A lump of coal in his stocking just isn't enough
The daughter of Sisyphus has a Christmas wish for the president.

Would you like to hear my Ebeneezer Scrooge impression?
Thank you, Devra. You've beautifully and righteously vented on something that's bothered me most of my life -- the distinct lack of charity in a lot of "charity." I've never sorted toy donations, but I've done canned food drives, and clothing donations, and at some point I always end up mumbling to myself, "Exactly when did you people come to the conclusion that the poor aren't human?" The one donation to clothing drives that sends me round the bend is torn underwear. What kind of people think the poor are so desperate they'd wear someone else's old underwear? And are they sitting at home basking in the warm glow of their generosity?

Sorry -- charity drives bring out my most uncharitable side. And bad memories as well.

I have to admit, this is partly a personal issue. I went through a period as kid when Christmas was ruined every year by the guy from the church (not our church, some other damn church) pulling up in a station wagon loaded with food boxes. My mother was too polite to turn him away.

It started when I was eleven -- just old enough to begin reading adult body language. A man with a crew cut, wearing a bright red cardigan, carried a cardboard box into the apartment and set it on the kitchen table. My mother was in her robe, her hair in curlers, getting ready for work. She worked night shift. I could tell that she was in hurry and embarrassed to be seen like that, and that she wanted the man out of the apartment fast. But he hung around, asking stupid questions and glancing at everything out of the corner of his eye. I remember realizing that my mother was trying to maneuver to get him with his back to the couch, because the couch had a spring sticking out. She had covered it with a towel, but you could still see the outline of the spring, and the towel looked ratty anyway. Every poor person fixates on one thing that makes them feel especially poor, an objective correlative of poverty, and for my mother it was that sofa. She could buy her clothes at Goodwill and go without food at least once a week, she could handle being awakened by phone calls about my father's gambling debts, but somehow she felt less poor if she thought no one saw the sofa.

My mother was from Ireland. I once read that during the potato famine, Irish peasants who realized they were about to die would find a corner of the houses that couldn't be seen from the window, and huddle there to wait for the end, humiliated by their starvation. And, strangely, I smiled when I read that sad detail, because it reminded me of my mother. You're all right as long as no one sees.

The man in the red cardigan just didn't get it. He hung around chatting, as if he were waiting for something. And eventually my mother figured out what he wanted and gave it to him. She asked if he had a lot more deliveries to make. I think she was just trying to remind him to get going, but that question turned out to be exactly what he wanted. He started rambling on and on about how many people his church helped at this time of year and how proud he was of all those fine people, and how good it made him feel to help. My mother kept looking at the door. And then he said that what he had in the car was for the people in our building, and he looked at a piece of paper and told my mother which other apartments he was spreading his Christmas cheer to.

Kids who grow up in violent homes learn to pick up the exact moment an adult becomes angry -- before they do anything. When the man named the other charity cases in the building, I could see a change in my mother's expression that I'm sure the man couldn't see. She kept smiling, but anger was building under the surface, made worse by the fact that she had to keep smiling and playing the part of the grateful poor lady.

The anger came out after the man left. My mother screamed and cried that he was going to tell half the people in the building that she couldn't even feed her kid. And all the time she was jerking the curlers out of her hair, because priorities are priorities, and she was late for work. And anyway, she screamed, headed for the kitchen, that was a lie. A no-good lie. We always have food, except the day before payday, and we don't need their garbage. She took cans out of the box -- some dented, some labelless, others just useless. Beets, lard, hollandaise sauce. I remember looking at that little yellow can and wondering what it was. Did it come from Holland, and was it made of daisies? My mother picked up the small frozen turkey. "I don't want this garbage," she screamed -- and she threw the turkey to the floor, and stormed out of the kitchen. She'd thrown it so hard, it dented the linoleum.

She left for work, and I put the canned charity away. There was one large box of kiddie cereal. The bottom of the box had gotten damp, and when I picked it up, it split open, and all the cereal scattered across the floor.

Whenever I hear about welfare taking away people's dignity, I always remember crawling around on the kitchen floor, trying to pick up the sugary colored rings of private charity.

I thought of the man who sucked the air out of Christmas a few days ago, as I was reading an article about President Bush urging Americans to give more to the needy. I'd second the idea, of course. It certainly wasn't his plea for time and money that bothered me. It was a president being photographed putting canned peaches and spinach in a bag, without thinking about the fact that there are more important and effective things he could do to help the needy. But of course that assumes that the point is to help those in need, and not to provide photo-ops for presidents, and chances for the middle class to feel good about themselves while getting rid of their garbage.

