Artists vs. Techies III: Where do scientists fit in?

First, I don't know that it is correct to characterize computer usage/programming as science. In my opinion, it has more in common with fine arts (you're using a tool to create something). Learning C+ and trying to understand quantum mechanics or modern physics aren't all that similar. I'm also not sure if your remarks were confined deliberately to engineering (as opposed to chemistry or physics or biology, which are very different) or it was shorthand for "science." Because again, I think the mindset is going to be different. "I need to make something useful by a deadline" is a very different starting point from "why is DNA based on furanose sugars instead of pyranose" -- the former probably has a flowchart describing how to proceed (I would imagine that building a workable bridge isn't terribly mysterious, for example); the latter is a different sort of question. What is the real question, the testable question? Or at least, what do we think is the testable question? Is "furanose based nucleic acid chains have a particular melting temperature " a satisfactory answer? Is the geometry of the chains important? Maybe the reason is chance and a six-membered ring would work as well. Regardless, you're not done until you've made some of the pyranose material, probably via chemistry you had to invent, and run an experiment or two, which you also had to invent. This is a better representation, I think, of science.

Also, scientists love good writers. Science is a story. A good lecture/paper should have a plot. I have to care about why you did what you did, after all. And I won't care if I'm asleep or bored. "1000 reactions I ran" is a boring talk, even if they all worked, hell especially if they all worked. A good talk will have a certain amount of drama -- this step in the synthesis was really tricky/gave us an unexpected byproduct/led us away from our initial goal. It has to have a conclusion. It has to provide a why not just a how.

As for arrogance, I think one difference might be that the sciences have right answers, or at least wrong ones. "Why did Rembrandt do so many self portraits" can't really be answered definitively. He was a narcissist might be a perfectly adequate answer, who knows. "No definite answer" might translate to "well then, I'm right" in certain minds, especially aggressive ones. Or the lack of a clear answer one way or the other might just be irritating, which manifests as frustration disguised as anger. Just a guess.

-- Brian

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Thanks for the response, Brian. Your thoughts are very interesting and challenging.

First, yes, I was referring specifically to engineers (and threw in business majors later when I realized that I saw some of the same mindset in them), and no, I didn't mean that as "shorthand" for science (I try to be more precise about language than that, although God knows I don't always succeed.) I think -- and this came out more in the letters I got, I'm not sure if you read them -- that scientists and humanists actually have a great deal in common. It's not a common interest that either one often recognizes, and it defies stereotypes. We're still stuck in that "brainy" scientist vs. "emotional" artist notion. (Artists and humanists often get lumped together, and though there are people -- like me -- who straddle the two, they can be quite different, as different as biologists and engineers. I know there's an enormous difference in my mental processes between when I am thinking like a humanist/academic and when I'm thinking like an artist.) But the fact is, education in both lab science and humanities involves learning to think at least as much as it does acquiring a given set of facts.

One of the letter writers, who taught history, mentioned that some of his best students were biology majors. I didn't get many science majors when I was teaching. The few I had were pre-med, but pre-med majors tended to be among my better students, although they were often frustrated by the fact that they didn't get easy A's -- they assumed humanities classes were easier than science classes and therefore an A ought to be automatic. (My response was, "You're acing Chem 1A and struggling for a B in Humanities 1A. Do you think you might want to revise that thesis about 'easy' humanities classes?") Nevertheless, many of them had an appreciation of alternate ways of approaching things that I suspect their science studies had nurtured. Or perhaps it was an innate interest in different ways of approaching problems that led them to study science. I find, even today, as I write on this site, that some of my most interesting and thoughtful letters come from scientists. They appreciate the way I think. I appreciate the way they think. (Although I'm not sure they understand how hard I have to work to understand some of the things they tell me. But I do make the effort, because it always turns out to be worthwhile once the mental effort is done.)

It's interesting to me, though, that so many people seem to have misread what I said in that way. I think the science vs. the arts clash is so firm in people's heads that they see that, even when it's not there. It's an old problem: People quickly plug into the story they think they know and have a hard time even perceiving that the story has changed.

My problem was with the emphasis on technical education, which I think does not ask students to look at things from many points of view, or re-think assumptions. It's a time-consuming and difficult education, without being a challenging one.

As for the idea that humanities doesn't have "wrong" answers -- I think that's a little bit of a cliche. It's true up to a point, but humanities aren't as relativistic as most non-humanists think. "Why did Rembrandt paint so many self-portraits?" isn't the kind of question I'd expect an art historian to ask. I have only a minor in art history, so don't expect a sophisticated analysis, but I can give you some indication of the kinds of things art historians would consider.

My interest is more in Italian art, so I'll switch from Rembrandt to questions that fascinated me when I was studying medieval Italian art: Giotto began painting in the early 14th century using techniques that we associate with the Renaissance -- perspective, convincing use of space, three-dimensionality, greater attention to natural detail, close observation of facial expression, individualized faces, etc. And yet no one continued with Giotto's work. The art of the 14th century, after Giotto, appears to be simply a reworking of medieval themes, styles and iconography? Why? Why did the Renaissance "begin" with Giotto and then stop -- with no artist picking up on his innovations for another hundred years?

How do you answer a question like that? I think people without strong backgrounds in humanities think that art historians sit around throwing out any answer that comes to mind -- maybe fourteenth century artists just weren't very talented -- and since this is "squishy" liberal arts, anything goes and all answers are equal. But that's silly. First you have to look at the works created in the fourteenth century and decide if it is true that artistic development went on hold after Giotto. It's a testable thesis. And when you look closely -- and looking closely at a painting is something you have to be taught how to do -- you see that, despite first appearances, it did not. No one truly captured the spirit Giotto began, but artists used some of his innovations here and there. It's provable. You can point to the influence. So now you've got new questions. Why did artist's pick up some innovations and not others? And why, when artists clearly caught on to some of the new techniques, were they not able to build on that understanding? Why did they use them for different, more conservative purposes?

Once again, you're forced back on the work, and there are answers that are definitely "wrong." Answers that just won't hold.

I could go on and on about this, and the questions get more and more complicated. They involve history (social changes wrought by the Black Plague may have played a role, for instance) as much as unfathomables. Does "progress" in the arts come in spurts, with geniuses emerging that no one can understand for generations? That's a possibility, and a "testable" one (you'd have to look at a broad span of when and under what circumstances enormous changes have taken place in art) but there are better, simpler explanations. Just like in science -- there are explanations that cover what's known better than other explanations. And, just as in science, answered questions don't settle things forever. They just lead to newer questions.

I won't dwell on this any more -- even though I'd love to -- because I doubt many people find Trecento painting or the Bubonic Plague as fascinating as I do. But I hope you see how similar, in many ways, science and humanites are.

I realize that in technical fields you have to "test" whether something works, but, as you suggest, "how do I get this to work" is a fairly limited question compared to the kinds of questions scientists and humanists ask. I love your idea that "science is a story" and believe it absolutely because the description you give of putting together a good science lecture/paper sounds very much like the way I think when I'm putting together a story.

And that, really, was what I was trying to get at. The old science vs. the arts division isn't terribly useful. What we do is different, but not as different as the stereotype would have it. But people with straight technical and practical educations -- and nothing more -- are the new piece of the puzzle. And I think what they study asks very little of them as complete human beings, or as thinkers. That worries me. Especially because I see them more and more defining the way we as a society view things.

The current administration is composed mostly of MBAs, not engineers. And yet I notice enormous similarities between the way they speak and perceive things and the way my old engineering students thought and perceived. I just have a hunch that there is some connection between that simplistic mode of thought and the "practical" education they received.

-- Jeanne

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Eh, the Rembrandt question is one I remember being frustrating in an art history class I took. Frustrating because I was coming at it from a studio art perspective -- most of my free electives were drawing or painting classes. "Why do a self-portrait" is a very different question to the painter/drawer than to the non "artist." Or at least, it seemed that way to me. Why would I do a self portrait? I want to play with technique with no worries/expectations about how it should turn out. I got funny looks when I argued that particular point with the non-painter/non-drawer art historian in one class. And "the no wrong answers" is probably confined to studio arts, where you don't want to squash the next Shiele or Pollack or Picasso. "Did you mean/want to do that" is often the way the question is phrased. Also, you look at art in a different way in a drawing class than in an appreciation class, I think.

-- Brian

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I'm really surprised by the Rembrandt question. I can't remember ever hearing such a silly and unanswerable question posed in a humanities class of any kind. You characterize the class you took as an "appreciation" class, and I wonder if that had anything to do with it. Every university has its set of classes that exist for the sole purpose of getting people through their general education requirements as painlessly and mindlessly as possible. Usually they're not very good, and they sometimes confirm the silliest cliches about the field.

One of the classes I took to get through my science requirement in college, for instance, was an Introduction to Astronomy that simply asked me to memorize an enormous number of facts, all of which I forgot as soon as the class was over. If I hadn't known better already, the class wouldn't have served much purpose except to confirm a popular notion of science: that it's simply a huge body of facts, and that great scientists are "smart" because they know more of those facts than the rest of us dummies. Here was one of the few science classes many liberal arts majors would take, and it "taught" a hackneyed and utterly false notion of science. I suspect your "art appreciation" class might have served the same purpose.

But you raise another issue as well, and that is the difference between people who "do" art and people who study it. And you're right, people who write about the arts can be mind-bogglingly off-base about how they're produced, and about the kinds of questions artists ask themselves. But I think that's beyond the scope of what I've been talking about.

If there's a "no wrong answers" approach in studio classes, however, I doubt it has anything to do with not wanting to squash budding artists. Condescension probably has more to do with it -- a belief that "these fools will never be real artists, so just let them be." I took a couple of drawing classes too, and was encouraged by my teachers, and, believe me, no one could mistake me for the next Picasso. But once you get into "real" art practice classes, it's a different matter. I don't know anything about studio art classes beyond the basic level, but writer's workshops -- which you have to be selected for, based on a portfolio of your work, and everyone assumes that you are seriously trying to become a writer -- are famously brutal. You go back week after week to have your heart torn out and roasted, and your work savaged. I can not imagine a writer's workshop -- and I'm not talking about lower division or community "creative writing" classes -- in which anyone gave a damn about the writers' feelings, or believed that there were "no wrong answers."

-- Jeanne

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"The repression of women [is] everywhere and always wrong." -- George Bush

There was a strange little article in Tuesday's Washington Post. Fourteen Afghan women met with George Bush, Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell in the kind of gathering usually reserved for "the most powerful foreign visitors."

Okay, I'm impressed. I was under the impression that women had been virtually shut out of the Afghan government. That there were fourteen Afghan women who had achieved positions high enough to be considered "powerful foreign visitors" was news to me. Good news.

But ordinarily, powerful foreign visitors have names. These women apparently left theirs at home. At least the Post did not consider them worth mentioning. And my instinct tells me the president did not christen them with any cute little nicknames either, because this is probably the last time he will see them. They weren't ministers of this or that, but students "selected to receive computer training."

Granted, computer training for Afghan women is a wonderful thing. And I think in the long run we get back far more than we give when we bring foreign students to the United States.

But most foreign students don't get the same champagne and snacks as Pootie-poot. And these women obviously weren't in Washington to discuss their ideas for strengthening women's rights in Afghanistan. They were there to have their pictures taken. They were there so George Bush could say something like "women must play prominent roles."

Women, you know, they just love it when you tell them sweet lies.

I'd be a little more impressed if one of the women at that meeting had been Sima Samar, the minister of women's affairs under the interim government who was forced from her position last June because of death threats. Samar would make it harder for Bush to pat himself on the back, but she would have plenty to tell him about what still needs to be done.

If he was interested.

I'm not the first (and I'm sure I won't be the last) to note the hypocrisy in the world's most powerful Deke trying to pass himself off as a feminist. In fact, Katherine Viner had a good piece in last Saturday's Guardian called Feminism As Imperialism, not only noting Bush's hypocrisy, but tracing its historical roots back to Lord Cromer, the British consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, who loudly condemned the way Islam treated women, and yet was a founding member of the Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage.

For Cromer, as for Bush, women's rights were only an issue when they provided an excuse for attacking "less civilized" people. That doesn't mean the abuses of women are not real, but it does mean that their "champions" are phonies, and it means the issue will be dropped as soon as it's no longer needed. Cromer raised school fees in Egypt (keeping girls out) and discouraged the training of female doctors. Bush has turned his back while warlords with a history of using rape as a weapon of war run Afghanistan, and he didn't say a word on behalf of Sima Samar.

Viner makes a good case that there's more than hypocrisy at issue. By stealing feminist language and yoking it to oppression, in the long run men like Cromer and Bush make women's lives harder, because they discredit feminism, and leave women struggling for their rights without a language in which to describe their struggle. When feminism is used as an excuse to bomb a country, it's hard to be a feminist.

Roger Ebert finds an encouraging sign of a growing attention to women's rights in a recent Iranian film. And the movie screen is not the only place the struggle is going on.

The detective who investigated the beating and rape of the Central Park jogger has a new theory about the case. First, the five teenagers who were convicted of the crime bludgeoned the woman and left her for dead. Matias Reyes, who has admitted committing the crime (and DNA evidence backs him up), and insisted he acted alone, came along later, found an unconscious woman and decided to rape her and beat her more. Since Reyes wasn't described by anyone in the group, doesn't know anyone in the group, and wasn't with them at the time, that's the only theory Detective Burt Arroyo can come up with that makes sense.

I know truth can be stranger than fiction, and I don't know what cops and lawyers will make of that story, but I wouldn't want to bet my reputation as a writer on trying to sell it to a publisher.

Honey, there are holes in that plot Stephen King couldn't patch.

Via Sisyphus Shrugged

UPDATE: Ignore my gut instincts about the strangeness of the new theory, and go straight to Talk Left for a thorough analysis of the problems in the story.

If you've followed the story of Amina Lawal, the Nigerian woman condemned to death for adultery, there's an interesting article from a South African newspaper exploring the politics of Islamic law as it relates to her case.

Techies vs. Artists (continued)
I got so much interesting mail on my post yesterday on humanities as a mode of thought (and the limitations of business and tech educations), that I'd like to share some. The writers bring up lots of thought-provoking issues.

(I'm going to split the letters up into separate posts, because otherwise I suspect Blogger will simply devour the words -- so just keep reading through all the posts for today.)

I just read your bit on the arts vs. the sciences, and I think there's an even more nuanced and tricky layer to the discussion as well.

First, I was an historian (less romantic or Romantic than being able to say "I had a farm in Africa," but there you go). In my experience as a grad student (5 years) and as a TA (3 years), I encountered very few engineers at all. They hated history more than anything, because it required a rigorous analysis and a LOT of reading (much of Kevin's point about schedules and demands is well taken) that was founded ultimately on processing a wide variety of opinions and positions very different from their own experience. The unwillingness to step beyond the preconceptions and rigid formalities of the technical fields presented in their major core colored every aspect of their intellectual lives.

Equally annoying were the majors in Film Studies, Sociology and Communication Studies, who thought reading 10 pages on one subject for more than one perspective was onerous. My best students were English and Poli Sci majors, followed by Psych and Bio majors.

Scientists in general are too large a group to easily taxonomize, but I do find that they share a very defensive attitude about writing. Many of them resent that good writers often achieve a certain measure of success not based on what they see as 'real skills.' Thus, a clear communicator might get a decent job in academia or the private sector that an engineer feels is unwarranted, because writing just a waste.

Of course, the WORST offenders are the Bus/Econ guys in accounting or marketing concentrations. They fear engineers and scientists, and hate arts and letters people. This generalization may be overbroad, but the boys in the back from Fin 102 tend to be racists, loudmouths, and wastrels. They are particularly hostile to good writers who beat them out for positions in marketing and sales. Most really good companies often have more Liberal Arts people around than one might think, and the internal culture can get very nasty. I know of more than one English major hired by a merchant bank for writing skills and smarts forced out by a vicious hazing.

In truth, the well of hate that the right-wing techies on the web seem to tap into on a near continuous basis is really appalling. Kevin is truly one of the good ones.

-- Atticus Finch

QUICKIE REACTION: You're right, the issue is a lot more complex than I made it out to be in a single post. And I don't mean to jump on techies and business majors. I don't want to play Armey's game of figuring out which is the dumbest or laziest group of people. My concern is more with the fact that we seem increasingly to respect people with technical degrees more than anyone else, and believe that they will solve all our problems. That concerns me because I see so many limitations in the way most techies view the world, limitations that have their roots in extremely narrow and, in many ways, unchallenging educations.

