maybe there would be no need for such a college fund.

“-You have Martin Luther King Day.”

Martin Luther King belongs to the history of the world and the history of everyone in the USA. Dear author, is there something you don't like about the end of segregation? Why don't you see Martin Luther King Day as your day too? Do you, dear author, seriously believe that Martin Luther King and his work are not worth honoring? Why on earth do we celebrate President's Day either? Maybe we should get rid of Memorial Day, Labor Day, the 4^th of July, Veterans Day, and Christmas as national holidays. And of course, what about Columbus Day? That one seems not to disappear no matter how many people demand Leif Ericson Day instead!

“-You have Black History Month.”

What month of the year isn’t “white”-American history month? That’s the main history taught in schools and remembered on the History Channel. It’s good for people to know that there are other histories out there worth knowing because those histories are also part of everyone’s history. No one group of people has a lock on “history.”

“-You have Cesar Chavez Day.”

Well, given dominant USA culture’s disdain for the hard-working labor of the United Farm Workers, maybe we should just ditch this day too? Again, dear author, as with Martin Luther King, why is it that you don't see Cesar Chavez Day as your day as well? I suspect it's either racism or classism or both, but what do you say?

“-You have Yom Hashoah”

Do we all celebrate this broadly? Is not any community welcome to have a day in which they focus on losses that are not even a century old, and yes, were motivated by racism? We should all be forced to spend time thinking about the horrors of genocides that have plagued Homo sapiens for as long as recorded history can recount. Maybe then we would be less inclined to let them happen again.

“-You have Ma'uled Al-Nabi”

I could be wrong here, but doesn’t the celebration of Muhammad’s birthday predate the existence of the USA? And again, dear author, it only proves your racism that you continue to lump all non-“white” Christians of the world in as one unit completely alien to yourself. This is especially significant here as I am pretty sure there are “white” Muslims who celebrate the prophet’s birthday!

“-You have the NAACP.”

See my point about the Negro College Fund above. Plenty of legal groups have been active advocating for rights for "white" people (and often for all people in general - thank you ACLU!). If their legal activities still leave you, dear author, feeling disempowered, you may recall that “white” people have a terrorist organization known as the KKK they can join. And because it's a free country, everyone is allowed freedom of speech, even the KKK; they only get into trouble when they try to hurt people and/or property.

“-You have BET.”

And dominant culture (or your average “white” American) has FOX, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, etc. I have lived in New York. The fact that shows like Friends and How I Met Your Mother can have only “white” people running in circles of all-“white” friends (oh, wait, some of those Friends’ characters were Jewish, and I guess you don’t think that Ross Gellar is “white”!) is a statistical improbability. Yet these shows exist on major networks because most non-"whites" are not seen as a primary audience to pursue. BET exists in part because of the wisdom of capitalism. Find an untapped market and become a channel that an untapped market can turn to.

“-If we had WET(white entertainment television) ...we'd be racist.”

Just because the author doesn’t call certain television programming WET doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. More importantly, such a name would be unnecessary, because, as pointed out above, WET already had a lot of channels competing for market share.

“-If we had a White Pride Day... you would call us racist.”

I have no argument with this. Dear author, I would call you racist. There are lots of days when people of different ethnic backgrounds share pride in their heritage together. For instance, the Rose Parade has a diversity of people celebrating a diversity of things with a lot of pride. Is that not good enough for you? But, if I'm not mistaken, the allusion is really to "Gay Pride Day" so I'm guessing, dear author, that you are a wee-bit homophobic as well and you assume that being “white” not only includes being Christian and from the USA but also being heterosexual. Amazing how those unexamined views can sneak up on a person.

“-If we had white history month... we'd be racist.”

I already addressed this when I talked about “Black History Month.”

“-If we had an organization for only whites to "advance" our lives... we'd be racist.”

Well, as some of the slamming of Harold Ford, Jr. in Tennessee’s 2006 Senate race proved, there are still parts of the USA where racist “white” people can run the Republican party, so, dear author, I suggest you move there and work with them.

“-In the Million Man March, you believed that you were marching for your race and rights. If we marched for our race and rights...you would call us racist.”

I believe the KKK does still have rallies if you want to join them. This just isn’t worth rebutting a third time, but I will do my best. When equality really is available to everyone regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, class, country of origin, gender, sexual orientation, or belief, then stuff like this won’t be needed. And dear author, have you heard recently of how Barack Obama has been slandered because of his father’s Muslim heritage (and slyly because of his mother’s atheist heritage)? Does it sound like the injustices that redress is being sought for have stopped?

“-Did you know that some high school students decided to make a club for only the white students because the other ethnicities had them... they all got sent to court for being racist but the african-american, Latino, and Asia clubs were not even questioned.
-You are proud to be black, brown, yellow and orange,”

Uh – who are the “orange” people? The old racist term for the indigenous peoples of the Americas was “red.” And a lot of people from different ethnic groups don’t like sporting terms of "color."

“and you're not afraid to announce it. But when we announce our white pride, you call us racists.”

And yeah, some different people are proud of their ethnic heritage, but so are “white” people who have Irish heritage on St. Patrick’s Day.

”I am white.”

How do you know? I have pretty fair skin myself, and I compared it to a “white” table. Not really close in color. Besides, statistically, most "white" people in the USA are part African and part indigenous American, so you may want to think about what "white" even means.

“I am proud.”

Of what, exactly?

“But, you call me a racist.”

I covered this point already. Dear author, the challenge that lies before us in taking down racism is for people to realize that racism is more than just people in the KKK burning crosses on lawns. It's a complex system in which we all participate, and we all have to work to change it if we want to live in a more just world. Though, based on this message, I am not certain that a more just world is something you, dear author, are really interested in.

“Why is it that only whites can be racists?”

Well, not only “whites” can be racist. The issue is about power, and a homeless person of any ethnic background just doesn’t have the same power over you, dear author, that you have over him or her.

“Now watch, I'll be a racist for posting this”

Admission is the first step. But I don’t think dear author that you are past denial yet.

“So what? no one will re post this for fear of being called racist”

Well if my half Mexican-American friend can get this in an email forward and send it to me (because she was equally disgusted and angry), it appears not to be the case that some “white” people fear being called racist.