Thank you to everyone who sent me ideas for fixing my archives yesterday, including Dwight Meredith, who suggested burning candles and chanting nursery rhymes in Arabic (don't know any Arabic, so I went with Gaelic prayers and Italian lullabies). After trying a dozen different suggestions, I finally followed the advice of my favorite conservative, Eve Tushnet -- I ripped out my archives link and made new links myself. And now, thanks to Eve, I have archives!

This entry has also been posted at Stand Down -- the anti-war blog that explores reasons for opposing war with Iraq from multiple politcal perspectives. If you'd like to comment, you can do so here.

The Liberal Media in Action
Thank you to Donald Johnson for pointing out to me that the New York Times got around to publishing something this morning on a topic Kerim Friedman wrote about a few days ago and I picked up on yesterday: the outing of companies that did business with Iraq, providing support for Saddam's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. Oddly, the Times quotes "American officials and private weapons specialists" who say Iraq's weapons declaration includes the names of 31 foreign suppliers, including two small American companies, both of which are now out of business, and one of which was owned by an Iraqi immigrant.

The Times' numbers are decidedly out of synch with those published a few days ago in the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung (and picked up by The Independent), which include 24 US companies -- Honeywell, Unisys, Sperry, Rockwell, Hewlett Packard, Eastman Kodak, and Bechtel among them -- and 150 foreign companies in all. In all honesty, I have no way of knowing whose numbers are more accurate, but it seems dishonest to me to cite one set of figures, and one list of companies, without at least noting that others have been named. The oddity is compounded by the fact that at the end of the article, the Times quotes Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project On Nuclear Arms Control, who argues that any company that did business with Iraq deserves to have its identity revealed: "If you look at the scale and frequency of the exports of some of these companies, it's clear that they were deeply involved in Iraq's chemical weapons program. They must have known what was going on."

That's a bold statement. So, New York Times, where's the rest of the list?

Can somebody on Blogspot with functioning archives help me? For some reason, my archives expired in September. That's a bit of a problem because I occasionally get e-mails from people saying, "Remember that thing you wrote a few weeks ago on [fill in the blank, but it's usually Nigeria]? How do I get that?" And unfortunately my answer is always "Your guess is as good as mine." I can find everything I've written on my editing page, and I've even e-mailed old posts to people who've asked, but I have no idea how to get them to show up on the site. Ampersand even blogged about my late lamented archives (okay, that wasn't the most important part of his post, but the topic did arise.)

I just looked around and realized this is not just one of the things you have to live with if you're stuck on Blogspot. CalPundit has archives. Ignatz has archives. PLA, Rittenhouse, and Two Tears all have living, breathing, up to the minute archives (and good ones at that). Am I doing something wrong? My settings are on weekly archives (I'd change it to monthly, but since it's not working anyway, there doesn't seem to be any point.) I've tried republishing the archives so many times over the past few months it's ridiculous. Does anyone have any suggestions for bringing my archives back from the grave?

More awards! Jesse Taylor has opened nominations for The Year's Most Annoying Conservatives. I think his readers pretty much have it covered already, but go over and see if you can think of anybody who's been getting to you all year to add to the list. Personally, I'm with the reader who said Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Osama bin Laden should tie for first place -- people who sell the idea that God is full of hate should be lumped together, even if they call their hatred by different names, and they certainly top my list of people I wish would just go away.

CHAPTER 3
Everything you always wanted to know about John Ashcroft*

John Ashcroft's opposition to school integration in Missouri may have been politically motivated, but it sometimes had a gratuitously mean edge. In 1984, when he was in his final year as Attorney General of Missouri, and was running for Governor of the state, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals voted to uphold most of the school desegregation plan that Ashcroft had vigorously fought during his tenure as AG, including a voluntary transfer program which permitted students from predominantly black suburbs to attend schools in predominantly white suburbs. The court did agree with Ashcroft that the state should not pay for the that part of the program, since it didn't have anything to do with integrating schools in the city. Ashcroft immediately moved to cut off payments for the 311 African American students in the program -- a move that, if implemented, would have forced them to return to their former schools with only three months left in the school year. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called Ashcroft's action a "cruel way to deal with students who had placed their educational hopes in their new schools." Fortunately for the students, the court ordered the state to continue the payments until an agreement could be worked out between the state and the suburbs. Ashcroft called the decision allowing the black students to stay at the same school through the end of the year "a gross miscarriage of justice."