You brought up a problem with engineering majors that I didn't mention, but experienced as well -- the unwillingness to deal with points of view other than their own. They seemed to have a sense that anyone who saw things differently was just being obstinate (another belief I see prominently displayed in the White House.) I see an enormous danger in "educating" a generation without forcing them to deal with the fact that not everyone perceives the world the same way they do.

Your ranking Biology majors high on the list of good history students interested me because I had the same impression of pre-med students. Arrogant sometimes, sure that they were so smart that they deserved A's on everything they breathed upon, and often so overworked that they had a hard time getting the reading done -- and yet most pre-med majors recognized and respected the amount and the kind of thought required of them and made at least some attempt to live up to it. I think scientists and humanists have more in common with each other than either does with people in tech fields or business.

And you're right about Kevin. Thoughtful and well-read techies are rare and wonderful. And when they can write clearly as well, they're a godsend. I wish there were more like him.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I am a liberal arts major who drifted into computer work because it pleased me esthetically. I've been doing it for over a quarter century now, but your observations about the arrogance of "pure" engineering types is right on, as is your observation about the apparent thought processes of our President. There are so many people (mostly men) with absolutely beautiful minds who cannot form two coherent sentences in a row and seem not to consider that a problem. I am at heart a writer, seduced by the lofty salary available to me by going over to the Dark Side, and sometimes it gets so lonely over here waiting for someone to produce or even recognize something beautifully said. Your essay cheers my heart immeasurably. I'm going to pin it up on my cubicle wall as spiritual sustenance for the next time I have to review another technical document from an author whose approach is "Writing documents is a waste of time. Why can't you just let me code? And besides, you know what I mean."

-- Roberta Taussig

QUICKIE REACTION: I know quite a few English teachers who are aesthetically pleased by computers, but have taken the opposite approach. They've chosen to teach, despite the low pay, for various reasons, but primarily because they need the daily fix of responding to writing (whether Chaucer or remedial English compositions), and yet they spend enormous amounts of time learning about computers. Everyone calls them "the techies," but of course they have more in common with people like you and Kevin than with "pure" techies (how about "techie fundamentalists" -- the people who accept code literally and unquestioningly?)

Y'know, I understand what you're saying and know exactly the kind of people you're talking about, but I think you've still got things backward.

Are there tech people who lack essential knowledge of the humanities, and don't give a damn? Absolutely. Is this a bad thing? Yep. But the problem of humanities-illiterate techies is nothing compared to the problem of tech-illiterate art-folk.

Any person with a college degree is going to have at least some exposure to the humanities; there's simply no way around it. They'll have read some Shakespeare, they'll have taken some history. But it's easy -- and common -- for humanities people to graduate college with no more science than maybe a quick, tossed-off Rocks For Jocks. Humanities people can graduate from college without even knowing how to do a simple integral.

What really convinces me that the isolation comes from the humanities side rather than the tech side is that everyone I know who straddles the line considers themselves a techie. Back in college, I double-majored in CS and early modern history; I took classes in aesthetics, physics, Greek drama, linear algebra, ethics, algorithm analysis, and the intellectual history of the 12th century. But for all that my interests fall equally on either side of the tech/art divide, I consider myself foremost a tech person -- because it's not uncommon for self-identified tech people to have deep interest in the humanities, but it's absolutely unheard-of for self-identified humanities people to have deep interest in tech fields.

Try as I might to be fair, I can't think of a single counter-example to that. There are definitely humanities people who have a shallow interest in science, who'll read Gould or Hawking's popularizations; but I can't think of a single one in my acquaintance who's ever delved into real science.

So, yeah, it's problematic that there aren't more people who know both tech and the humanities on a substantial level, but it's not primarily tech people who are stubbornly refusing to cross the divide.

-- Mike Kozlowski

QUICKIE REACTION: I'm guessing Roberta would disagree with you about how everyone who combines a humanities background with tech knowledge considers herself a "techie," and so would the computer-crazy English teachers I know. Their tech skills are just a tool in the creativity kit -- art and language are what matters to them. If most people who combine both skills consider themselves more techies than humanists, I suspect it's because of exactly what I was talking about -- that's where the money and the prestige lies.

I'm also a little amused by your idea that humanities people who read Gould (I don't believe anybody really reads Hawking; you put Hawking on your coffee table so people will think you're smart) are exhibiting a "shallow interest in science," and yet techies who have taken a class in Shakespeare (and I think that's rarer than you think -- kiddie lit and film studies are more common choices) are well-rounded. I'd suggest that humanists who read writers like Stephen Jay Gould, and keep up even with the fairly shallow coverage of developments and issues in science that you find in first-rate newspapers and general interest magazines have a far better understanding of science -- far from perfect, but better -- than techies who have some vague memory of who Hamlet and Lear are.

But once we get past "who's the worst," we basically agree -- most people don't understand much about the world beyond their specialization.

Well, this is a big subject. I just read your posting and think its quite good and very important in many ways. I was just thinking how this re-building in Afghanistan might go if the education were more about the humanities and art and less about how to build an infrastructure. If you teach a nearly illiterate society to build houses and sewage plants, you will not change the society very much, but if you toss in a copy of Voltaire and Shakespeare and a bit of Dostoyevsky and Melville you will, in a generation, actually change the way people live. Why this isn't obvious is a bit beyond me. Americans have always been Puritans.....and suspicious of anything that couldn't be measured or weighed.....anything deemed impractical. This was simply the legacy of our founders....practical meant what could serve an observable purpose....and it followed an Enlightenment notion about progress (which also is what haunts Marxism).

So now we have a government run by a figure head President with little education and who is close to functionally illiterate and is vaguely proud of it. I was reading some old Paul Goodman essays just recently, and was astonished to hear him bemoan the coming tide of ignorance.....that education was coming to mean the ability to follow orders and be employable. I wrote an essay for the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival about some of this in regards to that "alternative" festival, and how when one has nothing to "sell" one is looked upon as useless and marginal. This seems to reinforce the reasons for the paucity of good and serious works of fiction and theatre and even painting -- the culture industry (which I worked in for far too long) wants only distraction, things that are familiar and which support a fantasy about "real life". Today's right wing tends to be made up of engineers and wonks and technicians of one sort or another who revel in a faux-populism that accepts mass culture as good because it is mass -- all with an odd trope of irony tossed in (the trivia games about Gilligan's Island etc) -- and part of this stems from (or is caused by) the post modern mind set of absolute relativism. I argued with a colleague several years ago who maintained a Harlequin Romance was just as valuable as King Lear, it was only a matter of what "games" and "rules" one had learned. Now, to so torture logic and reason as to arrive at something this idiotic speaks volumes about the bankruptcy of academia, but it also points to some greater failures of the left these days. From cultural relativism comes moral relativism -- and apologetics.

Anyway, I could go on and on -- but I do think the new Imperium is in part so scary exactly because of this anti-humanist bent and the loss of historical perspective that goes with it. Russell Jacoby's End of Utopia touches on some of this....as do many others -- and certainly the mass media and marketers out there don't want to suggest to anyone that reading some Milton might deepen their lives and make them better people -- reading Milton doesn't make you want to run to the mall and shop.

-- John Steppling

QUICKIE REACTION: There's so much here, your comments deserve a lot more than an off the cuff reaction, and I will probably come back to some of your ideas later (interesting ideas often linger in my brain for a long time before germinating), but I'm immediately drawn to your insight about the rebuilding of Afghanistan (to the extent that it's going on at all) being purely a matter of infrastructure. Please excuse the disorganized nature of these fetal thoughts, but two things came to mind when I read your comments. One was an essay I read about a year ago, and unfortunately I can't remember who wrote it, so I can't dig it up. It was written by a film critic who had been involved in some kind of cross-cultural program in which he showed American films to filmakers in Eastern Europe, I believe in the '70s. He also watched and critiqued their films, which were mostly turgid Communist propaganda. The filmakers weren't stupid and they weren't party hacks, they just had not been exposed to much of what film could do beyond propaganda. The critic discussed the excitement of these filmakers when they encountered American films that were critical of the American system in some way. I remember that he mentioned two films in particular -- "All The President's Men" and "Twelve Angry Men." The Watergate film was a revelation -- writers with nothing but the truth on their side can overthrow a president? That's an oversimplificaton, of course, but it was an empowering thing for artists in Communist countries to realize, and it also, ironically, taught them something very good about the United States. Similarly, "12 Angry Men" deals with racism and injustice -- not what you would ordinarily think to use as pro-American propaganda. And yet at its heart the message of the film is that each individual's conscience matters in a democracy -- again, an empowering message to artists and one that offers a positive message about the U.S. (although few right-wingers would perceive it that way). The Bush administration seems to understand that "hearts and minds" count, but their reaction is to send in the advertising people to sell a product. I think we would be better served by a generation of leaders who had a deeper understanding of American culture (and Western culture as a whole), who could explain it better than we ever could to their own people.

The other thing that came to mind is that if an education focused too tightly on technical fields encourages an unquestioning mindset, an unwillingness to engage with different ideas -- as I think is the case -- then pushing technical training, rather than a broader humanistic and scientific education, in a part of the world where black and white, moralistic, fundamentalist thinking is rampant, and dangerous, does not seem like a very good idea.

Once again, fetal thoughts -- not well-reasoned or consideredÉ

You are correct about the differences. To be fair to the engineers, they cannot see shades of grey and they cannot be educated to do so. Humanists see the grey shades and can have a scientific outlook too.

In my opinion, the world's population is roughly 50-50 black & white types (including engineers) to humanistic types. Obviously, if there were more humanists the world would be a finer place. If there were more of the black & whites, we'd be wearing burqas while driving our perfectly engineered tanks on our last day of life.

-- LT

QUICKIE REACTION: An interesting thought to keep in mind in relation to what I just said above about emphasizing tech skills and education in rebuilding Afghanistan.

I just finished reading your wonderful post on the benefits of a true liberal arts education. I think that the disdain that many feel for the humanities comes from a fundamental misunderstanding. They believe that art, literature and writing is basically undisciplined.

Last year, my oldest was in Cub Scouts. One of the activities was to build a race car from a small block of pine. Many of the dads were talking about the power tools they would use, how to reduce drag coefficients, and the best lubricants for the wheels (liquid or powdered graphite?). One dad, an aerospace engineer, announced that he would test his son's entry in a wind tunnel at work to ensure that air resistance had been minimized. Being more comfortable with ideas than power tools, my son and I had planned on using a pocketknife and a can of spray paint to build our model. Fearing that humiliation of father and son was eminent, I casually asked if there was a liberal arts division that we could enter. My question was met with laughter and a number of comments to the effect that a liberal arts education was worthless and was nothing more than a haven for mush-brained non-thinkers.

I wish that people with that opinion would write for publication every day for a week. Then, perhaps they would understand that writing demands discipline on a number of levels. The first level is the discipline to actually write. I started my blog, in part, because I thought that if I published my writing on the net, I could pretend that I had an audience. The pretence of an audience would help me maintain the discipline to writing every day. It is hard to write every day. While I do not post every day I do write every day. Many of the things that I wish to write about are difficult to compress into 25 words or less. It often takes several days for a post to ripen from an idea or a thought into something that I willing to let others read.

The second type of discipline required of a writer is to think carefully about the organization of what is sometimes a free floating idea. I have often realized when writing that my central idea is simply wrong. That realization results from the process of writing. The flaws in my logic become apparent only when I begin to explicitly set down the reasoning.

The third type of discipline is to express your ideas in a manner that is understandable to the reader. Steven Den Beste recently wrote a manifesto that many readers felt called for the military destruction of much of the middle east and the imposition of western culture on the populations of the middle east by force of arms. The next day, Den Beste clarified his position in another post in which he said that the primary weapon the west would use for the destruction of the Arab culture was not military might but rather was the Barbie Doll. I suggest that Mr. Den Beste failed to express his idea in a way that was reasonably understandable to his audience (another option is the that he simply backed down from his original post in the face of stiff opposition). Mr. Den Beste is an engineer.

I think that the effect on our culture of the dismissive attitude towards reading and writing anything but computer code and technical articles is quite distressing. The market simply does not reward the generalist as greatly as the specialist. I chose law as a profession in part because it allowed me to establish a practice in which a wide variety of skills (writing, speaking, logic, storytelling, compassion and others) were necessary.

I think it is a sad day when the leader of the free world cannot utter three coherent sentences without a speechwriter. Mr. Bush is not only an example of the failure of a liberal arts education but he openly derides those that exhibit one. For example, he upbraided a reporter who had the temerity to ask the prime Minster of France a question in French.

As long as the market rewards those with narrow skills that do not depend on interaction of ideas or people, we will slowly lose a large part of what made western culture great.

-- Dwight Meredith

P.L.A. -- A Journal of Politics, Law and Autism

QUICKIE REACTION: I think you've described the most important "virtue" derived from doing a lot of writing -- you learn to question yourself, to recognize many of the flaws in your own thinking. Writing keeps you modest. People who do a lot of writing usually don't think of themselves as brilliant, because every time you sit down to write -- if you write honestly and well -- you're confronted with your own ignorance. I think that willingness to deal with your own limitations serves most people well in life.

Thanks! My girlfriend and most of her friends are math people (actuaries, esp.) and while they're much more liberal arts-savvy than most of my engineering friends, we have this ongoing dialog in which I've trying for years to explain why a good humanities background matters. Frankly, I've been continually surprised by how much they don't get it, and even more surprised by their arrogance in thinking there is no reason they should. I'll never convince them a humanities major had to think as much as they did in college.

(I'm a public policy person, and they buy the idea that the economics part of my major might have been worthwhile [I think it was useless, except that it helps in arguing with armchair libertarians] but they don't see the same thing with the philosophy part of my major. And they don't understand why my unfinished second major, English, would be worthwhile at all.)

(They probably won't be impressed by your blog either, but I am, and I thank you. I'll send it to them just in case.)

Last thought: living in the Bay Area I've met quite a few computer science/engineering types that went out of their way to get a good humanities education, either formally or on their own time. They're some of the most creative and freaky (good way) people I know. But still, probably the exception.

-- BJ

Robbed By A Fountain Pen

QUICKIE REACTION: Yes, I know what you mean. I knew several counter-culture computer freaks in Berkeley in the early seventies. Never had the vaguest idea what they were doing, but they were extremely creative, and I could often see that creativity displayed in areas that had nothing to do with computers.

My 18-year-old son, actually, is kind of a current generation version of that type. He's a musician. He plays piano, french horn, trumpet and guitar (and occasionally drums), and he has been composing music ever since the first time he got his hands on a piano (at four). He also writes, does cartooning, makes films, and is wildly creative in just about anything he touches. He also loves computers, and has been doing most of his composing at the computer since he was twelve and I bought him a keyboard and software for that purpose (best present he ever got). He's good at math, has taught himself quite a bit of programming (or picked it up from friends) and wants to combine that with music. So obviously I know from experience that tech skills and creativity are not mutually exclusive categories.

I am intrigued by your lengthy discussion of the relation (or lack thereof) between the sciences and the humanities.

First, some introduction -- I'm an anthropology grad student, working on my dissertation at the moment. Anthropology is a discipline that has spent literally decades trying to decide (unsuccessfully, I might add) if we're a science or a humanity, which is more or less how I ended up in it.

What drew me to anthropology was the fact that one absolutely "has" to approach culture from both a scientific and humanistic perspective. "Scientific" because, after all, we are attempting to describe the world we live in, "humanistic" because the subjects of our work are, of course, humans. Actually, the idea of two perspectives doesn't even begin to work -- the matters of the heart and of the head, to use Armey's demeaning characterization, are almost always intertwined in such a way that it is impossible to separate them. It's like the old adage about taking apart a butterfly in order to understand it--you may attain some understanding, but it ceases to be a butterfly.

There is a site out there called "Third Culture" that addresses just the divide you talk about in relation to Snow's "Two Cultures." Although I don't agree with most of the writers involved (Stephen J. Gould being the notable exception) I admire the idea of the site, that our society needs to develop a field of intermediaries, men and women like Gould who can write across the gap between sciences and humanities, who can point out the many points of contact between the two fields, who can elucidate the contributions of both to our understanding of the human condition. (This sounds like an ad for the site, but I'm really just "riffing" on the idea.)

As you point out, though, too many people these days see no contribution to be made from the humanities -- in fact, see no point in understanding our humanity at all, not in the way I've just described. (Reduce it to selfish genes and free market competition, and you've got their attention.) In fact, the Armey's of this world are more than a little threatened by the whole thing. Art, music,literature, theater--they are all kind of fuzzy and always potentially subversive and, to be honest, they just don't get it.