“if you think its true re-post it saying "im not RACIST but its true”

Well, as I said, you, dear author, are RACIST (and so is anyone really nodding in agreement with your email), and that's TRUE!

The Freedom to Choose

2006-10-22T23:40:00.000-07:00

In Nicaragua, women do not have a right to an abortion. Now it looks like they won’t have a right to an abortion, even if their lives are at risk. I would prefer to live in a world where women were valued more highly than their ability to reproduce. I would prefer to live in a world where certain choices were left up to women to make, whatever choice they made, as long as they had the freedom to choose.

Yet a woman’s freedom to choose (and not just an abortion) to be the kind of woman she wants to be for herself is in ideological peril in many places these days. Including, and maybe especially the USA. I am volunteering to serve as a bartender at a Halloween party this year, which means that for the first time in a few years I truly need better than the old-fashioned home made costume. Luckily for me, one of those Halloween specialty stores is open a few blocks away. Unluckily for me, or so I discovered this year, I am skinny enough to find that neither do the available costumes suit my purpose nor, considering it is the end of October, did these costumes provide adequate cover for my legs and arms.

I am not the only person to have noticed this trend. Stephanie Rosenbloom recently described this costume situation in The New York Times’s Fashion & Style section (“Good Girls Go Bad, For a Day”). I think it’s great that some women have the freedom, and the comfort, to choose and to wear costumes consisting of very little fabric. What I dislike is my relative lack of freedom in choosing a costume that I am more comfortable with. While I could rant here about so many trends in fashion and beauty everywhere that keep a woman paranoid about her appearance, mostly in the name of capitalism, I will not. What upsets me the most is how many women may buy these costumes to please men but not themselves.

I have been told by a number of different Muslim women that wearing the veil is liberating. Some have told me that they feel closer to God while wearing the veil; others have told me that the veil liberates them from feeling objectified, especially sexually objectified. My only difficulty with this line of reasoning falls in with my difficulty with abortion and Halloween costumes. It seems that I live in a world that promised women equality and only delivered them multiple ways to have their body objectified and dictated by others (men and women). Whether a body is hidden, cut open, pregnant, or bare does not matter – what matters is how society signifies the position of that woman and how she views herself. What is most important in my view is that women have the freedom to choose for themselves. Freedom of choice is about letting women make the choices that make them feel more human to others, not less. And ultimately it doesn’t matter what the choice is, as long as the woman making it could do so freely and without damaging social, cultural, or psychological repercussions had her choice been different.

Ultimately, this Halloween, I will go as an old-fashioned vampire in a long, full, red cloak. I have to partially design my own costume again, but at least the choice is mine. For now.

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Pictures taken above (left to right) Nicaraguan women opposing abortion, some women modeling USA Halloween costumes, and Aishah Azmi, a British woman suspended from her teaching assistantship because of her refusal to remove her niqab veil.

Why isn't everybody offended by the Pope?

2006-09-16T17:25:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, September 12, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a speech, “Faith, Reason, and the University: Memories and Reflections,” that is in some way offensive to, or at least harshly critical of, Muslims, medieval Persians, secular humanists, Protestants, and pretty much anyone who identifies themselves as Christian but is troubled by the influence of Hellenistic thought on theological tradition.

The remarks against Islam have drawn the most attention in the past few days, terminating today in a statement from the Vatican, mildly apologizing for any offense to Muslims and asking that they consider the “true sense” of the papal words, (see the BBC for the text of the “apology”).

In my own consideration of the “true sense” of this speech, I found that the pope raised some interesting as well as startlingly awful points. Ultimately, the pope wishes to return religion and ethics to the study of communal reason. He fears that the future of the world is in danger because of the separation of scientific reason from questions about God. Only through the exercise of communal reason in consideration of God can a dialogue between cultures take place. In fact, in his view, secularists are largely to blame for many contemporary problems because they do not view religion as a field for the exercise of reason. One would think secularists would be up in arms over such an indictment.

The pope believes that the greatest difficulties for Christian thought are to be found among those who would divorce Christian and Hellenistic thought. He blames German liberal theologians, many responsible for his own training, and their pursuit of some original Jesus who correlates with their version of reason. He most fervently blames, however, the Protestants and their doctrine of sola scriptura for the divorce of reason and Hellenistic thought from Christian thought. I guess it's time for Protestants to cut ties with the Vatican.

The pope does imply some awful perspectives about Islam. In my view it is not the quotation offered from the Byzantine emperor about Mohammed that is most offensive, as the pope is actually quoting someone else. The pope then discusses the inappropriate, unreasonable use of violence by any religion. This is the basis for his argument that collective reason in the examination of religion is necessary for the future of the world and conversation between civilizations; that only religion examined through collective reason can combat a sometimes violent, but generally subjective view of religious ethics.

Most offensive here is that the pope implies, by using Ibn Hazn’s description of God, that Muslims (and some Christians as well) may view God as so radically transcendent as to be overly capricious. In the Pope’s view, Christianity is saved by Hellenistic thought, by the logos that signals the analogy between created human reason and the Creator Spirit. For the pope, God is reasonable, and so must we be also. The unstated implication in the phrasing is that the Muslim view of God (and the Protestant one for that matter – though not stated directly) is an unreasonable one. This is the most insensitive part of the Pope’s speech, in my view, the part that many would have had reason to be irritated by, the part for which perhaps the pope should even have apologized. Though this level of the pope’s speech requires you to have actually read it and it does not sound good when condemning him in sound bites.

Ultimately, the pope either poorly or pointedly chose the textual dialogues about Christianity and Islam that transpired between the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian, Ibn Hazn. They probably took place in 1391, and we have the emperor’s version, so who knows what the biases are in the text. The pope’s decision here seems to be a poor one, used in service to a far more complex and interesting point (even if I disagree with much of his argument).

Yet the only thing that is truly offensive about the text is that Pope Benedict clearly believes Catholicism to be the best path. Then again, he is the leader of that tradition, so it would be shocking if he thought otherwise. As a leader of over a billion people in a world with deep and dangerous religious divides, the pope does need to be more diplomatic than the rest of us. It is right and fair for everyone to be critical of his views. Yet to demand an apology for such a speech is to demand that everyone who believes their religion holds the truth apologize for such a view. This is not only a ridiculous violation of the allowances of free speech, it is just patently ridiculous as long as people have different beliefs about God.