...........................

*but were afraid to ask.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

That Western companies helped Saddam Hussein build weapons isn't news. But some bits and pieces of information about that assistance that have filtered out over the past few days disturb me, even though I haven't figured out how much weight to give them, and how to string them together yet:

* According to Die Tageszeitung, Iraq's report to the UN Security Council lists 150 foreign companies -- including American, British, German, and French -- who provided Saddam Hussein with equipment and expertise for his weapons program from 1975 on, including support for building nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

* Some of the companies were providing support as recently as last year.

* The dossier documents methods the companies used to cover up their activities.

* Information about foreign companies' involvement with Saddam Hussein was collected by UN weapons inspectors between 1991 and 1998. However, the five permanent members of the Security Council -- the United States, Britain, Russia, France and China -- have blocked release of the relevant information.

* The non-permanent members of the Security Council received an expurgated version of Iraq's weapons declaration report, with the names of foreign companies blacked out, although the censors did an incomplete job and left the names of some German and Swiss companies in the report.

* Die Tageszeitung quoted sources close to Dick Cheney as saying the Bush administration was hoping to prove a German company was continuing to co-operate with the Iraqi regime over the supply of equipment allegedly useful in the construction of weapons of mass destruction.

* Relations between Germany and Washington are strained because of Germany's outspoken criticism of a possible military strike against Iraq.

* Among the American companies listed are Honeywell, Unisys, Sperry, Rockwell, Hewlett Packard, Eastman Kodak, and Bechtel.

* British officials said the list of companies appeared to be accurate.

* Most of the sales were legal and often made with the knowledge of governments. In 1985-90, the U.S. Commerce Department licensed $1.5 billion in sales to Iraq of American technology with potential military uses.

* I can't find any articles on the subject in either The New York Times or The Washington Post -- and I'm hoping that has something to do with my lousy research skills.

.................

More information and comments at Stand Down

........................

Sources:
Leaked report says German and US firms supplied arms to Saddam

Parts of declaration cut from Iraq weapons report

Arms report names Western suppliers

U.S., others aided Iraqi nuke program

Die Tageszeitung's List of Companies
.

Obviously the Republicans want Trent Lott out because he hurts their carefully crafted image. But there's another reason percolating under the surface. I've been thinking about it for a few days, because hints of this other motive peeked out in a couple of conversations I had with Republicans, and now the Christian Science Monitor has picked up the thread: They're afraid that with Lott around, the party (and, indeed, Lott himself) will have to be so sensitive that they're forced to move left on racial issues. The administration's backing off on support for the Supreme Court case challenging racial preferences at the University of Michigan, and Trent Lott's statement on BET in favor of affirmative action make conservatives nervous. What are they going to have to do to avoid the appearance of racism? Are there right-wing judicial nominees who might have squeaked through before Thurmond's Centennial who won't past the smell test now? And will that reduce the party to hunting for moderates? Will cutting millionaires' taxes while education, welfare, and health care wither suddenly be seen in a different light -- and force Bush to do the unthinkable: put the needs of the most vulnerable citizens (of all races) ahead of the wish lists of his corporate friends?

Relax, Republicans. It's not going to happen. I wish it would, but it won't.

The party is going to have to be a little more careful about race than it has previously been, whether Trent Lott goes or stays (but having him around scratches the wound and complicates matters). In many ways, that's a good thing for the country. Assuming we still have a remotely functioning press -- a big assumption, I admit -- the Southern Strategy just got harder to play. Bob Jones University may find few politically powerful speakers. Interviews with Southern Partisan magazine are probably not going to pass unnoticed by the mainstream press. It will get a lot more difficult to play footsie under the table with bigots. Your South Carolina strategy will be noticed in Southern California. And that's a good thing -- a small rip in the fabric of hypocrisy.