A couple years ago I worked at the Jewish Museum in New York (not to be confused with the Holocaust Museum in New York, mind you). While I was there, the Brooklyn Museum of Art opened it's "Sensation" exhibit that raised such a fuss, with the mayor screaming about the madonna with the feces "smeared" across it, etc. The JM's director was one of 8 (I think) museum directors that signed a letter of support for the BMA. Now, my position was such that I read most of the important mail that came through the Museum, and one day I read a letter from Peter Vallone, Democratic Chair of the City Council, thanking our director for her support of the BMA. But he also said something like "Though I find the work in question reprehensible, I support the BMA's right to show it". Along the same lines as Hillary Clinton's "support" for the Brooklyn Museum, even as she said neither she nor Bill would attend the exhibition.

I had gone, and I thought the piece was not great, but certainly not the work of evil it had been made out to be. It was a beautiful piece and, most importantly, did not fit the descriptions that Giuliani, Clinton, or Vallone had ascribed to it -- none of whom, of course, had ever actually seen it! Of course there were political games being played, but what struck me was the absolute ignorance and distrust of art displayed by all three of them, and the insistence that the work had to mean something that could be easily fit into a sound-bitten policy statement. I mean, the work was very Catholic, something that, with a little thought, the mayor at least should have been very comfortable with--the Madonna both as the mother of faith and as the figure whose representations are the foundation of the Western art tradition.

Had the mayor the desire and the intellect to unravel the mystery around the work, he could have easily found out the significance of elephants in some African mythologies, and the use of dung (though more likely cattle dung) by some African peoples as a "purifier," something not entirely out of place when speaking of the mother of Christ, I believe. He might also have discovered that Catholicism is growing in Africa at the fastest rate it has "ever" grown, put all this together, and even if he still didn't "like" the picture, at least have met it halfway. But he didn't, and neither did the rest of our "leaders"--because it was already suspect just by being "art," just by "being."

-- Dustin Wax

QUICKIE REACTION: Uh-oh. You've entered another hot-button issue for me: politicians' deliberate distortions of artistic works for political purposes, and/or their complete lack of understanding of an artist's way of approaching the world. I was, like you, appalled by the political use Giuliani and others made of that Madonna, as well as a similar controversy over Alma Lopez's "Our Lady." I don't think Lopez's work is brilliant, but it is interesting, and represents an artist taking in and renewing the meaning of received images -- a valuable goal. I was also angry about the way the press played the issue as a conflict between "religious" people like Giuliani and "anti-religious" artists. As you point out, the artists are often more genuinely and deeply religious than the censors who want to keep them from exploring religious images and ideas.But that's a topic for another dayÉ

If you happened to be here yesterday afternoon, at just the right time, you might have noticed that my post directing you to Dwight Meredith's comments on Dick Army's denigration of artists was a little longer than it currently is. I had included some remarks about my far from pleasant experience twenty years ago teaching humanities to college freshman with majors in engineering. As soon as I read it on the screen, I edited that part out, because I realized instantly that it was not what I wanted to say. I was hoping it disappeared so fast nobody saw it -- but no such luck. Kevin, over at Lean Left, spotted it (and noted the self-censorship -- drat! ) and wrote me a very polite e-mail (much politer than my post) with thought-provoking comments:

Kevin: I saw your post about Armey before you excised the bit about the engineers being dumber than turkeys. (Did I say that? Ouch, I'm sorry.) I should point out that before I got a career and a family, I was 5 non technical classes and one design project from getting my BS in Electrical Engineering. Seriously, I can explain why your students hated that class so much -- time. Engineers are expected to take more classes than any other bachelor program, and the classes they take are very, very time consuming and complex. Time is at a premium, and English classes and Art Appreciation feel like a waste. The arguments that you need those classes to be a well rounded student fall flat, especially considering how little science non technical majors are supposed to take. To an engineering student, Music 101 feels like a full employment for liberal arts majors program.

The fact that English majors can walk out of college with almost no exposure to real science or math is a serious flaw in our college system, I feel. I do not understand how one can be considered a well rounded person without having been exposed to the scientific process and method. Science is not a set of facts -- it is a way of looking at the world, of creating a system that forces you to look at the results of your suppositions and actions squarely in the face, and of dealing with new information and situations. I don't understand why an understanding of that process is less important for the average person than an understanding of Chaucer.


Me: Boy, Kevin, you're fast and observant. I wrote that in a fury, posted it, and as soon as I saw it on the screen I realized it didn't sound nice at all and wasn't what I meant. So I tried to take it down. Blogger is a real pain at the moment. I have to hit publish 5 or 6 times before the change actually shows up, so it took me ten or fifteen minutes to get rid of it. I hope you're one of the few people who saw it. It was embarrassing and awful.

Nevertheless, there was an idea buried in that mess that I still stand by.

There was a book written sometime in the fifties by C.P. Snow: The Two Cultures -- which I admit I haven't read, but have been told about many times. In it, Snow argued that one of the tragedies of modern life was the loss of the well-rounded person. In the 19th century, an educated person would be expected not only to understand science, but to make small "amateur" contributions to it, and at the same time read Virgil in the original Latin. Everything has become so specialized and complicated that few people understand anything outside their own narrow fields anymore, and that's a tragedy because solving the world's problems would be facilitated by scientists and humanists being able to talk to each other. Right now, they can't.

I may have this wrong, because, as I said, I haven't read the book, but as it was explained to me, Snow felt that it was more important for humanists to understand scientists than the other way around. He also thought scientists had a better understanding of humanities than humanists did of science. His book was primarily aimed at scientifically illiterate humanists and artists.

I don't know if that was true when the book was written. I know it isn't today, and hasn't been for many years. Scientific illiteracy is a major problem in this country. But ignorance of the arts and humanities is even deeper and more wide-spread, and the biggest problem is that most Americans don't even recognize that that ignorance exists or matters. No high school eliminates chemistry, no matter how tight the budget. Art is expendable. When my son was in his high school orchestra (all four years), the school repeatedly forgot to get their instruments where they belonged (or open doors so students could get them themselves) or even send buses to pick the kids up. As my son once noted, "They never forgot to send the bus for the football team."

My students, in the late seventies and early eighties, were, I think, the first wave of that trend in which the arts and humanities became "frills."

Time probably was a factor in why my engineering students didn't "get" Homer. But it wasn't the most important one. The reason I took my post down is that my annoyed little remarks about my students not wanting to do the work suggested that they were simply unwilling to put any time into it, and that wasn't what really bugged me. I had lazy and busy English majors too. (You'd be surprised how long it can take just to read through and comprehend a few pages of Middle English poetry, let alone have anything original to say about it.)

My problems with the engineering students had to do with their arrogance and shallowness. Those were universal traits in the students I got from the engineering department (and I'll throw business majors into that category, too), and I think when I read Armey's remarks, he reminded me so much of my old students that I had to lash out. I had quite a few pre-med students as well, and a lot of them shared that arrogance (the extreme shallowness was less of a problem with potential doctors), but there were exceptions.

Why didn't budding engineers and business majors take to Homer and Dante? First, because they shared Armey's belief that the arts are matters of the "heart" (for which they have no respect) and science, business, and technical fields are matters of the "head." I had students tell me flat out that they were "too smart" to waste their time on "easy" stuff like Dante. I probably took remarks like that personally. As someone who was inching her way through the Inferno (in Italian) and finding it glorious, but head-achingly difficult in its complexity (and this was on my fourth or fifth reading of the work), I was angry at someone telling me he could put it all away in a minute if he thought it was worth his time. It would not occur to me in a million years (nor to any humanists I know) to suggest that if we weren't busy struggling with the words of the greatest thinkers in the history of mankind and facing issues that have haunted us for millennia, we'd have time to fool around with that silly engineering tinker toy stuff. We expect the same respect from technocrats, and we don't get it.

Don't get me wrong. Humanists can be arrogant, too. As a writer whose background is in comparative literature, I have problems with English professors who see literature as something completed in the past, as well as their myopia about literature in languages other than English. (Most of them will allow a little French and German into the canon, and a few Russian novelists, but most English professors seem blithely unaware of the fact that literature exists and thrives outside of Europe). But we don't make the assumption that anyone working in areas other than our areas of expertise is "dumb." And we don't assume that we are so brilliant that we could take on those other areas easily if it weren't a waste of time to do so.

My other problem with engineer wannabes was their shallow thinking. To put it in the bluntest terms, not one of them had ever read a challenging novel, essay, poem or play. They had reached their late teens without ever having thought a serious thought, without ever having challenged their own immediate perceptions in any way. Their understanding of human behavior was straight out of sitcoms and the cheapest, most exploitational movies. Black and white. Them and us. Good and evil. Unless they have aged better than I expect, I don't think any of them would be capable today of understanding that there was anything odd about the notion of a "war" on "evil."

And that lack of experience with challenging books showed up in their writing as well. I never encountered a single engineering major who could construct a decent sentence, let alone deal with the complexity of a good paragraph. They just didn't read enough to have developed the innate sense of how language works that all readers have. I actually had some success at the sentence level by drawing on my Catholic elementary school memories of the almost lost art of diagramming sentences. Seeing a sentence splayed out on lines seemed to appeal to engineers, and make it possible for them to cope with sentences. But paragraphs? Forget it. Despite what many high school English teachers think, a decent paragraph can't be reduced to a neat formula. It requires an ability to step gracefully from thought to thought. In order to do that, you have to begin with real thoughts. If you don't have any, you're up the proverbial excremental creek.

And once again arrogance reared its head, because my engineering students repeatedly informed me that writing clearly was a useless skill. "You know what I'm trying to say," was a statement that I heard over and over again, "why should I waste my time trying to make it sound nice?" Sheer arrogance -- I know what I mean, you figure it out.

Notice any similarity to the discourse of a certain MBA-toting president?

You said that science is "a way of looking at the world," and you are absolutely right about that. In fact, I don't know any artist or humanist who doesn't recognize that fact and make at least some effort to close the gap in her education. We have a reverence bordering on idolatry for scientists who can also write, like Stephen Jay Gould.

But the humanities also represent a way of seeing the world. It's not a matter of "appreciation." It's about looking deeply, recognizing multiple points of view, and above all understanding that what we see and think is not "obvious," that if we want other people to understand what we say, the burden is on us to make ourselves clear, not on the listener to intuit what we're trying to say. There's been a lot written lately about the "plasticity of the brain" developed by children who study languages, art and music. They develop a bone-deep understanding that there are many ways of knowing, and many ways to solve problems, and that understanding carries over into everything they study. I certainly agree that English majors lose out when they don't develop scientific habits of mind. But I think that is a commonly noted and widely shared belief. I don't think it is equally well understood how much people in fields like business and engineering lose by never developing the habits of mind that artists and humanists take for granted.

I took down my original post in large measure because it was stereotyping people, and I don't like to do that. The fact that I never met an engineering student who was capable of nuanced thinking or decent writing doesn't mean there aren't any. The fact that you, Kevin, were once an engineering major, rips an enormous hole in my stereotype. In fact, I'd be very happy to learn that you used to be one of those arrogant "brains," but that maturity and experience have granted you an ability you display every day -- thinking in complex ways and expressing your thoughts in crisp, clear prose. Knowing that would give me a little hope that some of my old students may have grown in similar ways. But, to be honest, I suspect you always found time for a little reading in history and politics, at the very least, in between your studies.

I think all of this matters because more and more we are becoming a nation of people with enormous technical skills and little understanding of what to do with them. And I think it shows up in our politics. While I am certainly appalled by the Bush administration's willingness to set aside the rigor of scientific thought in favor of a "give me the results I want" mentality, I'm equally dismayed by their inability to hear artists, humanists and social scientists. I don't care if Bush has never read The Great Gatsby , or if Cheney wouldn't know a Guelph from a Ghibelline. I don't think there's any one work that every educated person "must" read (although the Constitution would be nice, if you plan to be president). But I care that none of them have the artist's habit of mind that not only recognizes but delights in the complexities of human beings. I care that no one in this administration seems to have read any history that isn't simplistic and jingoistic. It bothers me that none of them have ever given up pieces of their egos long enough to see themselves in a novel's characters. I honestly believe George Bush would understand more about dealing with tyrants and warlords if he told Donald Rumsfeld, "Leave me alone for awhile, I need to read a little Shakespeare." Shakespeare knew Hosni Mubarak better than Rumsfeld does.

And I think the impossibility of that happening began decades ago, when they were business and technical majors, and decided that nuances were for the weak and thinking was for people with too much time on their hands.

The nonsense about Al Gore's "lies" has gone on way too long. Hesiod is keeping track, keeping score, and not let the real liars get away with it anymore. Bravo!

Talk Left reports that ABC News will be broadcasting a report on false confessions, including a look at the Central Park Jogger case. I'm not a lawyer or a tv watcher, but I hope Jeralyn will keep us up on this. Her writing on the subject of false confessions is always thoughtful and interesting.

Let's see: Dick Armey is an anti-Semite and he thinks anyone who labors in the arts is dumber than anyone in "occupations of the brain" like engineering. Can I be equally offended by both of those things, or do I have to choose? (It's so generous of right-wingers to give you so much to choose from.)

Dwight Meredith has more.

Yvonne Ridley is a British journalist who was arrested by the Taliban and held for 11 days for entering Afghanistan illegally. When she was captured, she had no passport and was wearing a burqa. While in captivity, she made a promise to study Islam after she returned home -- certainly not a promise anyone would hold her to, given the circumstances under which it was made. But she kept it anyway, more as an intellectual exercise than in a search for faith. But then an odd thing happened. She felt herself drawn to the faith.

There were reports (premature) that she had converted, even that she had cracked up completely and was cavorting with terrorists, that she was suffering from "Stockholm Syndrome."

The truth -- as Yvonne Ridley tells her own story -- is both more complex and far more interesting. In fact, she hasn't converted, but has only developed a strong interest in Islam, which could at some point become a conversion. But her interest in the faith is intriguing and surprising. Why would an ambitious, strong, and intelligent woman even consider the possibility of becoming a Muslim?

It was a question many people asked Yvonne Ridley:

Others feared I was being brainwashed and that I would soon be back in my burqa, silenced forever like all Muslim women.

This, of course, is nonsense. I have never met so many well-educated, opinionated, outspoken, intelligent, politically aware women in the Muslim groups I have visited throughout the UK.

Feminism pales into insignificance when it comes to the sisterhood, which has a strong identity and a loud voice in this country. Yes, it is true that many Muslim women around the world are subjugated, but this has only come about through other cultures hi-jacking and misinterpreting the Qur'an.

I wish I had this knowledge (and I'm still very much a novice) when I was captured by the Taliban, because I would have asked them why they treated their own women so badly.

Of course, she's right. Both in this country and in other countries, there are many strong and ambitious Muslim women, and even many brave and eloquent feminists. We would know almost nothing about the conditions under which women lived in Afghanistan under the Taliban, for instance, if it were not for the breathtaking bravery of the women of RAWA, filming beatings and executions through holes in their burqas. Bravery like that doesn't spring up out of nowhere. You would think that if we oppose Islamic fundamentalism in part because of the way it treats women, we would be listening to the Muslim women who are among their strongest critics. And yet I would be stunned if George Bush could name a single Muslim feminist. If you champion women's rights, wouldn't you want to hear from the women who are already standing up for those rights? Wouldn't you ask them what you could do to help?

Also intriguing is an insight Ridley had while sharing a jail with "six Christians who faced charges of trying to convert Muslims to their faith." One day, hearing the hymns of fundamentalist Christians on one side of her and the call to prayers of Taliban fanatics on the other, she realized she was "caught in between two sets of religious fundamentalists." Opposing each other, but not nearly as different in their beliefs as they think they are.

I disagree with Yvonne Ridley a little bit. She seems to suggest that there is greater fundamental support for women in Islam than in other religions. I doubt that there is less, but I also doubt that there is more. I was educated by nuns -- who, I'd venture to say, were (and are) as " well-educated, opinionated, outspoken, intelligent, [and] politically aware" as any Muslim women Ridley has encountered, and I've seen first hand the support they find in their faith (and not to put too romantic a gloss on it, I've also seen the Church undercut them. Plenty of nuns have asked the question Yvonne Ridley wanted to ask the Taliban -- "Why do you treat your women so badly?"). There is support for women at the heart of every faith. The problem isn't finding the "right" religion, the problem is avoiding the people who leech the heart and soul out of faith. And I expect you can find them in any religion.