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The photographs above are taken from various BBC articles. The photograph on the left is of some Indian Muslims burning the Pope's effigy; click here for the picture of the Pope in the center; and click here for the photograph on the right of some Pakistani Muslims protesting the Pope's speech.

Life as a checked-box

2006-08-25T10:54:00.000-07:00

It’s okay to be racist; it’s just “ethnic pride.” According to CBS that is. I guess I was asleep and missed the pop culture cues on that one. This fall, the reality show that defined a genre has decided to split 20 contestants up into four ethnic groups: “African-American,” “Asian-American,” “Hispanic,” and “white.” The terminology makes me think I woke up in a bad parallel 1982. I suppose the show’s producers forcibly removed the “Native American” team before filming began while they were too busy pretending there are no “Middle Eastern-Americans” in the USA. Listening to NPR’s ”Day to Day” this morning, I learned that the producers of CBS’ Survivor: Cook Islands rationalized their “race-baiting”, attention-grabbing “social experiment” on the basis of just having interviewed people with a lot of “ethnic pride.” Since half of them admit to be actors, that sounds a little fishy to me. With ethnic- or religious-based civil wars raging in large swaths of the world, it seemed like a good time to divide people up over “ethnic pride.”

Really, it’s okay that “corporate America” wants to convince us that racism is “so last year” that it’s “all good” for people to identify with labels and supposedly root for a team based purely on their sharing the same ethnic background. Of course, all of us multiracial/multicultural, Native-American, and/or Middle-Eastern-American people will just have to watch other shows this season. But I’m not sure what since the new racial divide haunts me wherever I go. Last Sunday’s Comedy Central Roast of William Shatner contained a plethora of racist and homophobic humor (like George Takei’s difficulty saying “glory hole” because of his Asian accent, which last I heard had the perfected pronunciation of a Shakespearean actor, but I guess I slept through that too). Here’s a novel idea. Maybe I should just turn off my television because by now I’ve learned I’m not really part of the target audience for anything anyways.

Of course, listening to the news I realize that this pop cultural joke is not relegated to poorly conceived television shows. Apparently the Bush administration believes that certain regulations are no longer necessary. Even worse, they keep people out of schools “because of their [white] race.” As Survivor proves, we have clearly solved the difficulties around race in this country.

Fat Momma is here to save the day

2006-07-28T13:25:00.000-07:00

Despite reality television’s ever expanding grip on our attention spans, I was pleasantly surprised last night when I took a break from my normal Thursday evening to watch Sci-Fi channel’s new reality television series, Who Wants to Be a Superhero? I admit to having been skeptical of the idea that you could create a reality show about people who wish they were comic book characters, but the premise of the show is actually quite charming and all the characters quite amusing (including my favorite, “Fat Momma,” whose weakness is diet food). These people are not competing for lots of money; they are competing for the adaptation of their own idea of a superhero by legendary superhero-creator Stan Lee.

That was not the only thing that I liked better about that show than a normal episode of Fear Factor or Survivor. The first two eliminations were truly based on whether each individual could indeed offer the super-person qualities requisite for a superhero. In the first round, all the would-be superheroes were spied upon to determine whose motives might not match the selfless demands of a superhero’s existence. In the second round, all the contestants were told their challenge would be to change in a private place into their superhero costume and get to a finish point as fast as possible. The challenge was actually if they would stop what they were doing to assist a girl crying for help just before the finish line. The unfortunate reality of this reality show is how most of the would-be superheroes ran right past the girl. The terrific thing is that the ones who stopped to help (Fat Momma, Lemuria, Cell-Phone Girl, and Major Victory) were all guaranteed safety in the next elimination round. Whatever my complaints about reality television, it is nice to see a competition that tries to reward people for being better people. In theory, this reality show cannot be won by scheming, manipulation, stabbing people in the back, and being the most outrageously irritating person around. It will be quite interesting if this six-episode show does continue to be the foil of the reality TV I’ve come to expect.
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Image taken from Sci-Fi.com (from TV Guide)

Being a bad friend

2006-07-22T16:37:00.000-07:00

I've always said that I want the type of friends who would tell me when I have food in my teeth or a booger hanging out of my nose. A good friend is one who is willing to tell you the truth about what you do.

The USA has not been a good "friend" to Israel in a long time. These past two weeks, however, mark a completely unacceptable turn in the ridiculous alliance of these two nations. If you are to believe Ted Koppel's editorial in yesterday's New York Times, then Israel is a puppet state fighting Iran for us through their puppet of Hezbollah. If Israel is doing this of its own accord, it is a crazy attack that has cost so many civilian lives while merely strengthening the support of Hezbollah in Lebanon. A good friend would tell Israel that attacking Lebanon is probably a long-term bad idea, but instead the USA is speeding up its shipments of weapons.

But maybe the USA does enjoy the idea of spreading theocracy throughout the Middle East.

For a good batch of editorials on the current Israel-Lebanon conflict, you should take a look at today's New York Times which has a diverse array of views.

Also, if you're interested in learning more about the Mearsheimer/Walt article that spoke of the dangers of the Israel Lobby to the USA's own foreign policy, I would like to recommend a set of links that give food for thought on the relationship between the USA and Israel.

The London Review of Books contains an abbreviated version of the Mearsheimer/Walt article, and it includes a link to the full paper if you wish to read it.

The New York Review of Books' Michael Massing published a review not just of the article but of the controversy surrounding it, and he is critical of most of the article.

The most compellingly non-reactionary critique of the article is probably from Noam Chomsky.

Mearsheimer and Walt also published their own summary of the controversy and response to their critics.

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The photograph above comes from The New York Times' Tyler Hicks, and it shows leaflets dropped by Israel in Southern Lebanon in an attempt to warn civilians to leave.

I believe it is about the essay

2006-06-27T21:35:00.000-07:00

I am just adding my voice to the chorus on this one - Ward Churchill may not be someone I agree with, or can even support, but the academy has joined the rest of the country in walking the knife's edge.