But when it comes to policies, nothing will really change. Genuine change requires understanding that the effects of slavery and segregation continue to gnaw holes in the promise of America, in psychological as well as economic ways, and that we have a continuing moral obligation to look for ways to undo the damage. The modern Republican Party, even at it's best, has never believed in that obligation. It's been about tokens, and twisting the language of justice to unjust purposes. In the CSM story, there's a revealing remark. An affirmative action opponent who believes the Bush administration will eventually file a brief opposing the Michigan program, offers a way of selling that opposition: "I think the way this drama has played out actually puts the president in a very good position.... He can say, 'I think racial discrimination is wrong..., and for exactly that reason, my administration is filing a brief telling the Supreme Court that they should rule against racial discrimination in college admissions.' "

Yes, we think discrimination is bad, and therefore we're going to put all our effort behind ending the massive discrimination against white people. Republicans think that will sell, and they're probably right. But the fact that they're thinking of that even now, while the fruit of that thinking is on the front page of the paper every day, says a lot about how deep their understanding of the problem goes.

I'm an odd sort of political junkie in that I tend not to pay much attention to electoral politics until I absolutely have to. I suppose when it comes right down to it, I'm too much of a moralist to feel comfortable with all the compromises involved, and so firmly on the left that I don't expect to have a real choice. I can count on the fact that my favorite candidate is not going to win. I haven't voted for a presidential candidate I actually liked since George McGovern (and I thought he was a bit too conservative.) Most of the time, I'd prefer to vote Green, but I understand that the Republicans also prefer I vote Green. You never saw a grin as smug and satisfied as the one that appeared on the face of one of my husband's Republican friends when my husband said he was considering voting for Nader. (The grin changed my husband's mind -- you've got to watch your body language, Republicans, you're giving the game away). Basically my attitude is, I despise Bush and therefore I'll hold my nose and vote for any Democrat you put in front of me.

I am capable of being embarrassed by my ignorance, though. Recently someone asked me what I thought of Howard Dean, and my answer ("Uh, the guy from Vermont, right?") was rather humiliatingly stupid. I would have been better prepared if I'd read this London Times article, which seems to me a good, fair, and simple (I need that) introduction. Count on the Brits to explain American politics in a way that even a politically clueless American like me can understand.

And the next time someone asks me about Howard Dean, I'll be able to say, "That's the best we can do, huh? Well, at least he's not Bush." (Once the campaign really gets going, rather than put on a bumpersticker for my favorite candidate, I may just have one made up that says, "Not Bush." That pretty much covers the possibilities I can live with.)

Score one -- maybe -- for the expression of outrage.

The people who own Nestle have an interesting sense of timing. Ethiopia is in the middle of a drought which has left millions in danger of starvation. The number of people requiring emergency food aid could reach 15 million over the next few months. Nestle decided this was a great time to demand $6 million from the Ethiopian government as payment for a company nationalized in 1975, which Nestle didn't even own at the time.

I hate to cut into VH1's monopoly on the eighties, but do they know it's Christmas?

That was yesterday's news. Today's news is that public outrage over Nestle's greed forced the company to promise to pour the money back into Ethiopia. Of course, it would be better if they didn't take the money out of the country in the first place. And it would be better if the promise to put the money "in a long-term viable investment in Ethiopia which will contribute to the economic development of the country" didn't arouse suspicions that they're talking about something that is more in the long-term interest of Nestle than of Ethiopia. (This is, after all, the same company that made a fortune on pushing powdered milk over breastfeeding in countries where, because of unsafe water, bottle-fed babies were 25 times more likely to die than breastfed babies.) Business may be business, but when people are starving, contracts and long-term investments are way down on the priority list. But at least Nestle got nudged in a decent direction, and I guess that's cause for a small Christmas celebration. Without chocolate.

CHAPTER 2
Everything you always wanted to know about John Ashcroft*

As governor of Missouri, John Ashcroft twice vetoed measures passed by the Missouri legislature which would have made it possible for volunteers from nonpartisan organizations like the League of Women Voters to register new voters in St. Louis, a Democratic-leaning city, which was about 50 percent black. The measure would have made it as easy to register in the city of St. Louis as it was in St. Louis County -- which was mostly white and Republican, and where volunteer deputy registrars could be, and were, commissioned. By making it more difficult for voters to register in St. Louis than in the suburbs, Ashcroft managed to surpress the African American vote, which aided him in his 1988 re-election bid.

...........................

*but were afraid to ask.

Chapter 1

Jeb Bush stepped up boldly yesterday to criticize Trent Lott. Not for rhapsodizing on segregation, mind you, but for doing something really unforgivable -- hurting Republicans.

"It doesn't help to have this swirling controversy that Senator Lott, in spite of his enormous political skills, doesn't seem to be able to handle well," Governor Bush told The Miami Herald in an interview published today. "Something's going to have to change. This can't be the topic of conversation over the next week."