The storyteller's dilemma
An early in the morning, off-the-wall speculation: It's hard to lie to people about economics and domestic issues. They know when they, or their friends and relatives, have lost jobs. They can see the retirement fund and the college savings dry up. They're aware of medical benefits whittled away (or not there to begin with). It's not impossible to shade the truth, but there's not a lot of room for error when you're trying to sell a story and people can test that story out in their own lives.

It's the fiction writer's constant nuisance: if you live in California, and you set a story on a certain street in Queens, you better make damn sure that street exists, and that the grocery store is exactly where you say it is, and its colors are exactly what you say, because you can count on the fact that somebody who reads the story really does live on that street and will decide you're an idiot if you get it wrong. And will write to you, asking "How can I trust anything in your story if you can't get such a simple thing right?"

It is easy, on the other hand, to lie about foreign policy. It's over there. It's far away. What do we know? They must know more about it than we do. If you're trying to control a story that's getting away from you, if you're tired of having to worry about picky details, or sick of being reminded that you got things wrong, you'd be crazy to try to tell a story about real life. You'd want to tell a story about how far away, in a strange world, there were monstersÉ

Whenever I write about news and politics, it's usually from around the edges, or from odd angles. There are a lot of reasons for that, but the main one is that I'm a slow and eccentric thinker, a crazy artist, not a political junkie, and more often than not by the time I've thought about something enough to express a coherent opinion, lots of people have already said the same thing I would say, only better. Either that, or someone says something that makes me think, hmmm, I'll have to think some more about that one, but by the time I've thought it through, the issue has passed.

I was fascinated by Al Gore's speech yesterday, thought it was a great speech, both in what he said, and in the quality of his rhetoric. I don't have much more to say about it than that, but I wanted to take note of two writers who had much more intelligent readings than I did:

In the category of, "things I would have said if I were smarter and faster": Liberal Oasis argues that "Gore saved the Democratic Party" with his speech. A brief and imperfect summary: Democrats would like to duck the issue of Iraq, but they can't and they shouldn't. Most Americans care more about domestic politics at the moment (as they usually do), but to cede the entire argument over foreign policy to the Republicans is foolish, even suicidal. Gore's statement was courageous and non-poll driven, as several pundits have recognized (and I suspect it will strike most Americans that way as well -- whether or not they agree with him), and any positive response the speech gets (and it has gotten quite a bit of positive response) will help Democrats who want to vote their consciences on the congressional resolution.

And in the "This hurts my brain, but I'll try" category: I can't begin to deal adequately with Max's complex reading of the speech -- good speech because it is "a welcome handful of sand in the gears of Bush's drive for war;" bad speech because Gore is a "more ambitious imperialist, if also more sensible and cautious" than Bush. I'm having a little trouble with the concept that a commitment to nation-building is inherently imperialistic, although I certainly agree with the contention that "nothing brings more potential harm than good intentions." I can't do Max's argument justice, so just go read it.

I recently did an interview with Brian Linse at The Lefty Directory. If you've been reading Body and Soul and have been trying to make sense of my politics, religion and general attitudes toward stuff (I have that problem myself sometimes), you might want to check it out. Brian asked good questions, and I at least took a stab at answering them.

Thanks, also, to Brian, for providing a link to a nice article about my former teacher, Brian Moore. He was a wonderful writer and a very good man -- and that's the highest praise I give anyone.

Just in time for Banned Books Week, Kevin Raybould has posted a list of The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1999-2000 -- which includes some great reading, if you're looking for a good book. (Reading a banned book would seem to me the ideal way to celebrate the occasion.)

I just finished reading number 7 on the list -- one of the Harry Potter books -- to my daughter (who happens to be 7 -- she likes those kinds of coincidences) and found several other favorites on the list. I've always liked number 25 -- Maurice Sendak's In The Night Kitchen, which, if you're not familiar with the book, is on the list because it revealed the shocking fact that little boys have penises (or, as my daughter said, the first time I read her the book, "Look, mama, his vagina sticks out.")

To Kill A Mockingbird is at number 41, because it would be wrong to leave children with the bizarre notion that there is, or ever has been, racism in this country.

And Shel Silverstein hit number 51 because -- to be honest, I can't imagine. Somebody thinks it's a bad idea to make kids laugh and beg for poetry?

I was disappointed to learn, however, that two Natalie Babbitt books that used to be constant targets of the book banners when I was working as a volunteer in my son's elementary school library -- The Devil's Storybook and Tuck Everlasting -- are apparently no longer subject to attack. They're excellent, beautifully written, thought-provoking books with ideas to stretch and challenge growing young minds. They really deserve a place on that list.

Hail Atrios for discovering this revealing Freeper response to the shocking (well, to some people) notion that "Women's self-emancipation is a primary source of America's present power, wealth and social energy."

Women's rights would be such a cool excuse for war if only women would shut up and not act like we're supposed to mean it or anything.

Mother's Sentence Unsettles a Nigerian Village

Amina Lawal is a Nigerian Muslim woman who has been sentenced to death for adultery. When her baby is weaned in 2004, she will be buried up to her neck in sand. When only her head is visible, crowds will be invited to throw stones at her until she is dead.

The story hasn't been ignored by the American press, but it's not making the front pages either. As Ann Salisbury angrily and accurately noted, Amina Lawal's photograph and story appeared in the Living Section of Tuesday's LA Times. Below the fold. Sandwiched between an article on Japanese tea traditions and a jolly little trifle on the Art Deco Society's Gatsby Picnic, where, as one participant noted, "The ambience is so fabulous. It's so civilized in what is getting to be a more uncivilized world."

Well, yes, it's nice to find an escape from brutal reality.

One of the reasons I haven't written anything about this story before, even though I've been following it for quite a while, is that while moral indignation is immediate and easy, actually accomplishing anything feels out of reach. Not that people aren't trying. The Times article, in fact, is only indirectly about Amina Lawal. It focuses instead on the efforts of some Southern California women -- a book club and a philanthropic organization -- to call attention to the story and have their anger heard. That's the way American women think: if our anger gets heard, we can make a difference. Normally it's a feeling I share, but somehow I don't think it well make a difference in this case.

Something struck me about the article though. Two of the L.A. women mentioned that hearing Amina Lawal's story reminded them of gender-based injustices in their own lives. There's a temptation to laugh at that. Having your grandfather leave his property only to the male members of the family, however unfair, isn't exactly in the same league as being stoned to death for bearing a child. But I think I know what the woman who brought this up means. Often it is a simmering anger over the injustices -- however trivial -- in our own lives that allow us to feel righteous anger about larger injustices. As long as we don't get trapped in nursing our own puny wounds, understanding the small ways in which we've been mistreated, is often the first step in caring about real injustice.

Even easier to mock would be the beauty queens for women's rights. Several Miss World contestants are boycotting the pageant because it is scheduled to be held in Nigeria. (The current Miss World is from Nigeria, and the fact that Agbani Darego -- Miss World -- Amina Lawal, and the women of Escravos come from the same country says a lot about the complexity of women's rights issues in Nigeria.)

My inner radical feminist thinks we're in a whole bunch of trouble if we need to take lessons in ethics and human rights from Miss Belgium and Miss France, but the truth is, those women might be wielding the biggest weapons of all. Nigeria could use the money the pageant brings in.

Here's a sentence you may never hear me say again: Hooray for the beauty queens!

If enough pressure, and the right kind of pressure, is brought in this case, Olusegun Obasanjo, the president of Nigeria, has the power to commute the sentence. But he hasn't done so yet, and he says he won't. He says he does not believe the sentence will be carried out, and if it is, he will "weep for Amina" and he will "weep for Nigeria." He will not, however, take the politically difficult step of standing up to northern politicians. Nor apparently, is his government willing to extend much assistance to Amina Lawal. The Attorney General announced that the government would assist in her appeal, but her next court date is less than two weeks away, and her lawyers haven't heard a word from the AG's office.

I'm not going to pontificate. I certainly don't know enough about Nigerian politics to understand what's causing Obasanjo's reluctance to intervene. Nor do I understand much about Islamic law. (It is certainly worth noting, however, that not only have organizations like the Islamic Human Rights Commission and the Muslim Public Affairs Council argued that the sentence is contrary to Quranic laws, but even Shariah officials in Amina Lawal's own state have argued that the sentence is wrong. This isn't about religion, it's about power.)

But when you dig under the complexities, what it comes down to is this: a young woman's life is at the mercy of political machinations. Men are struggling with each other for their tidbits of control, and a woman's life is nothing but a little piece of that power struggle. Amina Lawal is not the first young woman guilty of adultery to be sentenced to death by stoning in Nigeria. In October 2001, a court convicted and sentenced Safiya Husseini Tunga-Tudu (fortunately, her conviction was later overturned). After her conviction, Tunga-Tudu told a reporter, "I never thought there would be such a penalty. It is because I am poor, my family is poor, and I am a woman."

It's a little more complicated than that, of course, but not much. Tunga-Tudu's understanding of the situation trumps anything I could say.

As much as I wish the women who are trying to publicize Amina Lawal's story well, and hope they succeed, and will sign any petition they give me, or write any letter they suggest, I think there is a bigger problem, and that is that in many parts of the world, to be a woman is to be a piece of somebody else's power struggle, and not much more. And as happy as I am to see the Miss World contestants use whatever small power they have to alter the game a little, to stick a good, sharp stiletto heel in the wheels of the machine, and -- please, God -- save Amina Lawal's life, I think in the long run the solution is not to play the power game, but to work around it.

Amina Lawal's vulnerability to the petty power struggles of Nigerian politicians makes me very open to this argument for aiding Africa by circumventing leaders and investing directly in women:

Gordon Brown, the British chancellor of the Exchequer, has proposed a $50 billion Marshall Plan for Africa. Unfortunately, were it to come about, it would fail. The nature of the Marshall Plan was that it returned Europe to the status quo ante.

In Europe, there was a base and a memory. But in Africa, there is no base and no memory, save for the hated colonialism. So Brown's plan cannot but repeat the mistakes of the past -- massive corruption, misallocation and theft.

A whole new scheme is needed for Africa: a scheme that circumvents the nominal leaders and their culture of Mercedes-Benzes, AK-47s and Swiss bank accounts, a scheme that delivers aid directly into the hands of the people who hold African society together as best they can: the women.

If ever there was a great cause for the feminists of the world, it is Africa -- and it is the delivery of noneconomic aid to the women of the villages. This aid needs to be simple education about hygiene, reproduction and the tools of survival -- hoes, water jars, household medicines and home economics.

You cannot till the soil without an implement, store water without a receptacle, or save the life of a child who has trod on a thorn without disinfectant. And you cannot save Africa without its women.

Education and economic power for women are not the only important things, by any means. The world must pressure governments to strengthen secular justice systems in order to protect women's legal status. Local women's and human rights organizations should be supported. We need to support things like the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, to give women more legal protection. But if Amina Lawal had education and tools for survival, she could help stand up for those things herself. And in the future women like Amina Lawal wouldn't need beauty contestants or L.A. book clubs or people like me writing letters desperately trying to save her. She'd have the power to do it herself.

Amnesty International Action on behalf of Amina Lawal

Sisyphus Shrugged on how far you can go and still qualify as a moderate Republican.

If you haven't already read this post at A Level Gaze, you should. I disagree mildly with David's pessimism about the value of writing, although I understand the discouragement, and often share it. He is certainly right that truth seems to have no effect on this administration's ability to get its way, but I think it has almost always been the case that no single writer, no matter how eloquent, could take down the powerful. Powerful people rarely get knocked off their pedestals. Instead, the pedestal is slowly chipped away until they have nothing to stand on. I remember laughing out loud the first time someone told me Nixon would be impeached over Watergate. Yeah, right. I thought, Nixon's a cockroach, he'll be the last thing standing after a nuclear war. But little by little the pedestal disappeared beneath his feet.

But the broader argument of this piece is one I can not shake off quite as easily -- that many of the policies of this administration are not just bad in and of themselves, but bad in a larger sense, bad in that they strike at who we are and who we will be as a country. And, in fact, the last part of this post may be the best argument against the first part. Keep writing, keep thinking, because, when you come right down to it, right now we are determining what kind of a country we are going to be.

Keep them barefoot, too?
Frederica Mathewes-Green would like to see more teenage pregnancies.

Just a note of warning to any women who are reading this: If you go to Washington, it is not illegal for a man to aim a camera up your skirt, take pictures, and sell them on the internet. The State Supreme Court said so. The opinion was written by Justice Bobbe Bridge, one of four women on the Court.

More sites that I should have added to my weblog list long ago, and would have if I weren't so damn lazy and didn't hate HTML so much:

The Agora

Busy Busy Busy

Free Pie

Hindsight Aforethought

Let It Begin Here

A Level Gaze

Liberal Arts Mafia

Making Light

Pandagon

Ruminate This

Uggabugga

Vanity Site

Please, God.

If I'd voted for George Bush, I'd be depressed, too.

(Go to: September 20 -- Draw your own conclusions, folks. -- Everybody's permalinks are giving me grief today.)

Sam Heldman's mail is worse than mine. He must be doing something right.

And speaking of Sam, his discussion with Nathan Newman of the judicial nomination fight over Michael McConnell is fascinating. I'm not going to make myself look like a fool by expressing an opinion (in truth, I don't have one yet; I can see all sides and am just intrigued by the arguments), so just go read it and start thinking (as Sam and Nathan already are) about what you can hope for and what you're willing to settle for. The essence of politics in a few well-written posts.

Quite a few people have linked to Dawn Olsen's lovely ode to her daughter and revelation of her insecurities as a parent. It's a good piece and beautifully written. But somehow a meditation on Dawn's post by Devra at Blue Streak struck closer to the bone for me (It's today's post, called "Fear of Failure." She doesn't seem to have permalinks.) Devra doesn't have children yet and she's torn between the longing and the fear that she won't be able to live up to the task. She's very open and honest in her writing, and her piece is well worth reading.

It struck a chord with me because I remember the constant fear I had during my first pregnancy. I did not grow up in anything vaguely resembling a functioning family. My only understanding of what I wanted for my children was that anything would be better than what I had. Not a lot to go on.

I remember, in fact, being certain, when I was about six months pregnant, that I had made an enormous mistake. It was because of the tomatoes. The combination of a Catholic education and reading too much literary criticism has always made me take symbolism a little too seriously. While I was pregnant, I was also trying to grow tomatoes in the back yard. A foolish undertaking -- I'd lived in apartments all my life. I don't know the first thing about growing things. But my husband's father had a glorious vegetable garden in the tiny side-yard of his house in New Jersey, and it filled me with envy. So I attempted a task I was unsuited for.

And failed. What were supposed to be Big Boy (or Big Girl or Fat Man or something) tomatoes looked like cherry tomatoes. I watered. I fertilized. The vine withered. The leaves were mottled yellow, like a person with a skin disease.

And I cried and cried because if I wasn't even smart enough to grow a few fucking tomatoes, how the hell was I going to take care of a baby. For a long time, my heart was just breaking for this poor, poor kid who got stuck with me for a mother.

The first time I held him I was astonished by how solid and heavy he was. Somehow I expected a baby to be almost weightless. I kept talking to him, telling him, "Don't cry. It's okay. Really. Everything's okay." I must have sounded a little hysterical, because the doctor said, "They all cry, you know."

I also remember holding on to him a little too tight, looking around the room at perfectly nice nurses, just doing their job, and thinking, if anyone lays a hand on this child, I will personally tear the heart right out of her chest. I meant it literally. I am the quietest, meekest person on earth. People are always asking me to repeat what I said because when I speak, you can barely hear me. I've never been capable of yelling back at another person, let alone hurting anyone. But I knew I could do anything if my son was threatened in any way. Complexity fell by the wayside. I took parenting lessons from John Wayne: You hurt him, you die. You got that, pilgrim?

As he grew up, I continued holding on too tight. When I went up and down stairs with him, I'd practically crush his little bones I was so scared of dropping him. I knew that people don't ordinarily go around dropping babies down stairs, but I figured if anyone could manage to do something that stupid, it would be me.

I figured I'd warp him for sure, make him as meek and hesitant as I am. But in kindergarten, he got mad because he saw kids tossing soda cans instead of recycling them, and marched, on his own, into the principal's office, and insisted they start a recycling program. The principal asked him to make a speech about it to the school, which he did. At five, he could do what I could not have done at thirty.