On Monday, the interim chancellor of the University of Colorado, Phil DiStefano, recommended the termination of Churchill's position at the University of Colorado. Consequently all his teaching and research duties have been ended, though he is still being paid until the Board of Regents makes its final decision. (For more in-depth coverage, you may check The New York Times , The Rocky Mountain News, and, on a different note, Inside Higher Ed.)

What is interesting to me is that the faculty investigating this noted themselves that Churchill was hired and promoted by a university who knew he was an activist and that he has not been traditionally credentialed with either a Ph.D. or J.D. For years, allegations of research misconduct had flown around Churchill's work. Yet it is when his opinions draw national attention and disdain for being "unpatriotic" that an investigation is convened (though DiStefano pleads that one has nothing to do with the other). The faculty on the committee were themselves divided on how Churchill should be punished with only one of the five members recommending all out dismissal and termination of tenure (you can see the faculty's own reports on the University of Colorado's website).

DiStefano's call for Churchill's dismissal is now a sad academic mirror of the criticisms of free speech plaguing the country. Just this week, President Bush himself joined a chorus of conservatives condemning The New York Times for actually reporting news to the U.S. public (check out the Canadian perspective here). Not unlike Churchill, The New York Times has made some serious mistakes before, but actually reporting real news isn't one of them. Of course what do you expect in a country where press freedom is lower than that of the bulk of the Western world (including my favorite countries in the Western hemisphere, Costa Rica and Canada - see here for more information on the USA's low ranking)?

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The image of Ward Churchill on the left is taken from the Washington Post article. The image on the right is from Satya.

Sometimes you just need a little Nietzsche

2006-06-14T21:01:00.000-07:00

"Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein."

(Translation: Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process s/he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.)

Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future), Aphorism 146.

Sayonara Amendment One

2006-06-01T00:46:00.000-07:00

"Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

On Tuesday, the Roberts (with Alito bonus player) Supreme Court made another landmark decision. Landmark that is if you are on the side of government being protected from whistleblowers. They decided that Richard Ceballos, once deputy district attorney of Los Angeles, had no right to query the affairs of his office in his official capacity as deputy district attorney. Rather, somehow, he can only do this if he holds a public press conference as a private citizen, not in his position as an advocate of justice advocating, well, justice.

This decision is, as The New York Times argued, a break with previous precedents, one of which was even set under the Rehnquist court of 1979. It is also, of course, a decision that likely would have been different had one of the presiding justices been Sandra Day O'Connor and not Samuel Alito. (As a sidenote, I thoroughly enjoyed the brief commentary on this to be found at The Right Honorable Samuel A. Alito, Jr. Blog.)

This decision of this Supreme Court just underlines the Bush administration's control over the Judicial branch. It is an administration who has already violated the Fourth Amendment in its NSA search through the phone records of countless private citizens. Now, its Supreme Court, which will long outlast the Bush administration itself, is in the process of taking apart basic First Amendment protections that would allow an individual to pursue justice through official capacities.

The irony is that this comes just after a time when many immigrants to the USA were joined by allies, many of whom are also of immigrant background, as they actually exercised their First Amendment rights to peaceably assemble and petition this government for a redress of grievances.

While I think the pro-immigration protests were a great thing, I would really like to know what is wrong with us that immigrants can turn out in droves and liberals can turn out in droves for immigrants, but we can't turn out in huge numbers when the most fundamental freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution are being taken away from us.

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The photograph of Samuel Alito when he was a justice with U.S. Court of Appeals Third Circuit is from Wikipedia.

The image of the First Amendment to the USA Constitution is from The National Archives "Charters of Freedom".

The transcript of the First Amendment is taken from The National Archives as well.

that's just the way capitalism goes

2006-04-26T19:58:00.000-07:00

To look at the adbusters' source of this image, click here.

I have spent a lot of time (not here admittedly) ranting about the sacrifice of quality and whatever "reality" there may be in the world to the endless consumer capitalist frenzy that seems to surround me.

In yesterday's New York Times, Stephen Budiansky wrote an editorial titled "Brand U." He describes how universities have changed the way they "market" themselves to potential students, including changing names and having the administrators, faculty, and staff refer to students as customers.

Education, the exchange of and search for knowledge, the experience of learning, these are all reasons that higher educational institutions (most of which are technicnally non-profits) have for existing. Profit should not be one of those reasons. And profit, based on enrollment, does not prove how good an educational institution is at providing these items. Students are not "customers." They are people of great value to an educator; not because of the money they bring but because of all the promise to be found in the pursuit of knowledge.

The day after I read this editorial in the New York Times, NPR had a story about ExxonMobil's posted record profit and the U.S. Senate's examination of oil profits. I understand that oil companies do need to turn a profit, but what I don't understand is how they can so comfortably do it as gas prices climb dramatically for almost everyone in the world. Wouldn't they be happy with a little bit less profit? Don't get me wrong; I think high gas prices might be good in terms of eventually weaning the U.S. off oil dependency. I just don't understand the appeal of unrestrained greed.

As someone who is both dependent on a car and somewhere deep down still in love with the idea of higher education, these news items added to some of the sorrow I so often feel these days when I think of the future of the world and the mastery that corporate capitalism wields over all our lives. But that's just the way capitalism goes.

The new debt slavery

2006-03-25T12:04:00.000-08:00

What I really have wanted to know for a long time is why we aren't out rioting about some of the things our government has done. Well finally I was sent articles that have answers for the apathy of the younger generations. Okay, these are not the only answers but they are some pretty convincing ones. We are so saddled with the debt we are attempting to pay off we really can't think about anything else. And the government is trying to make it worse not just for new students but also for their middle class parents. There are ways to tax the middle class that are far sneakier than outright taxing the middle class. It is to offer them education at too high a price for them to legitimately afford. This is also good because it forces younger generations to be satisfied with whatever job they can find, it forces them to place themselves solidly within a globalized capital system and prevents them from much of the political involvement discussed in this editorial below.

"Student Debts, Stunted Lives"

Also, if you want to read the stories profiled in the original Chicago Tribune article, click here.

not to be too reactionary...