I knew we could count on the president's brother to recognize the important ethical issues at stake here.

And also demonstrating his sense of priorities, Bush restored the civil rights -- including the right to vote -- of an FBI agent who was convicted of obstruction of justice for destroying a report criticizing the bureau's handling of the Ruby Ridge shootout. Bush obviously learned from his past mistakes and is making amends. And certainly this should more than make up for the thousands of legal Florida voters who were knocked off the voter rolls when they were classified as felons.

I'd really like to believe in the basic goodness and sanity of my fellow Americans. But sometimes they make it so damn hard.


(Via reading & writing)

I'm sure you've already heard that Bill Clinton told the truth. The man might lie about small things, but he told the truth when it counted: "They try to suppress black voting, they ran on the Confederate flag in Georgia and South Carolina, and from top to bottom the Republicans supported it."

Republicans have won elections by making it harder for African Americans to vote and by luring racists to the polls. That isn't a shocking statement to anyone who pays attention to politics, but it is stunning -- gloriously so -- when a politician says it. Even one who's not running any more.

I suspect Sam Heldman has it right. It won't be long before Clinton is accused of exploiting race in order to stick it to the Republicans and maybe benefit the Democrats. But so what? If Democrats hem and haw and try to play nice, Republicans will seize on insignificantly small disagreements to accuse them of playing politics. If Democrats stand up and boldly tell the truth, Republicans will accuse them of playing politics. Given the circumstances, they might as well tell the truth. The truth is always easier to remember anyway.

I don't pretend to understand the political machinations of the fight over Trent Lott. Who will benefit from this, Democrats or Republicans? Is this the first crack in revealing the strategy that has animated the Republican party for the past generation (in which case, Ashcroft goes next), or can the Republicans send Trent Lott into the wilderness and make everyone believe that their "seg"-tolerating days are over?

I honestly don't know, maybe because I just haven't thought about it much. I've gotten quite a bit of mail on the subject, so I know other people are thinking about it, but I just don't seem to be able to wrap my mind around the subject. To me, this is more an ethical than a political question. Trent Lott needs to go because if there's no cost to expressing support for segregation almost forty years after the Civil Rights Act, something is so rotten at the core of the American system that you might as well just give up on it. And I don't believe that's the case. If that benefits Republicans, I'll live with that, because the alternative is worse. But it's equally important not to let up on the Republican Party -- not for political reasons, but because the big lie that Republicans have worked hard to attract minorities shouldn't stand. They've worked hard to change their image; they've done little or nothing to change their ways. (I think Matt Yglesias is one of the smartest bloggers around, but I have to disagree with him on this issue: Bush has played racial politics with the best of them. Bob Jones, the Confederate flag, rumor-mongering about John McCain's adopted daughter. And let's not forget that he "won" an election by having his little brother surpress the black vote in Florida. What's new about Bush is that he's far better than Lott at talking out of both sides of his mouth.)

But even though I can't quite get a grasp on the politics of this issue, I have to admit, Clinton's statement cheers me. Clinton and I have probably been on opposite sides of issues almost as often as we've been on the same side, but there's two things I know you can count on Clinton for -- a good speech and an astute reading of how an issue plays out politically. Maybe now that he's not running for anything, he figures he can tell the truth and shame the devil, but deep down I suspect he's still reading whether or not it's a good time, politically, to tell the truth. The man's only been out of office two years, and I don't think politicians can turn honest that fast. But since his political instincts are obviously infinitely superior to mine, I'm encouraged by his honesty. I think it's at least possible he knows what he's doing.

It's always a good time to tell the truth. Maybe it's a smart time as well.

Yesterday I posted lyrics for Nina Simone's 1963 classic Mississippi Goddam. Two readers wrote to remind me that Phil Ochs had a pretty good understanding of Mississippi politics as well. Phil updated this song a few years later under the title "Here's to the State of Richard Nixon." ("where the wars are fought in secret, Pearl Harbor every day") I wish he was still around to update the song one more time.

Here's To The State of Mississippi
by Phil Ochs (1964)

Here's to the state of Mississippi --
For underneath her borders the devil draws no line;
If you drag her muddy rivers, nameless bodies you will find.
Oh, the fat trees of the forest have hid a thousand crimes;
The calendar is lying when it reads the present time.
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of.
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of!