He's played piano since he was six, and he's always been more interested in composing than performing, but at eight, he did an adjudication in which he played a duet with his teacher. While they were playing, the sheet music blew down and landed on top of their hands. The teacher got flustered and stopped, but my son kept going, playing flawlessly, with the paper bouncing around on his hands. One of the adjudicators wrote that she'd never seen poise like that in a kid.

He's braver and stronger and more sure of himself than I will ever be.

I've always held on too tightly. He's away at college now. The second day he was there, I talked to him on the phone and he told me he had a stomach ache. Every day since then, I've asked him how he's feeling. Is his stomach okay?

"Mom," he told me yesterday. "The next time I'm sick, I'm not even going to tell you. I was sick for about an hour and then I was fine. And you've been worrying about it for a week."

Okay, I still worry too much and hold on too tight, but at least I can laugh when he makes fun of me for doing it. And I think he knows, I hope he knows, that it's better to be loved too much than too little.

Sometimes an unguarded, off-the-wall thought can be strangely revealing. When I turned on my computer this morning, and saw this devastating picture on the L.A. Times home page, before I realized what it was a picture of, I thought, oh God, what now? I read the caption and discovered that it was the result of an Israeli attack on Arafat's compound, and, in all honesty, the first thought that popped into my head was, "Thank God. It's only Arafat."

I am not the kind of person who dismisses a life, any life, easily. The fact that a thought like that would even enter my head is probably an indication of how obvious it is that Arafat is one of those rare human beings whose existence has contributed nothing to the world that it is possible for a human being to find any good in.

A recent article about Zeenat Karzai, wife of the president of Afghanistan, reveals a great deal about the precarious lives of women in that country. I didn't even realize Karzai was married, and apparently most Afghans don't know that either.

Karzai's wife is a 29-year-old gynecologist, and a lot of women would love to see her play a public role, serving as a model for women trying to stretch out into the world again.

That's a hell of a lot to ask, of course, in a country where women's rights are far from respected and the president himself recently survived an attempted assassination.

But even if it's not a reasonable thing to ask for, I think it's certainly something to watch for. If Zeenat Karzai emerges as a public figure, it will be a sign of a notable improvement in the position of women in Afghanistan, and will also help to speed up that improvement.

Jim Capazzola is always insightful and reasonable. Who would have guessed he could also channel Lesley Gore?

Look out, Mad Kane. You've got competition.

UPDATE: Capozzola. Sorry.

I received a letter which I thought other people might find as interesting and thought-provoking as I did:

About the Central Park "wilding" convictions: A few years back, either the National Science Foundation or the AAAS (I forget which) did this study of scientific fraud wherein they found that to a one, zero exceptions, everyone who cooked their data cooked it in the direction that they thought the truth lay -- made up the results they figured they'd get if their experiments had gone as reported.

In a similar vein, I think cops and prosecutors often fiddle with evidence so's to convict people they honestly think are guilty (eg, planting the bloody glove on OJ Simpson). But -- as the Central Park case illustrates -- once you're willing to cross that line in a "good" cause, the line is apt to blur if, say, pressure to close a high-profile case or garden-variety racism affects your judgement. Just something to think about the next time you get jury duty.

Best,

Molly

I don't have the time today, and I don't feel ready in any case, to comment on this, but if you aren't already aware of Hesiod's response to a chill-inducing post proposing that we eliminate "Arab culture," you have to read it, along with the continuation of the topic (including the comments boards) on Demosthenes' and Atrios' sites.

UPDATE: Charles Dodgson has added some extremely insightful and well-reasoned comments to the discussion.

I'm working on an interview with Brian Linse for The Lefty Directory and probably won't have time to do much blogging today. I'll be back later this afternoon, or maybe tomorrow.

And speaking of Brian Linse, he has a link to a first-rate Robert Christau piece on Steve Earle from the current Village Voice.

By the way, is anybody else besides me having a terrible time getting Blogger to publish anything? This has been going on for several days now.

Must read:
Sisyphus Shrugged on the Bush administration's approach to science -- if you don't like what the scientists tell you, cut their findings from reports and fill scientific advisory committees with industry representatives who won't bother you with all that boring stuff about chemicals and global warming.

To be honest, I'm a little jealous of Bush here. I wish I had realized back when I was barely passing high school chemistry, that all I had to do was cut up the book and swear to God none of that scientific stuff existed. It would have made my life so much easier. I guess I just didn't have as much experience as a really lousy student as Bush did.

Via Lean Left (and don't ignore the link -- Kevin's got some interesting comments here)

Question Mark #17: "Friends"

Very effective piece -- but I think the guy who does these videos is stealing from my old record collection. First Hendrix, now the Isleys. I'm waiting for the Chickenhawk video with a certain appropriate Creedence song.

Hesiod sent me clicking this morning to read about Tom Friedman's flying leap onto the "invade Iraq" bandwagon.

Friedman may be the most frustrating political writer in the country, because when he's good, he's among the very best, but there are times when he leaves me shaking my head wondering how such an obviously intelligent man can say such stupid things. (His suggestion, in the aftermath of September 11, that having a dumb president and a crazy Secretary of Defense was a good thing springs to mind).

Today's column doesn't come close to reaching the levels of idiocy Friedman is capable of, nor is it one of his finer moments. It's a rather muddled piece, a reflection of a mind trying to work through some ideas rather than somebody who knows exactly what he wants to say and who says it clearly and well.

But I respect people willing to work through mental processes on paper, and I think some of the most interesting things people say come when they're still collecting and weighing ideas and haven't got all their defenses up and their nice neat arguments in a line. So I'd like to take Friedman's piece for what it appears to be -- probing thoughts, not clear and final arguments.

What I think Friedman is saying is that the arguments that are currently being used as an excuse to invade Iraq are a crock. Saddam Hussein is not a threat to Americans. He is deterrable. The real threat is still armies of angry young men trapped in "Arab-Muslim states that are failing at modernity and have become an engine for producing undeterrables."

If that is true -- and I certainly agree with Friedman on that point -- then it is undeniable that the Arab world desperately needs models of progressive, democratic government. They need it, for their own sakes, and we need it, for our own safety.

The issue is, how do you get there? Invade Iraq and turn it into a democracy? Friedman first suggests he would be in favor of that, but he immediately begins to back away and offer a lot of qualifiers:

I am for invading Iraq only if we think that doing so can bring about regime change and democratization. Because what the Arab world desperately needs is a model that works -- a progressive Arab regime that by its sheer existence would create pressure and inspiration for gradual democratization and modernization around the region.

I have no illusions about how difficult it would be to democratize a fractious Iraq. It would be a huge, long, costly task -- if it is doable at all, and I am not embarrassed to say that I don't know if it is. All I know is that it's the most important task worth doing and worth debating.

Those are some pretty big ifs. Friedman has written as well as any writer I know of about our failure to carry through on our promises to Afghanistan and has repeatedly noted that "Mr. Bush and his aides are very good at smashing things, but so far they've shown little ability to build anything abroad -- because they don't want to get deeply involved anywhere for very long." Whether or not invading a country and imposing a democracy is "doable" (I don't believe it is; I think, in fact, that an imposed democracy is an oxymoron), I think Friedman knows perfectly well that this administration is not capable of the kind of commitment it would take to help build a democracy anywhere. Friedman's own writing offers the best answer you could find to the question of whether or not the U.S. would be willing to commit to the "huge, long, costly task" of rebuilding Iraq.

But he is certainly right in suggesting that "the most important task" in this war is finding ways to encourage and aid the growth of democracy in the Arab world. An invasion won't do it, but I think we all need to be asking ourselves, what will?

Jesse over at Pandagon wrote this morning to tell me about a controversy brewing over the "wilding" story and especially over some thoughts I had about it. Actually, there are several controversies, but the most important one revolves around my statement that young black men were stigmatized by the story.

Before I get too far into the controversy, let me just back up on that a bit -- mainly because it was not a point in a carefully developed argument, but part of a post musing on some of the issues I felt the story raised. I had noticed that people were drawing a lot of lessons from the story, and I was trying to sum up some of what I'd read in various forums. I wanted to understand why people were approaching the same story from so many different angles, why even people who believed that the story revealed a great injustice focused on different aspects of that injustice. The effect on black men other than the young men who were arrested was one of the issues people were discussing.

It's not an issue I spent a lot of time on, not because I don't think it's important, but because, as a middle-aged white woman, I'd feel pretty stupid and arrogant trying to put the thoughts and feelings of young black men into words. I simply set down what was obvious from my reading -- that many black men were angry, and that I certainly understood that anger and, in an abstract way, shared it. "In an abstract way" because obviously it's not my experience, and no matter how hard we try, there are impediments in the way of truly appreciating what someone else lives through.

Many young black men felt that the Central Park story made their lives even more difficult, made people look at them in a more distrustful way. I generally take people at their word when they're talking about their own experiences. Obviously I know that racism did not begin in 1989, but when black men say something changed when that story became part of our national myth, I have no reason not to assume that they know a great deal more about it than I do. To every thing there is a season -- a time to argue, a time to shut up and listen.

Jesse pointed me in the direction of a post by Diane E. at Letter from Gotham, the gist of which is -- as Jesse succinctly described it to me -- "Young black men commit a lot of crime, and everyone was afraid of them. ThereÕs no problem whatsoever with this." Jesse himself responded ably to Diane E., and I urge you to read his comments on reasonable and unreasonable uses of racial profiling.

But other aspects of Diane E.'s argument interested me. First, she quotes some statistics about the percentage of crime committed by young black men, and I'll leave it to someone whose eyes don't glaze over at the first sight of numbers to discuss her figures and what to make of them. But then she goes on to relate a personal experience of being mugged twenty years ago by two young black men. She notes that when the police showed her a photo album of possible "perps," all of them were black. There seems to be a suggestion here that all of the criminals were black and you'd be hard pressed to find a white criminal in New York, but that would be a pretty nasty point and Diane E. doesn't strike me as a nasty person, so I'm going to assume that either she isn't making herself clear or I'm tired and am just misreading and misunderstanding. It would hardly be the first time I just didn't get it.

(Jesse notes, by the way, that it is normal police procedure to group photos by skin tone for easier identification. I'll bow to his greater knowledge, and simply add that since Diane E. identified the men who attacked her as black, it would seem logical that the police would not bother to show her photos of white criminals.)

In any case, Diane E. goes on to tell an intriguing story. After she was attacked, she noticed an elderly black man hesitate to take a seat on a train next to a young black man. She sensed that the young man was no threat, but she assumed the older man didn't entirely trust young black men and so she offered him her seat (see, I told you she seems like a nice person), but she didn't take the seat next to the kid either.

I could go after that statement and suggest that since Diane E. knew that there was nothing threatening about the young man, but still stayed away from him, the only explanation is racism -- but I know that's not true. In fact, I'd say that the fact that after such a traumatic experience she was able to look at a young black man and recognize that he was not a threat was, if anything, a pretty good sign of an absence of racism. Staying away was, I suspect, one of those dumb little superstitious protections we all engage in to make us feel safe when our safety nets have been punctured.

I'm just not sure how you pass from "I have a fear of black men based on my experience" to there's no problem when people look at black men and assume they are criminals.

It got me thinking about two experiences of my own, and about how we draw political and social lessons from our experiences. I was also mugged, when I was a college student in the seventies. The muggers were two young black men. The situation was more frightening than genuinely dangerous. They knocked me to the sidewalk and stole my purse. I'm sure they were disappointed in the amount of money they found in there. Weirdly, I remember one of them asking me, right before they ran off, if I had any cigarettes on me. Very casually, as if he were walking up to me on the street and asking for the time. I also remember that I said, "No, I'm sorry, I don't smoke," which, when I thought about it later seemed like a very bizarre thing to say under the circumstances.

The thing is, I never drew any conclusions from the race of the men who attacked me because it wasn't the least bit surprising. Not because I expect young black men to be criminals, but because I was in Oakland. Any experience I had in that neighborhood was probably going to be with a black person. The man who handed me a job application to fill out a little while before I was mugged was also black, as were most of the waitresses in the restaurant where I was applying.

I somehow didn't develop a fearful prejudice out of that experience, and yet I have to admit I did under another circumstance. I grew up, as I've written a little bit about before, in a violent family, watching my father bruise and batter my mother and knock out her teeth, never knowing when I'd be grabbed by the hair or have a heavy object thrown at my head. Once we got free of my father, I always lived in apartment buildings where the only tenants were women and children, and so I had little experience with men other than my father. I assumed that's what all men were like and even as a young adult I would freeze every time I heard a man raise his voice. I expected unstoppable violence to erupt.

My father was from Tennessee, and to this day I'm a bit uncomfortable when I hear a man with a southern accent. I'm not sure it rises quite to the level of a prejudice, but deep down I know I trust a man who sounds like he's from New York faster than one who sounds like he's from Tennessee. (It didn't stop me from voting for Gore).

The point is, I could move from there to statistics. Men are far more likely to commit crimes than women, especially violent crimes. There's a good reason for my fear, isn't there? Maybe I should just look at all men -- especially men from the South, because that's where my negative experience lies -- and assume that they are dangerous until they prove otherwise.

Of course I'd never get away with that. If I tried to prove that my negative experience with a Southern man, combined with statistics on male violence, added up to something that "people have no choice but to deal with," as Diane E. says about crime by young black men, everyone would tell me I'm letting my experience get in the way of seeing the world whole. They'd say my feelings were understandable, but not reasonable.

And they'd be right.

I never said, "Thou shalt not think." -- God

Éand other words of wisdom

Many church leaders in the U.S. have come out against war with Iraq, but of special interest is a statement by Jim Winkler, general secretary of the United Methodist Church General Board of Church and Society: "Our church categorically opposes interventions by more powerful nations against weaker ones. We recognize the first moral duty of all nations is to resolve by peaceful means every dispute that arises between or among nations." Both George Bush and Dick Cheney are members of the United Methodist Church.

Jesus wept.
The definition of the word blasphemy.

Via Atrios

Dumb de dumb dumb
When I'm wrong, I'm really wrong.

On Thursday, writing about the Central Park jogger case, I said that when the young men on trial claimed their confessions were coerced, we should have been listening. The point I was trying to make was that even above and beyond the fact that such claims should always be taken seriously, in this case, the claim had special merit, since one of the detectives on the case admitted, during the trial, that he had lied to obtain the confession.

That's what I meant to say. Unfortunately, it came out like this:

Yes, every criminal says he's innocent, but the case was weak from the beginning and liberals especially should have been paying attention.

I suspect I was trying to be terribly moderate, and "grant" the cliche in order to make the point that even if the cliche were true, it was irrelevant in this case. I've gotten quite a bit of e-mail from people making exactly that point, and my response has repeatedly been, you may very well be right, but in this case it doesn't matter. I wasn't really thinking about whether or not that argument had any merit, because in this case it seemed to me beside the point.

The problem, as both Avedon Carol and Jeralyn Merritt point out is that the claim that every guilty person swears he is innocent is not only untrue, but dangerous, and should never be tossed aside.

Avedon first:

Plenty of people admit they are guilty, plenty of people do not contest the facts, and even those who attempt to evade responsibility via the courts usually stop claiming innocence the moment they are convicted. When people have been in prison for years and are still claiming their innocence, there is actually a reasonable possibility that they are saying so because they are. That doesn't mean that everyone who does so is innocent, but that whole "that's what they all say" canard doesn't deserve the respect it so easily gets.

Jeralyn takes up Avedon's point and greatly expands it. I'm sure I would muddle her argument if I tried to summarize, so I'll just urge you to go read it.

After reading Avedon and Jeralyn, I realized that by letting pass what seemed to me an irrelevant point in this case, I was undercutting everything else I said. One of the most important safeguards against this sort of injustice happening again is paying attention to the clues that something is wrong. As Jeralyn points out, false confessions account for 20 percent of wrongful convictions. That's an unconscionable number. Anytime someone says that their confession was coerced, we should take the claim extremely seriously. And nobody should get away with saying, "Yeah, that's what they all say." And no one should blindly accept it when other people say it.

Including me.

I will be out of town and computorless for a few days, but I should be back on Monday. In the meantime, check out a few blogs on the right (the right side of the page, that is, not the political spectrum) that you haven't visited before. There's some great stuff over there.

A weird sense of humor must be in his genes
My son found this quote in the L.A. Times yesterday, and thought it was hilarious. I told him he and I were probably the only ones who would think it was funny, but he insists I'm wrong.