2006-03-02T00:19:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite movies in the 1990s was Quiz Show. As part of the generation who grew up with the constant hum of television, it was an interesting movie to think with. I was reminded of it when I saw Good Night, and Good Luck because it had once again made me consider the possibilities of television as a medium. It also made me reconsider the ways that television had failed us. After listening to the remarks made by Murrow toward the end of Good Night, and Good Luck, I found myself thinking about what an amazing tool television can and could have been for democracy and education. Instead it has become so filled with programming that my roommate may watch shows I have never heard of. We have become so overwhelmed by television and its persistent hum in our lives that we actually crave television that claims to mimic “reality.” I feel much as Goodwin does near the completion of Quiz Show: “I thought we were gonna get television. The truth is... television is gonna get us.”

I have found myself wondering the same about the internet these past few years. On the one hand, I love the internet. It allows me to write this to the two of you who read it. Google itself provided the amazing tool of “Google Scholar,” which I use far too often in doing research at the Institute. I read a lot of New York Times’ articles online. I am able to be in touch with friends from years ago who live in other countries. So I admit, the internet is an amazing thing. Yet sometimes I worry about its capacity to become just another part of the distracting noise that has been occupied by television and Enterntainment Weekly. This is why I enjoyed watching the science fiction product describing EPIC, the imagined ultimate creation of the futuristic mega-corporation, Googlezon. If you haven’t seen this movie yet, then I highly recommend you check out the Museum of Media History clip to see the video.

In this same vein, a movie has become really popular on the internet lately for mocking My Space, the online community website that looks like “Friendster” (which is referenced in the EPIC video) on crack. The maker of My Space - the Movie may not have realized what he was doing when he made it, but he did a good job of mocking a few of things about My Space that really bug me.

My friend Melody was showing me some of the pages for a couple of these girls on My Space who have gotten some minor fame out of taking photos of themselves in revealing clothing. What interested me most about the more famous of the two was her online poetry describing herself as a “real” person. I cannot help but wonder if it is only in a world where “reality” exists only in pre-fabricated images bombarding us on television and through the fantastic internet, if it is only in this world that we could crave the “real” so much. I recognize that the quest of individual “authenticity” has been such an odd part of modernity (a la John Berger and the discussion of the ability to make prints of art); that it has been frequently commented upon since the boom of 1950s consumer culture. It has also been an obsession in the U.S.A. in particular. People are always complimenting others by saying, wow, “she’s so real.” The irony far too often is that we are not real, authentic, or original. These girls on MySpace are but sad reproductions of the media-produced Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, etc., all of whom are empty products themselves (on those kind of terms; in Buddhist terms, we’re all empty). Only on MySpace could these girls plead their reality while at the same time demonstrating in photograph after photograph their unoriginal creation.

Bush/Cheney 1984

2005-12-27T19:24:00.000-08:00

For the bumper sticker, click here.

I know I have been away for a little while, but the spirit compels me to post two thoughts.

First of all, I know that people may have forgot during the consumer Christmas haze, but it appears we officially live in a dictatorship. It’s a little more pleasant than some because at least I can post on this blog, but I can no longer be sure at what cost. I can no longer have carefree telephone conversations or email exchanges without wondering who is listening, without worrying that I or the people I love are being monitored by Big Brother.

Props to Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts for dramatically stating the Bush administration’s unlawful violation of civil liberties. Congress should have never granted the Bush administration any special powers after 9/11, but even if they did, it does not cover such ridiculous dictatorial behavior as monitoring a range of groups and individuals with no clear terrorist aims, let alone clear ties to al-Qaeda. Thankfully Massachusetts (double props to the people of Massachusetts on this one) kept Kennedy around to remind us that “this is Big Brother run amok.” (click here for the link to the Los Angeles Times article with Kennedy’s quotation, with regard to his opposition to the renewal of the U.S.A. Patriot Act). By the way, isn't this why the constitution has this little thing called the impeachment process?

Read here for more information on the impeachment process in the U.S. Constitution; to see specifically which constitutional rights they have been violating check out the Bill of Rights, especially IV, V, and VI:

"Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense."

That is why my opening picture is of the Benjamin Franklin quotation. I think it’s time this nation reflects not just on how well, if at all, our “democratic system” actually functions, but also, we must reflect upon what we mean by this “freedom” we love so dearly? Then we should start listening to the now cliché-Gandhi sentiment: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” This applies not just to individual behavior but to our own government; if we want to see a “free” world practicing “democracy,” maybe we should aim for making the U.S.A. safer for freedom and democracy too.

Dating Rules 2005

2005-12-27T19:18:00.000-08:00

On a lighter note, props to Marc and Lauren for our discussion the other night. We have finally figured out exactly how to approach the issue of appropriate payment on dates. In normal first-date situations, s/he who asked is responsible for paying for the meal/festivities/etc. In later dates, the burgeoning couple is welcome to work out a system best suited to their individual tastes, although as a student with little money I am an advocate of the “pay-for-your-own” plan. Though unique situations can present themselves.

The “whoever asks” rule can get tricky when considering internet dating. In this situation, I really think it’s best that each pay for his/her own part of the date until a real dating situation has been established. I know a lot of girls have enjoyed internet dating because of the supply of free-food; however, I think that any woman who identifies herself as a feminist should be wary of such willingness to be so commodified on dates by the supposed purchasing power of men. I myself have often let men pay for a date, not wanting to seem rude and ungracious, and thus a new system for a new century should help us all figure this out better. I am not saying that all men pay for dinner because they have a desire to own something of the woman on that date; I think we just take for granted the capitalist relationship amongst certain constructions of masculinity and feminity on dates and it’s time for that to change. Especially if the woman in question has a steady income and the man on the internet date is a student with no steady income.

Finally, the “whoever asks” rule encounters the blind date situation. In this case, we believe that the “whoever asks” rule should be conservatively interpreted. The matchmaker should pay for the date of the poor set-up couple. Such a practice would have the added bonus of hindering careless matchmakers and their match-happy practitioning.

Happy New Year to all.

weekend in vegas

2005-10-28T16:13:00.000-07:00

Below are two journal pieces that I meant to post last month about Vegas; they are just food for thought about Vegas and U.S. culture. Bear in mind that it was the first and only time I have ever been to Las Vegas unless you count the hour I spent in the airport transferring from one Southwest flight to another.