And here's to the people of Mississippi --
Who say the folks up north, they just don't understand;
And they tremble in the shadows at the thunder of the Klan;
Oh, the sweating of their souls can't wash the blood from off their hands;
Where they smile and shrug their shoulders at the murder of a man.
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of --
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of!

And here's to the schools of Mississippi --
Where they're teaching all the children that they don't have to care,
All the rudiments of hatred are present everywhere,
And every single classroom is a factory of despair,
And there's nobody learning such a foreign word as "fair."
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of --
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of!

And here's to the cops of Mississippi --
They're chewing their tobacco as they lock the prison door,
And their bellies bounce inside them when they knock you to the floor;
No, they don't like takin' prisoners in their private little wars,
And behind their broken badges, there are murderers and more.
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of --
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of!

And here's to the judges of Mississippi --
Who wear the robe of honor as they crawl into the court,
They're guardin' all the bastions of their phony legal fort;
Oh, justice is a stranger when the prisoners report,
When the black man stands accused, the trial is always short.
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of --
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of!

And here's to the government of Mississippi --
In the swamp of their bureaucracy, they're always bogging down,
And criminals are posing as the mayors of the towns;
And they hope that no one sees the sights and no one hears the sounds,
And the speeches of the governor are the ravings of a clown.
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of --
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of!

And here's to the laws of Mississippi --
Congressmen will gather in a circus of delay,
While the Constitution's drowning in an ocean of decay;
"Unwed mothers should be sterilized," I've even heard them say;
Yes, corruption can be classic in the Mississippi way.
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of --
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of!

And here's to the churches of Mississippi --
Where the cross, once made of silver, now is caked with rust,
And the Sunday morning sermons pander to their lust;
Oh, the fallen face of Jesus is choking in the dust,
And Heaven only knows in which God they can trust.
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of --
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of!

CHAPTER 1
Everything you always wanted to know about John Ashcroft*

When John Ashcroft ran for Governor of Missouri in 1984, one of the centerpieces of his campaign was bragging about the fine work he had done as the state's Attorney General in opposing desegregation of St. Louis public schools. He called the desegregation plan "an outrage against humanity."

...........................

*but were afraid to ask.

I've discovered so many interesting blogs since I started reading them that sometimes it's hard to keep up. I just don't have time to read everything I want to. But one thing I've learned: Whenever Avedon Carol writes a long piece, read it. Today she has an essential essay on the politics of race -- in both parties. I'll come back to this topic, but right now, just go read Avedon.

My car radio is pretty limited. The public radio station fades in and out and the really good locally programmed station that I listen to at home doesn't come in at all most of the time. That leaves me with one talk radio station, one "classic rock" station, and one oldies station that are occasionally worth listening to. So today, as I was driving around doing my Christmas shopping, I had a choice between Jimi Hendrix (I love Hendrix -- but not on a car radio, thanks), Rod Stewart singing "Hot Legs" or Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh won. I figured there could at least be some comic relief there.

I quickly decided to go back to fuzzy Jimi Hendrix, but not before hearing about some poll that showed that two-thirds of all Republicans think that what Trent Lott said was no big deal. Rush Limbaugh seemed to think that meant the press was blowing it out of proportion. I had two reactions. If the poll is real, it ought to cue the one-third of Republicans who still have something vaguely resembling a conscience that they're in the wrong party. If it isn't true, it should cue all conservatives who still have something vaguely resembling a brain to turn off Rush.

Even if they have to listen to fuzzy Foxy Lady.

I just can't get this song out of my head for some reason:

Mississippi Goddam
(1963) Nina Simone

(The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam
And I mean every word of it)

Alabama's got me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam!

Can't you see it
Can't you feel it
It's all in the air
I can't stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer

Alabama's got me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam!

(This is a show tune, but the show hasn't been written for it, yet)

Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day's gonna be my last

Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don't belong here
I don't belong there
I've even stopped believing in prayer

Don't tell me
I'll tell you
Me and my people just about due
I've been there so I know
They keep on saying "Go slow!"

But that's just the trouble
Too slow
Washing the windows
Too slow
Picking the cotton
Too slow
You're just plain rotten
Too slow
You're too damn lazy
Too slow
The thinking's crazy
Too slow
Where am I going
What am I doing
I don't know
I don't know

Just try to do your very best
Stand up be counted with all the rest
For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam!

(I bet you thought I was kiddin' didn't you?)