George Bush: "I'm deeply concerned about a leader who has ignored the United Nations for all these years, refused to conform to resolution after resolution after resolution, who has weapons of mass destruction."

Hey, when Bush is right, he's right. I'm a little concerned myself.

There is a statement in the Voice article (see the post below) that got me thinking. The author states that the fact that the real perpetrator of the crime was left free to rape again (he ultimately murdered a young woman) is even more troubling than the unjust conviction and imprisonment.

It struck me that there are so many disturbing things about this case that it is impossible to rank them, although inevitably people will insist on doing so:

* Five young men lost their reputations and several years of their lives because of a crime they did not commit -- a personal tragedy.

* The real criminal was free to commit more crimes, including murder.

* The fact that the confessions were coerced does not speak well for our system of justice. (Yes, we know this kind of things happens. That doesn't stop us from being shocked when such a glaring example of it is revealed.)

* The fact that the boys said at the time that the confessions were coerced and everyone assumed they were lying does not speak well for us as a society. Yes, every criminal says he's innocent, but the case was weak from the beginning and liberals especially should have been paying attention, should have noticed that something didn't smell right here. I didn't. We didn't.

* A generation of young minority men -- especially black men -- was unfairly stigmatized. (It should be noted, of course, that the stigma would have been grossly unfair even if every detail of the story most of us believed was gospel truth, but the fact that it was a lie compounds the injustice.)

* Americans built a myth out of a lie.


What's the most important issue here?

I've recently found myself in an interesting position when it comes to following reaction to the story. Because first Atrios, and then Cursor, linked to my post on the case, more than three thousand people came to this site over a three day period, the vast majority of them, I'm sure, looking for that story. The links in my referrer log come not just from Atrios, Cursor, and other blogs that have picked up on the story, but from many forums (I've long since lost count of how many) -- several of which I've looked at, because I was curious about what people were saying about the news.

It's hard to pin down the reaction. (I'd link to some of them, but my referrer log only keeps the last hundred links, and they've already passed into oblivion). A lot of conservatives (and, God help us, some feminists) are clinging to the old story, insisting that they have no "sympathy" with the convicted "rapists" because, first, no one has proved them innocent (I don't think that's how justice is supposed to work, but let's let that one pass) and anyway, even if the boys are innocent of that crime, they were no angels and if they were sent to prison for a crime they didn't commit, who cares? They probably committed some other crime they should have gone to prison for.

(If that sounds a bit incoherent, I apologize, but you know how forums are.)

In the kinder and more rational conservative neighborhoods, you'll find the argument that, yes, an injustice was done, but the truth eventually came out, so why do liberals focus on the injustice and fail to notice that we live in a great country where the truth eventually emerges? (Permit me, if you will, a somewhat off the wall thought: that argument reminded me of people like Chomsky saying, within days of September 11, that Americans need to understand that people around the world experience tragedies on this level all the time, that we are not unique in our suffering. There was a kernal of truth in Chomsky's statement, but his timing was tone deaf, to put it as kindly as I can manage. To both Chomsky and the conservatives who would like us to celebrate the good, just America that uncovers the truth, all I can say is, you're probably right, but give me a chance to grieve and rage before you ask me to agree with you.)

And then there is the liberal reaction, which was captured by Sisyphus Shrugged -- Oh, my God!

I'm not sure most of us have figured out yet exactly what we mean by that cry to heaven. Are we furious at the injustice of what was done to those boys? Partly, but that can't be the whole story. If it were, we would have the same punched in the gut feeling when we read about men released from death row because of new DNA evidence. And I don't think most people do feel that way. I don't. I think, in those cases what the more intelligent conservatives would like me to think in this case -- thank God justice was eventually served (although in the back of my head I'm nursing the obvious thought that those conservatives would be less happy with -- the death penalty is too enormous and final a tool to put in the hands of fallible human beings.)

Do we feel angry that the real criminal went free? I haven't seen anybody focus heavily on that one yet. Maybe because the kind of people most likely to fixate on that have not yet given up the old story. Maybe that will be their next stage. (And I will not be the least bit surprised if the story they come up with is -- the liberals let this scum go free.)

Do we worry about what it tells us about the unfairness of our justice system? Or are we embarrassed by our own willingness to believe the story? Are young black men understandably angry and the rest of us feeling guilty?

All of the above.

If I were a lawyer, I would probably care most about the first three disturbing things about the case, and be wondering what could be done to make sure it never happens again. That's the most important thing to think about in this story.

But I'm not a lawyer. I'm a writer, a storyteller. And what interests me is the last thing I mentioned -- the myth. It's a theme that weave through a lot of stories I write -- the way a belief, often a mistaken one, influences the choices we make, the world we create.

I said when I first wrote about this that the Central Park jogger story was one of those myths that change the way we view things. Following the discussions of the story in forums, I can't help but be aware of the tenacity of myth. A story is a powerful thing. It may be more powerful than any law -- and even harder to change.

More on the Central Park jogger case from The Village Voice. Prosecutors are still clinging to the original story, despite the new evidence:

According to reports, investigators are now exploring four scenarios: that Reyes acted alone as he says he did; that he was with a group that attacked the jogger; that he attacked her before or after she was attacked by a group. None of these scenarios, except Reyes acting alone, are consistent with the evidence to date. To push forward any other theory would contradict accounts of the attack as depicted in the confessions that form the basis of the initial convictions, and thus would enhance the position that the confessions were forced.

Meanwhile, some women over at Ms. magazine demonstrate how hard it can be to abandon a myth, even when facts shred it. Skepticism is a wonderful quality, but many of these women are simply making up "facts' like non-existent eyewitnesses in order to hang onto the old story.

Thank you to Ampersand (and Salty) for not letting the myth stand.

God bless you please, Mrs. Robinson
You can't keep a good Irish woman down.

Reading Is Fundamentalist
In a speech yesterday, Pope John Paul II stated something every reasonable person would certainly agree with -- that nothing could ever justify the murder of thousands of innocent people. But he went on to make a potentially far more controversial plea for "new political and economic initiatives capable of resolving the scandalous injustices and imbalances which continue to afflict many members of the human family, creating conditions favouring an uncontrollable explosion of the desire for revenge." More than that, he asked for prayers of "mercy and pardon" for the attackers.

That seems like a fairly clear message to me, although one that most of us would have a difficult time living up to.

But I guess I have a very weak understanding of papal language, because apparently those words were meant as a rebuke of opponents of American foreign policy and a call for punishment for the hijackers' supporters.

Theology is so complicated sometimes.

UPDATE: Rabbi Benjamin Blech offers a moving and thoughtful counterargument to the pope's call for forgiveness.

SECOND UPDATE: In regard to the pope's plea for prayers of forgiveness, Hesiod wrote to ask an excellent question, "Isn't it true that before one can forgive one's enemies, your enemy has to seek such forgiveness. Otherwise, what's the point?"

I think it's actually a fairly complicated question, and one I don't have a good answer to. It's an issue I've thought about a lot, but I've never been entirely satisfied with any of my own conclusions.

But then that's the nature of spiritual and moral issues for me -- they always raise more questions than they answer.

It depends, first of all, on how you view forgiveness. If you see it as a gift to your enemy, then certainly it would be absurd and perhaps immoral to grant that absolution to someone who hasn't even asked for it, let alone atoned for his sin.

I'm not even sure that I think forgiveness is always a good thing, even if the enemy asks for it and is sincere in his contrition. One of the most awe-inspiring and disturbing books I've read in recent years is Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower. The first half of the book consists of the story of Wiesenthal's encounter, in a concentration camp, with a dying Nazi soldier who asked for his forgiveness, not for anything he had done to him as an individual, but for his crimes against other Jews. Wiesenthal walked away, unable and unwilling to grant the request. The second half of the book consists of the responses of various people -- theologians, human rights activists, Holocaust survivors, and others -- to a question Wiesenthal poses: Did he do the right thing?

One of the things that disturbed me about the book was that, despite the fact that I grew up Catholic, and still consider Christianity (and, in fact, Catholicism) a strong part of my spiritual tradition, I was put off by the responses of virtually all Christians in the book, who answered that Jesus taught that we are required to forgive. The contrition may or may not be sincere, but we have to leave that up to God and assume that it is sincere. That seemed a very smug and cheap answer to me.

(I apologize if that's not a perfectly accurate summing up of the points made. It's been five or six years since I read the book. But a great deal of it, as you can probably tell, continues to haunt me.)

I simply can not accept that we're required to forgive whenever we're asked to do so. I don't think that any act is ultimately unforgivable, but I think Wiesenthal's response -- that he had no moral right to forgive a crime that had been committed against others, and since the others were dead, the possibility of forgiveness on earth died with them -- is far more moral than the "Christian" response. The Pope's plea for forgiveness, or at least asking us to ask God to forgive, reminds me of my discomfort with the Catholic response to Simon Wiesenthal. Not only do I not believe I have a moral obligation to forgive Mohammed Atta, I don't believe I have a moral right to do so. I don't believe anyone living -- not even the families of the dead -- have a right to do so. The possibility of forgiveness on earth was consumed in flames at the World Trade Center.

If there is a Hell, let him rot in it.

But there's another side of forgiveness -- although I'm not sure "forgiveness" is quite the right word. It's putting aside the anger, the need for revenge. And that's not a gift to your enemy, it's a gift to yourself. In that sense, asking God to "forgive" is -- and please bear with me, I'm not entirely sure what I'm saying here -- a way of saying, take the burden of vengeance from us. We put the issue of forgiveness or the lack of it into Your hands, and will not allow the hatred and rage that consumed Mohammed Atta to find a place in our own hearts.

And in that kind of forgiveness -- if that is what he was suggesting -- I think the Pope was right.

THIRD UPDATE: Hesiod has pointed out to me something I'd forgotten -- the pope's famous public forgiveness of the man who tried to assassinate him. Does this act give the pope a certain moral authority to speak about asking for forgiveness that he otherwise wouldn't have? Does having demonstrated such Christian forgiveness add to his persuasiveness?

I don't think so. Only the Pope can decide in his own conscience if he can (and should) forgive the man who injured him. But I don't think that gives him the moral authority to ask forgiveness for someone who has murdered others.

Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it.
The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and his ears are open unto their cry. -- Psalm 34:14-15

Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. -- Romans 12:17-19

And make not Allah because of your swearing by Him an obstacle to your doing good and guarding against evil and making peace between men, and Allah is Hearing, Knowing. -- Koran 2.224

Faith

Hope

Charity

Reflections

Brian Doyle's Leap

September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows

Ampersand at Alas, a blog has called my attention to an interesting discussion brewing over on the right wing of the blog world. It began with a post by Dawn Olsen, arguing that many of the bigger bloggers have a "condescending attitude toward women bloggers" and don't link to them as readily as they do to male bloggers. She also takes Glenn Reynolds to task for linking to her only when she's writing about something sexual, never to her more thoughtful posts, and she complains that he usually takes what she says out of context, in a way that comes off as "condescending or even vaguely insulting."

Diane E. at Letter from Gotham adds that, while it is true that there are a lot more men than women writing blogs, the bigger problem is that there's an enormous "double standard" in how seriously ideas are taken:

Whatever certain male bloggers say is accepted and worthy of the blogosphere richochet; whereas if a woman were to say it, it would have been dismissed or ignored. And -- when a woman speaks with knowledge on a subject, using logic and evidence, she is ignored.

She offers as an example the fact that Steven den Beste is much more widely linked to than she is, even though she is more knowledgeable and a better writer. (Immodest, maybe, but undeniably true. I disagree with her most of the time, but she is a first-rate writer.)

Ampersand adds some interesting non-blog related research on scientific credit and job applications that lends credence to what Diane E. says: Men's accomplishments seem to get more credit than equal accomplishments by women.

Reading all this as an abstract argument, I'd have to agree that there seems to be rampant sexism on the Web. And why should that be surprising? Why would anyone expect the virtual world to be more just than the real world?

But a funny thing happened to me on the way to that conclusion. I ran smack into myself. Ampersand uses the "paucity of links" to my blog, in comparison to "many less thoughtful and interesting blogs" to demonstrate the same kind of sexism existing on the left.

I'm pretty clueless about links, and I don't care about them as much as many people seem to, but I don't think that's true. I admit this is not a normal day, but the idea that I'm not widely linked to struck me a little funny this morning because I had almost 900 visitors to this site yesterday, primarily because of some "big" links -- mainly from Atrios. And I've had more than 3000 visitors this week because of a variety of other links -- all of them, with the exception of one from Avedon Carol, from men. I have no idea how many people go to other sites, but that's significantly more than my usual numbers, and to me it seems like a whole lot of people. I've published stories in some literary journals that have fewer than 900 subscribers.

Maybe there's a lot more sexism over on the right (no surprise there), but a lot of men with blogs have been extremely generous in their links to me and quite a few have written me nice, encouraging e-mails over the three months that I've been writing this blog. Believe me -- and this is coming from a woman who has identified herself as a feminist since she was sixteen -- if the left-wing male bloggers made up the powers-that-be, the world would be a better and more just place.

I'm not remotely dissatisfied with the number of links I've gotten. If anything, in fact, I've been stunned by the number of people who come here regularly. I started writing this blog in June, more or less on a whim, and with no intention of aiming for an audience. For years, I've been in the habit of getting up very early and writing. It started when I was nursing my son (who is about to go off to college) and couldn't get back to sleep after the 4 a.m. feeding. Figuring I might as well make use of the time, I started writing in a journal, writing whatever vague and random thoughts came to mind. Some of it was political, some spiritual, some personal, some off-the-wall, and a lot -- and this was the category that always interested me most -- was an unclassifiable mixture of the four. Some of those scribblings developed into short stories that I published. But most of it stayed in my notebooks. Thousands of pages, literally, of stuff that didn't seem to fall into any category. For years, I've thought that a lot of the "stuff" in my notebooks was as interesting as any of my stories, but unfortunately wasn't remotely publishable.

Writing "Body and Soul" gave me another way of journal writing. I knew it was public, in a way, but for quite a while I didn't believe anyone was really looking at it. But little by little other bloggers started linking to me. Every time they did, my stats would shoot up for a day or two, then settle back to normal. But I noticed that "normal" kept getting higher and higher. Each time someone big linked to me, new people found me, and some of them -- for reasons I have yet to fathom -- kept coming back.

The point is, I guess, that I'm doing this mostly for myself, and anyone else who wants to venture in and join a kind of mental and spiritual journey (I apologize if that sounds terribly Californian, but stay with me -- I promise not to mention yoga or granola). Every once in awhile I write something of interest to people who aren't really part of my journey from idea to idea, and if they come for a day and don't come back until someone tells them to, that's fine. I'm not going to do anything different just to draw those people in.

Ampersand described my blog as "thoughtful," Thank you -- I think that's a good description. Lots of thoughts. Many incoherent, but thoughts nonetheless. And "thoughtful" in the other meaning of the word as well -- I care a great deal about kindness and politeness. I have no desire to pick fights with anyone, and I won't bother to respond if someone tries to pick a fight with me (a few people have tried) -- I regard it as the blogging equivalent of panhassling. I understand that fights drive up the numbers, and I don't care.

If I have fewer links than some other people, I suspect thoughtfulness has more to do with it than my gender. There are many other blogs written by men -- Alas, a blog among them -- that don't seem to be linked to as often as they deserve to be. Among them are many first-rate writers: Yuval Rubinstein, for example, Dominion, Sam Heldman, and Joseph Duemer. Gender has nothing to do with it. Thought and reason can be a disadvantage among bloggers, if you're looking for numbers. But I suspect none of these people care much about it anymore than I do. Perhaps that's a stereotypically "feminine" trait, but it's one plenty of wonderful men share.

Question Mark # 15: Freedom

Chilling and brilliant. Using the most effective piece of political protest music ever was a stroke of genius. Go see it. Now.

Via Lean Left

In defense of my gloriously crazy state...

Just for the record, that great "California cliche" Norah Vincent is a New Yorker. Egocentrism and shallowness recognize no geographical borders.

First stop Iraq, then on to the Vatican...
John Ashcroft will be holding a press conference this afternoon to announce that Pope John Paul II has been declared a terrorist sympathizer.

One of the most disreputable things the Bush administration has done is force Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, out of her job as UN human rights commissioner, in which she has served as a gloriously articulate and outspoken advocate for human rights (which pretty much explains why Bush objected to her). May her voice endure. Rath De ort, Ms. Robinson.