10.01.05

Well, here I am on the 17^th floor of a hotel and casino in Las Vegas, NV. I have an ideal view of I-15 and the towering glitz of the Vegas strip – Paris, New York, the Luxor, the Excalibur castle, all to my right, the coliseum of Caesar’s Palace in my direct line of sight. And below me, a fake tropical beach, four pools, two with waterfalls, one that looks like a fish from above.

Nowhere is like Vegas as far as I can tell. My first night here, I was completely overwhelmed; nothing can prepare you for the mix of revealingly-dressed young women, elderly couples, scantily clad women and men dancing atop bars to bad 90s music, and all the bells and whistles that haunt the lobby of the hotel/casino. All the noise, all the people. And this is as true at 10 am, even if less crowded, as it is at 11 pm. At night there are just more drunk people wandering around. Last night my aunt and I walked the strip. We saw brandy snifters and abandoned hurricane glasses, streets littered with the calling cards of legalized prostitution, young Latin American men and women handing these cards out to drunk men wandering past, 21-year old kids running around drunk and tightly dressed, a girl playing a television script on her boyfriend for talking to one of the attractive scantily clad hustling women.

I won $56 this morning. I think I have gotten all I need out of Vegas.

It is a beautiful area of the country. A stunning desert mountain region with this oasis of lush watered trees. The Bellagio has water works displays out front in the day. Yesterday one of them was played to the tune of “Proud to Be an American.” Because where else but the United States of America could you have such water displays in the desert.

And the desert – is that why the Ancient Near East is so played upon by so many of the casinos – the Luxor, the MGM Grand to a certain extent, Aladdin’s, the Mirage, the Sahara. Something about the ancient near eastern world bespeaks such opulence to the amnesiac American mind. Somewhere perhaps such desire for possession of this forgotten association launches the Bush family to seek more than just crude oil. Perhaps the Bible is not all the motivation – perhaps Babylon still rests as a center of wealth, of excess, of riches and personal freedoms beyond imagination, and perhaps that is why it occupies an imaginative space of desire.

Yet that is what makes Vegas so complex; it is here where all of the Hollywood-admitted-yet- “good-girl"- repressed desires of our Puritan capitalist selves are born out. We have watt after watt of electricity pumping at all hours where men’s and women’s bodies can be purchased and watched and videorecorded and where we can even get married or divorced in a rapid fashion; where thought is something to be done later. It is time to live on impulse now. Where we have all been trained to go and deposit coins since going to Showbiz Pizza or Chuck E. Cheese’s for our seventh birthdays. If they only had skee-ball, we would all be gamblers crashing before the casino giants.

At the same time Vegas is so refreshingly open and unabashed about its roles in the world. The Disney version of ancient Egypt, of New York, Paris, Venice, ancient Rome stands before us all to tour around, to imagine we live lives other than the ones we do. Vegas openly promises the escape and openly bears the falsity of it in the plastic statues. We all play scripts to excess here, just like the girl pushing her boyfriend for talking to the woman in red. We can relinquish all need to think our moments through, that is both the relief and the punishment of Vegas.

Yet, as I said, there is something so honest in such scriptedness. All of American life has become scripted of late. Very few moments happen in anyone’s life where they do not have the appropriate movie-popsong-television-realitytelevision script for the moment. Here it is an admittable fact of life.

And there are churches too. Nonpushy evangelicals standing on street-corners with “God Is…” pamphlets and priests standing quietly in the shade of the strip, collecting money for homeless shelters. Because Vegas has more homeless people too.

I cannot tell you what Vegas is. I can only tell you what happened to me. But it is 1:45 pm on Saturday now, and I sit in my room reading Orlando Patterson’s Freedom, doing homework, typing away at my computer.

10.02.05

Today, I had wanted to write about Penn and Teller. I saw them Friday night, and I wanted to discuss postmodern culture and my generation. What does it say that you can have magicians performing in Vegas for whom a large part of their act is showing how they do the “magic” they do, convincing you not to believe them or anyone who claims to be doing magic of all sorts, and more than that, convincing you to recognize the falsity of the entertainer-entertained exchange. Penn said point blank that “I am a liar.” They also did a little flag burning magic trick (without actually burning the flag) just to point out how meaningless the flag is next to the meaningful “freedom” of the bill of rights.

That is what I had wanted to write about today, so I felt an obligation to mention it. All I can think about though is what happened just before 2:30 am this morning.

Before starting this act of re-membering, I do want to question exactly what we value in capitalist freedom. Fresh from reading Orlando Patterson, I am forced to ask about the costs of “sovereignal” capitalist freedom – the desire to pursue your own freedom even beyond the point where you severely hinder the freedoms of others.

Early this morning, my family found itself the victim of a uniquely capitalist crime, and perhaps Vegas is home to all the sorrows of capitalism. The Marxian adage we might all want to think about is how capitalism makes people rich in needs. In Vegas, the need for more money is evident amidst all the flashing dollar amounts on every casino floor, even in the airport slot machines.

It is perhaps not surprising then that sleeping in a Vegas hotel, I woke up to find my aunt screaming at an intruder, an intruder who entered while we slept and had just enough time to steal all my aunt’s cash before bolting out of the room. Luckily nothing worse happened to any of us, even though my aunt chased the woman and her male partner down the hallway.

I feel, however, that this incident was not the only aspect of capitalist sorrows to haunt my family in the early morning hours. The hotel in its greed to protect itself either from culpability (and thus a possible lawsuit) or from some sort of financial scam was patronizing in handling my distraught aunt, my mother, and myself. At first, security tried to tell us not to call the police, that the police would not care about a crime of this minor magnitude. When my mother expressed her legal certainty that this was not the case, the police were called, and a wonderful policeman did a much better job of talking the morning’s events through with my distraught aunt. The hotel, who had no security cameras on the floors or in the stairwells offered us no support other than to give us a new room.

There is no solution, no simple justice equation, no answer to mistakes that were made, whether they be not bolting a door, not having security cameras, or being desperate enough for money to break into someone else's room and take it. I write this not to provide answers or even to expect their appearance; I write in the hope to share my own query about costs the deepest longing for capitalistically construed sovereignal freedom with others and to seek opinions in response.

don't forget to blame your enemies...