Picket lines
School boycotts
They try to say it's a communist plot
All I want is equality
for my sister my brother my people and me

Yes, you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie

Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You're all gonna die and die like flies
I don't trust you any more
You keep on saying "Go slow!"
Go slow!

But that's just the trouble
Too slow
Desegregation
Too slow
Mass participation
Too slow
Reunification
Too slow
Do things gradually
Too slow
Would bring more tragedy
Too slow
Why don't you see it
Why don't you feel it
I don't know
I don't know

You don't have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam!

The front page of yesterday's LA Times featured a poll showing that Americans are more doubtful about the need for war with Iraq than has been suggested, and that support for a ground attack on Iraq is decreasing. But it was a poll result buried at the end of the article that caught my attention: Seventy percent of Americans believe that if there is a war, we have an obligation to stay after the war is over and help rebuild. Unfortunately, that's an easy sentiment to exploit (The oil companies are laying pipelines all over the place. You don't call that rebuilding?) But at its heart it speaks to the decency of the vast majority of Americans. We expect to be held accountable for the consequences of our actions.

But rebuilding Iraq is off somewhere in the future. I wish someone would take a poll right now asking Americans if we have a moral obligation to help rebuild Afghanistan. I suspect (or at least hope) you'd find roughly that same seventy percent who say we do.

So how come we're abandoning that task and taking on a new one?

Human Rights Watch has issued a report on conditions in Afghanistan -- in Herat province in particular -- which documents that for women living under warlord rule (in this case, the rule of Ismail Khan, the governor of Herat) things haven't changed nearly enough since the Taliban were driven out. Many girls have been allowed to return to school, and women to some jobs. However, they can still be arrested for failing to veil themselves, driving, or speaking to a man on the street. Troops continue to enforce Taliban-era restrictions on music and dress, targeting women and girls for abuse. In addition, Khan has censored women's groups, intimidated women leaders, and even recruited boys to spy on girls and report "un-Islamic" behavior.

Ismail Khan and his warrior bands have received substantial military and financial support from the United States.

Hamid Karzai has made a bold move in the direction of breaking the warlords' control -- which is probably the most important task in improving the human rights situation, and protecting the rights of women in particular, in Afghanistan. On Tuesday he issued a decree banning senior politicians from military activity (in other words, no warlords allowed in the government) and announced that he will attempt to disarm the private armies that rule most of Afghanistan within the next six months. Heavy weapons handed over would be given to the still-forming Afghan national army. The private armies' weapons include tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery pieces, field guns, multiple-rocket launchers, and antiaircraft guns. Among the warlords most reluctant to give up weapons and hand control of their armies over to the national government is Ismail Khan, who so far has not responded to Karzai's decree.

Karzai doesn't have the power to control the warlords without help from the international security force. He's not getting it.

The Turks, currently in command of the ISAF, are going home ( according to the BBC, to prepare for war with Iraq). A combined corp from Netherlands and Germany will soon take their place. But discussions about getting the peacekeepers outside of Kabul have been abandoned. The UN Security Council resolution that created ISAF prohibits the troops from taking part in operations outside the capital. The US has suggested that coalition forces in several provincial capitals could work on both military and civilian projects, but humanitarian workers have already been targeted in many parts of Afghanistan, and are worried about any further blurring of the line between soldiers and aid workers.

HRW insists that all countries involved in Afghanistan -- including the US -- need to stop funding the private armies (the US is still using them to go after Taliban and al-Qaeda stragglers), and give all aid directly to the central government. We need to support Afghan women's groups and protect women leaders from threats and intimidation. And the ISAF needs to be expanded and sent out into the provinces. Women's lives are in danger.

But just in case Bush and Company don't really care about women's lives anymore, there is one other thing they should know. The chaos created by the warlords is threatening the trans-Afghan pipeline project as well.

Maybe that will get Bush's attention.

The good old liberal New York Times ran a strange article this morning keeping alive the well-debunked myth that conservatives were the ones who tore into Trent Lott, and -- grab your hat, we're headed into the Twilight Zone here -- asserting that this "fact" disproves Al Gore's statement that that "the nation's conservative news media acts as a monolithic Republican support system." The Times gives a prominent place to Rich Lowry's laughable comment that conservatives have worked so hard, and with such great idealism, in overcoming their racist image, and they couldn't stand to see that image torn down by someone like Lott. Not the racism, mind you, just the image.