**************************
On a related note, over the weekend I cobbled together a newstracker on human rights issues from Moreover, because they aren't isues that the newspapers I regularly read cover as well as I'd like to see them covered. If anyone else is interested, you'll find it here, and I'll try to get it into my links pretty soon.

Sometimes heroism comes in the form of a quiet, one-time illegal immigrant, armed with nothing but a squegee. I love this story.

Women aim to increase role as global peacemakers

Why women need to be involved in peace negotiations:

* The effects of war on women often differ from those on men.

* "Women tend to look at an issue from a more family-oriented stance, and it's in our nature to think about what will happen to the children. And most women Ð not all women Ð prefer peaceful alternatives to war."

* You can't expect warlords to develop a formula for lasting peace.

Via Sisyphus Shrugged

If you're old enough to remember back to 1989, the story is probably embedded in your memory, with the emotional resonance of a parable or a fairy tale -- a cautionary tale for women, a sign of the brutality of our times for everyone, and, for too many, a justification for racist fears.

In 1989, a 28-year-old woman was jogging in Central Park late at night, when she was attacked by a gang of teenage boys who had gathered for a night of "wilding" -- roaming the park and attacking people at random. She was beaten so severely, she lost three-quarters of her blood and was in a coma for 12 days. When she came to, she had no memory of the attack.

Thirty teenage boys were arrested. Six boys, ages 14 to 17, were tried for the assault. Five were convicted.

The young woman was white. The boys were black and Hispanic. That shouldn't matter, but of course it always does.

The story confirmed everybody's worst fears about young men, race, class, and urban life. It confirmed something many conservatives wanted to believe and most liberals were doing their damnedest not to allow themselves to believe -- that there were growing numbers of young men (most of them -- oh, God, do we have to admit this -- minorities) who had no moral center whatsoever. Animals.

Thirteen years later, there's one more detail that needs to be added to the story: It was a lie.

In January, Matias Reyes, a man not originally charged in the crime, confessed to the rape and attempted murder. Recent DNA analysis backs up his story. Moreover, key pieces of physical evidence that helped convict the five teenage boys have been discredited through DNA tests.

There was a rape. There was a brutal assault. There were no gangs of animals destroying everything in their path for pleasure.

There have been more horrendous stories, of course -- people who spent decades in prison, or even came close to execution, only to have their innocence established by DNA testing. The boys in the Central Park case were sentenced to between 5 and 15 years, and all of them have been released.

And yet somehow this story seems worse to me, because its effect was not only on the lives of those five teenagers -- as horribly unfair as that was -- but on all of us.

A lot of people say that September 11 changed everything, which is nonsense, of course, but it changed a lot of things, among them Americans' willingness to set aside the Constitution and launch wars that no one can explain. Some stories change the way we view the world, and the story of the Central Park jogger was one of those. It emboldened people who were already filled with hate, and made those of us who weren't a little more defensive. I, for one, grew more embarrassed by people like Al Sharpton, who seemed to cry racism at every turn. (It should be noted now -- for whatever it's worth -- that one of the few people to stand up for the Central Park "rapists" was Al Sharpton). I became less likely to wonder if racism lay behind an arrest. I assumed the boys were guilty. And I became more likely to assume that if a nagging suspicion that something was wrong tugged at me, I was simply guilty of having an embarrassing "bleeding heart."

The revised story wasn't widely covered. It won't have an emotional impact on as many people as the original story had. It probably won't change anything big.

But it will make me trust my bleeding heart again. And nobody's going to make me feel embarrassed or defensive about it.

Never let it be said that I passed up an opportunity to praise a member of the Bush family who says something intelligent. I don't get many opportunities to do that, but one just arrived: George Bush has a very smart wife.

If you're looking for a nice place to stay on your next vacation in Afghanistan, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose previous hobbies have included crushing prisoners under tanks, has a brand-new indoor swimming pool. The poolhouse includes a dozen chandeliers, pillars inlaid with colored glass, and a diving board with a spiral staircase. Siderooms contain saunas and a pool table. A greenhouse is in the planning stages.

General Dostum claims he built the structure to entertain foreign guests, and, indeed, he shares his pool with U.S. Special Forces soldiers -- except for the women, because of course that would be immoral.

Meanwhile, outside the poolhouse, life goes on.

There's something I've been wondering about. Many times I've heard Republicans make a conservative point and argue that it must be true because the idea was acknowledged even by the "liberal Washington Post." I was just wondering if anyone had ever read the liberal Washington Post. Where I live, they only seem to sell the conservative one. If you know anything about the liberal version, let me know. I'd like to take a look at it.

I suspect there is a special place in heaven reserved for lawyers who (1) use their skills to balance the scales a bit on the side of the less powerful, and (2) can explain what they do in English. Sam Heldman explains everything a non-lawyer needs to know about labor law as it relates to the possible dockworkers' strike that could shut down west coast ports, and why Bush's threat to send in military scabs is so outrageous.

On a side note, Ignatz seems to be holding as the name of Sam's blog, so I'm changing the name in my links as well.

Salon ran an odd piece today on people's "forbidden thoughts" about September 11 -- the improper, in some cases just plain nasty, thoughts people have had, and for the most part kept to themselves. Most of them should have stayed hidden, but I found this story interesting:

"I volunteered downtown for a few weeks right afterwards with a group of actors. They put me in a coffee shop. Most of the people were doing it as a social outing, a way to get publicity, a way to make themselves important. There was a lot of talking on the cell phone. There were a lot of propositions. A 21-year-old national guardsman proposed to me.

"It was there where I started to hate cops and firemen. The cops in the middle of the night were kind and friendly and appreciated the coffee and the food and the company. We all shared being freaked out together. But come daybreak? A bunch of fat cops throwing our food around because it wasn't good enough -- we didn't have skim milk for coffee, or it wasn't the right kind of bread.

"I'm sure some people treat service people that way, but it was beyond my comprehension -- especially while they talked, not quietly, about retiring because they were making so much overtime and their pensions were based on their previous year's earnings. All while we stood out there all night for free making them hot coffee and soup.

"And really, what's all this shit about the fireman being heroes? That's their job, to be heroes. That's why they signed up. Once a month you go run into a burning building and grab a cat and the rest of the time you sit in the firehouse and play cards.

"I used to think all firemen were hot. I now think they are slimy. At least four times last October I was in a bar where a fireman was so forward and sleazy, saying things like 'It's been so hard. You can't believe it' while pawing me. I'm sure his buddy who died running into a building on fire would feel vindicated by this slimeball getting laid, but I'm not going to participate." -- Anne, 31, an advertising sales manager in New York

I have an uncle who's a retired fireman and a brother-in-law who's a cop, and they're both great people, but these comments struck a nerve, because I know to the bone that she's right. The biggest problem with worshipping "heroes" is that at some point we stop letting them be human beings. We forget that the same guy can rush into a burning building to save a life one day and the next day beat his kids, cheat on his taxes, and grope the waitress who brings his lunch. If any of the bad stuff comes out, there are only two possible responses. Either we all insist it's not true, and get angry at the person who revealed it, (how dare you talk about a hero like that! ) or we turn on the "hero," deciding he wasn't what we thought he was.

We're still at the how dare you stage with police and firefighters, but we turned on the victims' families long ago. You want money? You want more information? You want the press to leave you alone? How dare you? What kind of heroes are you?

To fit someone into a hero mold is, ironically, to take away his humanity. To believe in, and insist on, perfect plaster saints, is to lose a great deal of our own. There isn't a human being on the planet who isn't a complex mess of traits. Thank God.

I don't think Anne has the whole story, despite her admirable honesty. Maybe she doesn't know enough working class New Yorkers to realize how often uncomfortable and unfamiliar emotions hide behind propositions and bragging about money. Her story reminds me of my brother-in-law, who's a plumber. The last time we stayed at his house (in New Jersey), he went off to work each day carrying massive amounts of food, swearing it was all for him -- he worked hard and got hungrier than we could imagine, he insisted. It was pretty obvious that he was bringing lunch for the men who worked for him -- all immigrants (which my brother-in-law is as well, he's just been here longer), all of whom he called the most godawful racist names (not to their faces), insisting that he didn't give a shit about them. Giving is really hard for some people, and they can't do it without doing everything in their power to let their inner asshole shine through.

Sometimes that's just the way heroes are.

Younger than Jack Benny

Everyone should be entitled to a small fib now and then. I think we should make a deal with Ann Coulter. If she stops lying about liberals, she can continue to claim to be 38 for the rest of her life and all we'll say is, "And doesn't she look young for her age?"

Lots of people bash Andrew Sullivan. Ted Barlow Googles him to a bloody pulp.

A few more members of the nasty riffraff

I've added a few weblogs I like a lot over on the right (not a comfortable place for any of these people, but I have enough template trouble without trying to move them to the left):

skippy the bush kangaroo -- This one kept turning up in other people's links, but I resisted looking at it because I just assumed I couldn't possibly like a blog called "skippy the bush kangaroo." Smartass one-liners and juvenile humor, right? Well, yeah, pretty much. Except that the one-liners are really funny and the humor is sharp. And he sneaks in a lot of smart analysis between the jokes. Now if he could only capitalizeÉ

Ungodly Politics -- Politics and religion "from a Godless American point of view." Reading my blog, some people might be surprised that I include this one among my favorites. But I love people with a questioning attitude toward religion, the comments by "Lazarus" (I assume that's a pen name, not a surname) are insightful, and he discovers lots of obscure but interesting stories. It's pretty new, but already good.

Sam Heldman -- Yesterday afternoon, he changed the name of his blog to "Wolves Howling," by evening it was "Ignatz." I have no idea what it will be today, so I'll just stick with "Sam Heldman" -- a lawyer from Alabama who writes about the law and labor issues in a clear, non-lawyerly way and still has time for comics, Bob Dylan, and Andrew Sullivan bashing. A true Renaissance man.

Today I've been Atriosed, Nielsen Haydened, Searled, Rylandered, Barlowed, and Frantzed. Don't you just love being a member of the nasty riffraff? The best part of all is that so far today I've had more visitors than the Jackson Browne fanzine.

I ought to be mad at Andrew Northrup for making me laugh so hard I spit coffee on my computer screen, but what's done is done. Read Ani DiFranco On My Radio Blues (I can't get a permalink, so scroll down if necessary) -- just don't have anything in your mouth when you do.

Alas, a blog has a wonderful and wise essay about why Peanuts is better than Garfield. It's as much a celebration of the human spirit as Peanuts at its very best was, and an argument for why kindness is better than meaness (an argument no one should have to make, but nowadays it is a necessity.) And I'm not going to tell you any more than that about it, because I just want to force you to go read it.

The Christian Science Monitor has two excellent pieces today about the need for skepticism when it comes to "evidence" offered in times of war fever. The first, by Tom Regan explores the discredited story of Iraqi soldiers tossing babies out of incubators that, while it didn't provide a true casus belli, manipulated people's emotions to make them more ready to listen to the "evidence" of Saddam's threat to Kuwait and the entire Middle East before the Gulf War.

The second piece, by Scott Peterson, looks at the intelligence information the first Bush administration presented as proof of the Iraqi threat, which turned out to be, in the words of a reporter who examined the evidence, "a pretty serious fib."

The article also makes a convincing case that the current president has inherited his father's ability to stretch the facts (or even make them up out of thin air) to get what he wants.

Who would have guessed there could be so much wisdom in games? Recently, Brad DeLong drew interesting lessons about the nature of democracy out of a computer game. Today, Nicholas Kristof looks at a Pentagon simulation game that sent the United States against an enemy in the Persian Gulf. We got creamed.

The Pentagon put a nice (and extremely creative) spin on it -- by replaying the game and learning from mistakes, we eventually won. Unfortunately that required a couple of tricks that probably won't be available in a real war -- ordering the enemy to disclose its troop locations and having the ability to bring dead soldiers back to life.

One retired lieutenant general Kristof interviewed, however, did seem to get the deeper lesson of the games. He said that "excessive faith in technology, inadequate appreciation of the fog of war, lack of understanding of the enemy, and simple hubris" -- the "mindset in Vietnam" (and, I would argue, the mindset of a president who avoided going to Vietnam) -- made him nervous.

Me too.

UPDATE: The Guardian has more coverage of the Pentagon's game, including an interview with retired Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, the Vietnam veteran who pointed out the workings of the "Vietnam mindset" to Nicholas Kristof.

With Focus Shifting to Iraq, Domestic Issues Fade

The prospect of weeks of debate in Congress about granting President Bush the authority to oust Saddam Hussein means that events abroad, rather than the domestic issues pushed by Democrats this summer, could dominate the nation's political discussion for easily half of the general election campaign this fall.

Several Republicans said today that the focus on Iraq would serve the political needs of their party going into the close Congressional elections.

Any comment would be superfluous.

If Margaret Dumont had a blog...

Old Norah:

Web logs are infuriating because they are thoughtful alternatives to the self-important New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and their toady satellites, much of whose reporting has become hardly less biased than the bloggers'. Bloggers at least have the honesty to admit their biases up front. They don't pretend to be objective.

But they do provide a healthy criticism of the liberal establishment's hopelessly arrogant monotone. What's more, they make news interactive, so that we can all stop yelling at the television and actually do something. Readers can opine, as well as argue, grapple or exchange expletives with their host. That's something you'll never get in print.

As one popular blogger, Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist James Lileks, put it: "The newspaper is a lecture. The Web is a conversation." Amen.

New Norah:

But, I must say that the so-called blogosphere, liberating as it can be, is -- as I have had the misfortune of discovering in recent days -- also full of nasty riffraff and wannabe pundits who because they haven't an earnest, original idea in their heads, fill their empty existences sniping impotently at legitimate targets. By legitimate targets I mean people who have actually had some measure of success in their professional lives, people who get published regularly in the mainstream press because, yes, they have a certain degree of talent, but moreso because they have something more to say on a weekly basis than 'boo hoo' or 'look ma, no hands.'

Sadly, as one friend of mine put it recently, the internet is something of an 'echo chamber,' and this means that even the flimsiest vitriol gets posted and reposted, annotated and updated ad nauseam until the accumulated pettifogging becomes a kind of beslobbered palimpsest that looks and reads like a snot rag.

You've got to hand it to Norah Vincent. She managed to say two utterly contradictory and irreconcilable things and both of them were stupid. That does, I must admit, take "a certain degree of talent."

I'm so jealous of that talent. And don't you think Nasty Riffraff would be a good name for a blog? I think the last person to use the word "riffraff" convincingly was Margaret Dumont (the dowager snob in the Marx Brothers movies, for readers who are younger than I want to think about).

How King Fahd Spent His Summer Vacation

The 81-year-old Saudi King Fahd is vacationing on Spain's Costa del Sol with an entourage of more than 3,000. Apparently he has different ideas about what room service should provide than most of us.

Several Spanish media outlets reported that a British agency has provided a large group of women to accompany the Saudi men during their vacations in Spain, on two conditions: the women must be young and blonde, and must be replaced every 15 days.

Although prostitution is legal in Spain, procuring is punishable by law. Nevertheless, no authority or organization has moved against the British agency, even though the contract was made public.

While in Spain, the King is expected to meet with Colin Powell, to discuss future US actions against Iraq, as well as a lawsuit that a group of Saudis are preparing against the US government and several media outlets for "psychological and economic damages" suffered since September 11.

I guess the girls are there to ease the poor Saudis' psychological distress.

This morning 15 people were killed by a car bomb in Kabul.


Later, Hamid Karzai survived an assassination attempt in Kandahar.


It's not clear yet whether the two attacks are connected, but both are being blamed on remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, who may have joined forces with disaffected warlords, including former prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who denies he has linked up with al-Qaeda, but has called for a jihad against Karzai and foreign forces in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar has been implicated in many bombings in the country since he returned from Iran early this year. The CIA attempted to assassinate him last May.


I have no great wisdom to offer about this news, which is still coming out in bits and pieces, but several things need to be said, at least tentatively.


The first is that Hekmatyar was one of many mujahadeen who received funding from the US government and the CIA. I'm not suggesting that having supported him in the past, we are in any way hypocritical to oppose him now, or somehow reaping what we sowed. I am certainly suggesting, however, that there is a lesson here about turning a blind eye to the crimes of our "allies" that ought to be kept in mind both in our relationships with other countries (Pakistan, for instance) and with lawless forces like the warlords we are using in the continuing hunt for al-Qaeda.