2005-09-01T16:28:00.000-07:00

AP photo from here.

To give money to the Red Cross, click here:

When disaster strikes human beings always seem to need meaning. I have no wisdom to offer today, no way of finding meaning. I have only outrage that people would claim any of those suffering right now have earned it. Today I read a blogger on the right who accuses New Orleans of earning this tragedy because of their “liberal” ways. Then I read a comment from someone on the left saying that the South earned this because they voted for Bush.

Tragedy is tragic because it’s not fair. It does not happen to people who earned it. So many of those suffering in Louisiana and Mississippi right now are people who were too poor to leave.

I spent two weeks in New Orleans when my aunt used to live there, in 2001. I loved the city. Of the cities I have been to in the U.S.A., New Orleans had the warmest, friendliest population overall. A great variety of people lived there from all religious/ethnic/political stripes. Did people on the religious right deserve mother nature’s wrath because of other people? Does the socialist who only uses public transit deserve to die in a flood because some people voted for Bush?

In truth, Bush did slash funding to SELA (for more information click here) in order to divert money to the war in Iraq, and yes, this probably made things worse for New Orleans (not to mention a lot of the rest of the South than it needed to be). Yet I do not believe that it is the responsibility of people in New Orleans or Gulfport to pay for all of our collective sins (yes I mean all of us who get in our car in the morning and contribute to global warming or all of us who consistently vote for politicians that do not care about state-funded emergency programs). Even Abraham argued to God that a city should be spared if there are “twenty righteous” to be found there (Genesis 18:16ff).

While my own beliefs do hold us as a nation accountable for our contribution to global warming, which has had global weather effects this year on a terrifying scale, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is tragedy because there is no reason to who suffers and who is spared, no logical system of picking out who is righteous and can be saved and who is not and so must be punished.

If you have read this far, may I again urge you to help people with whatever money you may have. Click here for FEMA’s list of donation sites.

Et tu Los Angeles Times?

2005-07-14T22:48:00.000-07:00

Much to my horror and sadness, this past weekend the Los Angeles Times made good on its threat to dismantle the opinion section and reinvent the wheel, as it were, with the cutesy “Current” section. Now, I really was hoping that I would like this change, that I could see some cool twenty-first century vision in this new endeavor. My favorite part of the entire new section was, however, Jamie Court’s critique of the section as a blogotorial. I guess I should give props to Bob Sipchen for at least running that piece.

I know that the Los Angeles Times has had to face decreased circulation (note some of the interesting connections made about the mid-90s problems in the hyper-linked piece) and the advertising boycotts of the automotive industry. The Los Angeles Times’ response is, apparently, to change itself to fit some profile seemingly more desirable to the public and General Motors. People who pride themselves on their “free” media should question not only the damage done by our government to the first amendment but the damage done by a kind of unethically protected capitalism (Adam Smith, by the way, thought morality was kind of essential for capitalism – if you don’t believe me, feel free to pick up his writings or a book by Larry Rasmussen). I know that I’m an idealist, but some part of me likes to think that we all still should do things for truth and justice first and capitalist greed somewhere considerably further down the line.

My disappointment in the Los Angeles Times is not just that it would so willingly compromise its content for money the week that the White House press corps actually exercised its spine. It is also that the Los Angeles Times dumbed the opinion section down – they did not just change the content, or institute a more conservative bias, they literally dumbed it down. That’s right, because you, me, and GM and more likely to give our money to a dumber Los Angeles Times. Not only did the new Current section include some less than cogent arguments like “Box office Blues Stem from Blue-State Bigotry,” it included pieces that truly do qualify as “blogotorials.” What place does Joel Stein’s little rant about Hogwarts’ fans being stupid (to which I just have to say, “I’m rubber and you’re glue”) have in a reputable national paper? Should not the Los Angeles Times actually challenge us to think about government, politics, global affaris, etc.? A blog is the perfect place for a terse emotional rant on some obscure point of ire; that’s why I am writing this here and now. I, however, would not advise the Los Angeles Times to publish this my blogpost, no matter how deftly I use the English language.

While I do believe there could be some good in making the opinion section more interactive, I just wish the Los Angeles Times had not sacrificed some great content that really made me confront some crucial issues in the world. I am sad to say good-bye to one of my favorite Sunday morning activities: actually sitting with well-researched, written, and argued opinion pieces that could grant me interesting and different perspectives on the world around me, pieces that could challenge my beliefs and make me think about the truly newsworthy events of the week. I guess I am just going to have to rely on actual blogs for that now.

Patriotic Paradox #12,374

2005-07-01T13:46:00.000-07:00

While the House of Representatives has sought to make the burning of the flag of the U.S.A. unconstitutional, Jessica Simpson can wear a cut-up version of the flag as a string bikini. It is considered not just patriotic, but a great reason to "be American."

Backlash Redux

2005-01-20T23:29:00.000-08:00

Last Friday Maureen Dowd wrote an editorial for the New York Times describing the tendency of men to prefer subservient women who are caretakers to accomplished, successful women. She discussed the popularity of these portrayals in recent Hollywood cinema, with Spanglish as her test case.

As the daughter of a successful and loving single mother as well as a woman of partially Latin American descent, my objections to Spanglish are legion.

First, as Dowd argues, the Mexican mother-as-maid (Paz Vega) is pitted against the cold-career-woman-white mother (Tea Leoni) for the love of their mutual daughters (Shelbie Bruce and Sarah Steele) and the love of Leoni’s husband (Adam Sandler). In this equation, Leoni appears to be the woman who got it all wrong; her perfectionism and career focus has made her an insensitive mother and an unloving, self-absorbed wife. Meanwhile, Vega becomes the very ideal of the loving, caring mother with whom Sandler falls in love. Women are taught a very cool lesson here, either be a subservient, sensitive, passionate caretaker, or be a cold, self-absorbed, career woman who could lose her husband to her maid.

This tale is made all the worse because of the particular stereotypes now attached to Latina women-as-maids: fiery passion (she yells at Sandler in Spanish at one point) paired with subservience to their men and profound maternal instinct (largely because of the stereotype that Latino males are absentee fathers, also played upon in this movie as I will discuss momentarily).

The involvement of Vega’s daughter (Shelbie Bruce) in the tale only adds to my disgust. The entire movie is narrated through the prism of the daughter’s application essay to Princeton. When Vega moves in with the family for the summer, Bruce is quite charmed by Leoni, who manages to get Bruce a scholarship to the prestigious private high school Leoni’s own children attend. Leoni and Bruce, both strong and intelligent women, seem to find quite the affinity with each other. Meanwhile, Vega rails against it and eventually quits her job in part because she wants to insure that Bruce ends up like her and not like Leoni. Bruce then narrates in her essay that an acceptance to Princeton would not define her because her identity is rooted in her mother. While I agree that an acceptance to Princeton should not define anyone’s life, rooting her identity as being Vega especially in contrast to Leoni is to accept the myth of Western society perpetuated in this film: men can have it all, women can’t. And listen well, Latinas, remaining true to your culture means not being learned or successful; it means remembering your place in structures of white patriarchal dominance. As Musa Dube said of Pocahontas, Vega and Bruce’s characters are clearly the products of the colonizer’s pen.

The glaring abuse of the colonizer’s pen deepens when employing the stereotype of the macho Latino father who abandoned Vega and Bruce. His absence only serves to demonstrate Sandler’s unstoppable goodness as the successful, loving, white male father who did not desert his cruel wife even after she cheated on him.

I would not be as angered by this narrative if its portrayals were not such an accepted part of the reality I live. Many men I encounter assume this tale reveals a deep truth; an intelligent learned woman cannot be spiritual, passionate, or maternal. I have to disagree with this since my mother, who was a better mother than many stay-at-home moms I’ve heard of, is successful, learned, spiritual, passionate, and an excellent mother. Latino men are often erased from narratives as Latino/as are being broadly integrated (not just in CA, NY, or TX) into the front lines of the culture wars; with the re-election of Bush partially thanks to 44% of Latino/as, they are only bound to become more prominent.

What is most perennially upsetting to me is the way that women have always historically been pitted against each other, a strategy that could not work if women did not fall for it. I know a woman who chose not to pursue graduate work because she feared it would prevent her from having a husband and children. I fear that the anti-feminists have already won when we ourselves buy into these things.

Remembering class

2005-01-15T18:53:00.001-08:00

Not having lived through all that much of the Cold War, I am not certain exactly what the lasting cultural impacts are upon U.S.A. culture. I hope that the popularity of Thomas Frank’s book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, is helping to undo a certain popular aversion to Marxist critiques of U.S.A. culture.

Having grown up in Kansas, I have some difficulty finding Frank’s analysis so incredibly new. I am not certain why everyone is now making such a big deal about it. The only thing truly shocking to me about Frank’s work is that he tries to pass Kansas and Kansans off as a type through which we can understand the rest of the U.S.A. In all fairness, Kansans have been even more religiously zealous, from the first abolitionist settlers to Fred Phelps, than the rest of this already religious nation.

What I think is truly great about Frank’s analysis is that he does raise up a question that can apply to all of the U.S.A. How do the Republicans get lower middle class and working class people to vote for them? In order to engage this question, Frank had to assert a fact commonly ignored in U.S.A. culture, and he points this out himself. Despite all of our beliefs to the contrary and all our patriotic fondness for the capitalist system, class really does matter. By class, neither I nor Frank mean whether you use the salad fork to eat your entrée, or whether you prefer NASCAR to sailboat racing, we mean class in a redefined Marxist consumer analysis, one that has moved from the industrial age to the digital one – how much you make, what you can own, and what you can buy.

In a time when blue collar and now white collar jobs have disappeared or been outsourced overseas (California lost 25,000 jobs in December alone), the sense of the class divide between an elite and those who appear to be on the underside of the capitalist system, has become ever more crucial. Congratulations to Frank for recognizing this and putting words to it. Such a divide, one would think, would offer all those opponents of the WTO and IMF ample opportunity to go into these areas and rally people to the banner of changing the global-capitalist system.

Yet, the point that Frank makes in his book is not only that this did not happen but also that the conservatives have shaped the culture wars in such a way that this could not happen. For these people in Kansas, class is identified not by what you make but by what you buy with what you make and where you spend your Sundays. Frank recognizes the way this class-divide has been cast as an issue of “culture,” as one that will identify the wealthy well-educated Bush as “one of their own” but forget that someone like Bill Clinton really once was.

What Frank does not really do in this book, and what I wish I had some better suggestions for, is offer a solution. He suggests that the Democrats should talk to their base more, as if the working classes are still the Democrats’ base.

I think the problem is a wider cultural one requiring a much broader program than that. Not being a politician or a labor organizer, I am not certain how best to go making all the necessary changes. Obviously, the Democrats if they do not want to die out and merge with moderate Republicans, do need to redefine who they are and maybe try to become a party of the working and middle class again in a way that working and middle class people can actually recognize. Grassroots organizers really do need to renegotiate their spiel so that they can appear to belong to that Kansas culture just as much as Bush seems to. And these organizers need to be out in droves, which requires money, which requires the support of large businesses and wealthy patrons. For this, I do believe we need a return to Marx and the flaws of the Marxist system in order to understand how settling some of the problems of the class question are in everybody’s best interest.

Yet another problem is that of a broader cultural phenomenon. As Jared Diamond argues in _Collapse_, we need to reinvent how we see ourselves if we hope to survive. People living in the U.S.A. need to become willing to learn and then actually learn how to think long-term and think of ourselves as part of a global community. We need to learn to get along with neighbors and allies and people who think differently than we do. We need to let go of beliefs about “American exceptionalism.” How you manage to sell an identity change to the people who most tenaciously cling to Cold War and pre-Cold War views of U.S.A. identity and place in the world, I am not sure.

continued constructive notes

2004-11-18T16:07:00.000-08:00

Once work in the office slows up a bit (around Thanksgiving), I will post a more investigative and introspective response to this; nonetheless, the BBC's report is worrisome...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4021447.stm

Under Construction

2004-11-14T20:32:00.000-08:00

I wanted to apologize for not putting up a post yet...
But, note that the dollar has weakened yet again (tied predominantly to the U.S.'s large debt)...