I chose the warlords and Pakistan as examples for a reason. Karzai has been pleading for months for an expansion of the International Security Assistance Force. But the political goal of a stable Afghanistan is in conflict both with the military goal of using warlords to hunt for al-Qaeda (so that American troops won't have to) and George Bush's political goal of not getting bogged down with "nation building" in Afghanistan. The personal threat to Karzai's life is not the most important issue. He is, after all, under constant watch by American bodyguards -- a privilege obviously not extended to most Afghans. He seems like a genuinely decent man who might have a chance to create a functioning government in Afghanistan, if the world (and the US in particular) would only give him the tools to do it. But the lawlessness of many of our proxies makes his task impossible. We are using the warlords to chase al-Qaeda, and putting Karzai's government at risk, but if Karzai fails, terrorists will once again have the conditions they need to thrive.

We made a mistake with Hekmatyar. We seem to be making the same mistake again.


Now the Pakistani connection. According to the NY Times of September 2:

Last week, Abdullah, the Afghan foreign minister, appealed to senior Pakistani officials in Islamabad to halt what the Afghans contend has been a new pattern of support for Mr. Hekmatyar from Pakistan's military intelligence organization, Inter-Services Intelligence.

The Pakistani agency developed close ties with Mr. Hekmatyar during the years when it was funneling substantial American military and financial aid to Mr. Hekmatyar's guerrilla group.

Afghan officials said the Pakistani officials listened to the appeals without confirming or denying that there had been fresh contacts with Mr. Hekmatyar.

The twists and turns of culpability are mind-boggling here, but it comes down to this: We are supporting a country which is in turn supporting a man who is attempting to overthrow a country that we are also supporting.

Now somebody explain to me once again about this new era of moral clarity we're supposed to be in. I don't think I'm quite clear on the concept.

Via Sisyphus Shrugged

Do the Bush Brothers have something against women and children?

First, Jeb Bush puts a man who believes bruising children is a religious duty in charge of children's welfare. Now his big brother plans to appoint to the committee that advises the federal government on domestic abuse law two representative of the Independent Women's Forum, a group that opposes the Violence Against Women Act and supported a lawsuit challenging it.

Listen carefully, because this is so bizarre, it's hard to take in: Two women who believe that "the battered women's movement has outlived its useful beginnings" and are convinced that the Violence Against Women Act wastes money and encourages battered women to mistrust men (it's okay, Nicole, just trust O.J.), women who believe rape and domestic violence statistics are wildly exaggerated, and who are terribly amused by programs that "educate" judges (those are their dismissive quotation marks) about domestic violence, will be advising the Justice Department and Health and Human Services on programs providing shelters and hotlines, tracking abusers, and preventing rape on college campuses.

Their solution to violence against women? Give them guns. (Of course we can count on the Independent Women's Forum to provide legal defense for the more than 1 million women who are battered severely enough to reach police attention and are told, "Nothing we can do, honey. Get yourself a little gun.")

I guess as long as George Bush sits in the White House, we can expect that every time the issue of women's rights comes up, the response will be, "We got rid of the Taliban, what more do you want? Jeez, women always expect too much from guy."

The letters to the editor in today's LA Times (especially the first one) show why the Catholic Church's problems aren't limited to a few bad priests.

"Never underestimate the women of the world." -- June Zeitlin, executive director, Women's Environment and Development Organization

There were plenty of disappointments at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (starting with our own fearless leader's fear of exposing his delicate ears to words like "sustainable development"), but there was one small but important success.

The health care paragraph of the plan that came out of the summit initially included boilerplate language about health care services being consistent with "cultural and religious values" but left out the rest of the boilerplate -- that it must also reflect "human rights and fundamental freedoms." The second phrase is needed to prevent "religious values" from being interpreted as supporting things like genital mutilation and denial of health care to women.

The Bush administration wanted "religious values," but not "human rights." (In my religion, that would be the same thing, but apparently not in the president's). But delegates from Europe and Canada fought back, and the "human rights" language was included.

For women in poor countries, the right to reproductive health care is a matter of life and death. This time, life won.

Brad DeLong has an eloquent and topical discussion of computer game values with his children. (Too bad George Bush the First wasn't this smart of a father).

I can't quarrel with Hesiod's comment that liberals have a "tendency to form a circular firing squad," and I don't expect to find much wisdom in web forums, but I'm not quite as offended as he is by the Democratic Underground "debate" over the possibility of Bill McBride choosing Alex Penelas as a running mate. Not yet anyway.

Since I'm obviously not remotely as knowledgeable about Florida politics as Hesiod is, I don't know how "conservative" Penelas really is. But I have to admit, when I saw his name, the first thought that came to mind was, "Oh my God, are they talking about that Alex Penelas -- the "Democrat" who helped stop the Miami-Dade recount? If Penelas turns him down, who's McBride's next choice -- Ralph Nader?

Anger is a reasonable response here. Really staying away from voting is not a reasonable response. Nor is putting out one iota less effort than you normally would. But you gotta say what you gotta say.

Believe me, I know about lousy political choices. If Gray Davis doesn't sign the bill authorizing binding third party arbitration for farm workers, I will scream at the top of my lungs that he is nothing but a worthless corporate stooge. But I'll still vote for him. Better a culturally liberal corporate stooge (who, to be honest, remembers from time to time what his party affiliation is) than a corporate stooge with loony Christian right tendencies. No contest.

There's a line between being honest about your frustration with the corporate-friendly wing of Democratic Party and being so holy and pure that you see the smallest capitulation on the part of the Democrats as "proof" that they are no better than the Republicans. And in Florida, I think, there's a line between an instinctive Gaaaad, no and a snotty refusal to vote for a less than perfect candidate.

Now's a fine time for anger and frustration. As long as people know when it's time to end it.

Some intriguing numbers from a well worth reading New York Times Magazine article on young Iranians:

* Fraction of Iran's population that is under 30: 2/3

* Percentage of Iranians who think their system of government is fine the way it is: 11

* Number of Iranians with access to the Internet: 1.5 million

* Expected number in 5 years: at least 5 million

* Number of underground music studios that have appeared in Tehran in the last five years: 30

* Price of an abortion in Tehran: $500

* Price to have a woman's technical virginity "restored": $50

* Price to be smuggled out of Iran: $5,000 - $6,000

The More Things ChangeÉ
There's an old story (which is probably apocryphal, since I've heard it told about Lyndon Johnson, George Wallace, and -- rather unconvincingly -- Jimmy Carter) about a southern politician who lost an election to a race-baiter and vowed never to be cast as less racist than his opponent again. Times have changed -- kind of. Two Republican Congressional candidates in Georgia are apparently competing for the title of most homophobic.

If Bill Simon moved to Georgia, he'd fit right into that race.

UPDATE: On the other hand, Bill Clinton wouldn't have a chance in that election, bless his heart.

I don't know what came over me the other day when I said that a lot of left-wing writing was boring. Okay, I do know what came over me, and a lot of it is boring. But as long as the sharpest, most entertaining political writer in the country is on our side, I shouldn't complain too much. And in her latest column, the woman is definitely wearing her kick-ass boots.

I admit there is a lot of competition, but I think Ungodly Politics has found the single most offensive piece of merchandising to appear this year.

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here. -- Brian Doyle

I rarely watch television, but I may make an exception for PBS's Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero tonight. Although I'm inclined to stay even farther away from television than usual in the next week or so, this show sounds like it has the potential to offer some genuine reflection and illumination. The range of people interviewed suggests more depth and breadth than you normally find in the press (especially television) when it deals with religion. And how often am I likely to find, on television, people with more questions than answers about God? Seriously, when was the last time you saw a "religious leader" on TV asking questions, not acting like God had personally handed him the tablets with all the answers?

If there is one thing I have absolute faith in it is lack of certainty.

The show's website also has a link to one of the most moving pieces (I'm not sure whether to call it an essay or a prose poem) that I've read in a long time -- Brian Doyle's Leap, which accomplishes the miracle of forcing you to look again at horror and nevertheless coming away with hope and faith.

An editor tells Ann Coulter we don't welcome haters, Ann, and that's what you are.

Just a thought: Editors are unlikely to take a principled stand that some rhetoric crosses the line, but is it possible that editors will realize that once you get past the brief titillation that comes from someone saying shocking things, hate speech just starts to bore readers? In order to hold her readers, Coulter would have to keep getting more and more shocking -- which, short of passing out weapons and unambiguous murder instructions, would be pretty hard to do. Within her brief moment of fame, she's already played out most of the permutations of hate. She shot her wad. In the end -- and I think it will be soon -- she won't go away because she crossed the line, or because her lies have been revealed, but because she's boring. There just aren't that many ways to say "I hate liberals" -- and that's all she's got.

Richard Goldstein has a beautiful and thoughtful piece in The Village Voice about the anniversary of September 11. He suggests that "the state of reflection at the heart of Yom Kippur" is both more appropriate and more attuned to the way most Americans feel at the moment than the mix of sentimentality, militarism and merchandising we will probably witness. It's an exquisite ode to the value that genuine religious traditions continue to hold.

Separated at birth?

Sisyphus Shrugged has notice a similarity between a certain son of an evangelist and a son of a president (and no, I am not going to tell you what else they are sons of -- I've told you many times, I'm a nice Catholic girl).

"As one who believes there is much merit in this Populist heritage, it always seemed to me perfectly logical that government should play an active role in the nation's business affairs, and I have never lost faith in the government's ability to guarantee economic justice to all people." -- Albert Gore Sr.

The Los Angeles Times truck overturned in Ventura yesterday so I got the Sunday Times a day late, but better late than never.

The Times had an interesting piece by Kyle Longley, who has a biography of Albert Gore Sr. coming out soon, which suggests that Gore Jr.'s populism is not only not fake, it's the very core of who he is, handed down from his father.

It's a fascinating piece, with a very different view of Gore than I've seen anywhere else.

The Christian Science Monitor ran an interesting article recently which argued that the press has matured over the past year in the way it covers religion. I think there's some truth in that. It wasn't very long ago that the press had only two models of religion -- the perfect Mother Teresa and the wicked televangelists. In between was a foggy gray area inhabited by people who believed in God and maybe even went to church every week, but unless those people voted as a group or tried to ban some books or movies, the press wasn't terribly interested in them. Everything fit neatly into heaven, hell or purgatory -- maybe it was the religious model itself that inspired such simplistic thinking.

In the past year we have learned everything there is to know about the worst horrors religion is capable of dealing out (at least we pray that we have), from slaughtering thousands to shredding children's lives. Any decent and reasonable person could be excused for tossing up his hands and muttering, the hell with it. If this is what religion is, may it die a quick and unmourned death. Not even Mother Teresa could balance the scale on this evil.

An understandable response -- and yet not many people seem to have resorted to it. And the press especially has moved back from that precipice. The press, the CSM article points out, has been unbending in its coverage of religious evil, from "the phony assertions of Islamic terrorists about their religion's mandate" to Catholic leaders who "waffled in the face of unspeakable crimes." (The adjective, I suspect, is more apt than the writer realizes -- the crimes were committed precisely because no one could speak of them.) The press this year has "demonstrated its capacity to force religion to reckon in democracy's public square." And though the CSM doesn't make the connection, I can't help but wonder if tough coverage of priestly pedophilia (coverage the press avoided for decades at least in part because of fear of being perceived as anti-Catholic) grew out of the way it was brought home to us last year that no one ought to get away with evil by calling it holy. No one. Ever.

But while the press has become more willing to take on religious power, the coverage has also become, ironically, more sensitive and nuanced.

A week or so ago, I had the television on Phil Donahue's show while I was making dinner. I wasn't paying much attention. It was background noise while I flattened and breaded the chicken. Phil lectured Gary Bauer, Bauer lectured back, and I flattened a breast with my wooden mallet. All of us pounding -- it kind of blended to together. When I grew tired of Phil and the fundie, I went over to turn off the tv, to replace the pointless religious hostility with Coltrane (a good rule for the spiritual life -- turn off the fundamentalists and turn on music: there is more of God's voice in a few bars of Coltrane than in an hour of Bauer). Before I got a chance, though, a woman joined the conversation. I don't even know who she was, but she asked a question that intrigued me, "Where is the great religious middle?"

Good question. I'm not sure it's hit television yet, where the fundamentalists still manage to pass themselves off as the voice of religion (if not the conscience of God himself). But in print, over the past year, it seems to me I've read more about that middle than I can remember seeing in my lifetime.

The crisis in the Catholic Church seemed to sum it up, because the conflict didn't play out as religious vs. secular, but as religious vs. religious: a Church bureaucracy in conflict with the people it betrayed, people as deeply religious as the pope. The press suddenly had to deal with enormous varieties of religious experience -- abused boys (and girls -- unfortunately the press has virtually ignored them) who reached adulthood struggling to balance a sense that God had betrayed them, with a faith that would not go away, and people who had their innocent faith in their Church shattered, and yet seemed to grow overnight into a deeper, more questioning, more adult faith.

That's a lot more complicated than Mother Teresa is good, Tammy Faye Bakker is weird. But it's also a much more interesting story. If the press has gotten a little better at dealing with religion this year -- and I think it has -- maybe all along it was just waiting for a good story to tell.

Go, T.J.!

For the first five years after my mother and I moved to California, we lived in Chula Vista, which is just this side of the Mexican border. I haven't been back in a long time, and I've heard it's gentrified a bit since I left, but in the '60s we called it "Chuchu" (if it comes out sounding like what a little kid calls a train, you said it wrong, say it as if it were a proposition) or "Chulajuana" because while San Diegans assumed it was a suburb of San Diego, the locals knew it was really a suburb of Tijuana. That wasn't just because a big chunk of the population had arrived fairly recently from Mexico. Even if you weren't Mexican, going "downtown" never meant going to San Diego, an ugly, right-wing little Navy town back then, it meant going to T.J. -- a much cooler, brighter, looser place.

Newsweek International Edition just came out with a list of some of the most vibrant and creative cities in the world (some of them pretty surprising -- Kabul?), and second on their list, right after Austin, is good old Aunt Jane. The freedom and mix of cultures that was just a hell of a lot of fun when I was a kid is producing a flourishing arts cultures lately.

Congratulations to my teenage hangout.

I think I have the beginning of an answer to my question yesterday about whether or not Tony Blair's joining the campaign to pressure companies to reveal payments to foreign governments was as big a step forward as it appeared to me.

The answer: Not really, but keep the faith.

Some of the NGOs that have supported the plan pounced on the voluntary nature of Blair's proposal yesterday, and said that only binding regulation would have any effect.

But Blair suggested that binding regulation was a possibility next year.

Maybe I'm not quite cynical enough, or maybe I'm shell-shocked after almost two years with a president who doesn't seem to have the needs of people in poor countries as part of his mental universe, but a head of state who is even aware of the connection between poverty and corporate corruption seems to me a small miracle.

This interests me, although I'm not sure how much to make of it: It looks like Tony Blair is latching onto the campaign by George Soros and several NGOs to pressure oil, gas, and mining companies that do business in underdeveloped countries to reveal how much money they give to those governments in taxes, fees and royalties. That would give citizens of poor countries where money has a long history of being siphoned off by dictators a tool to fight the looters.

Blair is pressing right now for companies to voluntarily reveal the information, but has suggested that he might take stronger steps -- including measures to stop non-compliant companies from being listed on the British stock exchange -- if the voluntary measures don't work.

That sounds to me like a wonderful thing, but does it have any real teeth or is it just public relations?

As if you didn't already have enough reasons to vote against George Bush in 2004, here's the mother of all reasons: Time Magazine is reporting that Colin Powell plans to leave at the end of Bush's first (and, please God, onlyÉ) term. Imagine George Bush with no reasonable adult to explain things to him and try not to cry.

Demosthenes' reasonable remark that the right wouldn't care about Islamic women's rights (I'll just let you go over there to find his infinitely more colorful way of phrasing it) if they weren't looking for an excuse to go to war drew some rather prickly responses, including one noting that "liberal women's studies programs" only talk about mistreatment of women but it took a conservative to do something about it and all those silly women don't even have the good grace to be "happy" about it.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that only a conservative man would think coming into a country, announcing that all the women are now free, and then looking around for more cool battles to fight accomplished anything. There is still a enormous amount that needs to be done, but apparently the Republicans have lost interest. I'm sure Afghan women, like women everywhere, understand that if you start a job, you finish it and you clean up the mess you made afterwards. If only George Bush were female.

Women in Afghanistan don't need big strong Republican men to save them. What they need are the conditions in the country that would allow them to do it for themselves.

UPDATE: Alas, a blog has a great piece on RAWA and why it is important to directly support Afghan women's groups.