Howell Raines, let me introduce you to the man Trent Lott is least likely to send a Christmas card to this season.

The Los Angeles Times at least touched on the obvious fact that the main reason Lott is in trouble with conservatives is that they've never liked him personally and don't think he's done enough to promote the right-wing agenda. According to the Times many Republicans question whether Lott is even conservative enough. (Most of the Republicans I know are fairly moderate. I don't know any truly insane, to the right of Trent Lott Republicans, so I won't even take a guess on how true that is.)

But you'll have to go a little beyond the major newspapers before you get to the really important point: Republicans want Lott out fast not just because he tars their name, but because the longer the story plays out, the more likely it is that people will notice other Republicans who've played similar games.

Joe Conason did a great piece yesterday on John Ashcroft's ties to segregationists. Josh Marshall went after Ashcroft as well. Timothy Noah pointed out that Strom Thurmond is not quite as reconstructed as the press (and, in particular, the New York Times) would have us believe. Hesiod is piling on George Bush I's warm and fuzzy feelings for the 1948 Dixiecrat presidential candidate. Paul Krugman is going after the Republicans' "soft spot for theocracy" (which he seems to have discovered via Atrios .) And in a weird piece defending Lott (I think, it's hard to tell), William Saletan argues that a lot of the Republicans now going after Lott have plenty of "politeness to bigots" and "amnesia about struggles for civil rights" to answer for as well. (Saletan seems to suggest that his makes Lott somewhat less condemnable; I'd suggest it means the condemnation so far has been much too narrowly focused.)

It can't be repeated too often: It isn't just Lott.

Lady Sings The Dixiecrat Double Entendre Blues

In honor (or perhaps I should say dishonor) of Trent Lott's nostalgia for the good old days of segregation, Devra recently posted lyrics (and a link, if you'd like to listen) to Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," a song about lynching. Keeping in mind Pat Buchanan's breathtakingly stupid choice of words in defense of Lott* it was a well-chosen musical accompaniment to the news.

Devra's post started me thinking about something I read a long time ago about Billie Holiday, "Strange Fruit," racism, and the interpretation of words.

Try to imagine Lady Day in an evening gown, a white gardenia tucked in her hair, on stage in a nightclub, singing a graphic song about lynching, while her audience sipped champagne. It's impossible, grotesque. And in fact, Billie was generally reluctant to sing the song, partly because, as you can imagine, it took a lot out of her. In her autobiography she  says she threw up every time she had to sing it. But she also had mixed feelings about the song because her audiences so often missed the point. She'd sometimes get bizarre requests to sing the "sexy" song about "black bodies," which unnerved her to say the least. Proof, if you need any, that as often as not, even the most eloquent voice is not heard.

When she did perform the song, it was usually at the end of a show. Two different kinds of audiences heard "Strange Fruit." One was a group Billie trusted. If she sensed that an audience was with her -- not just that they liked her act, but that they understood and appreciated the artistry of a woman who was changing the shape and structure of popular song -- she would sometimes sing "Strange Fruit" as a gift, the way you might share a painful secret with a friend who could understand that sharing was an act of trust and honor.

But she also used the song as a weapon. In Lady Sings The Blues she describes a scene that was all too common:

This white boy stayed around just to bug me. When I started singing...he'd start kicking up a storm of noise, rattling glasses, calling me nigger, and cursing nigger singers.

When she had that kind of audience, she would pull out "Strange Fruit," spitting out the words, as if to say, I know who you are, and I understand everything I need to know about why you're treating me this way.

One song, with many meanings -- most of them within the artist's control.

Southern trees bear a strange fruit

You don't have to start with a work of art to sing one song in different ways. You can start with words like "states' rights" and "traditional values." There's nothing wrong with the words themselves. Here in the central California suburbs, when Republicans I know hear politicians talk about things like "states' rights," what they hear is a message of smaller government and more local control. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to be in favor of. In some instances, I'd even agree with them.

But that arguable, respectable message is not what people in many parts of the country heard when Ronald  Reagan, for instance, proclaimed his belief in "states' rights" in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers -- James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman -- had been murdered in the early sixties, and where there were still many people who deeply resented their state's loss of its "right" to segregation and intimidation of black voters. It does not make the tiniest bit of difference whether Ronald Reagan was a racist. Signaling that hard-core racism was acceptable was despicable. For many people who regard themselves as liberals, it remains, more than twenty years later, unforgivable. Maybe it gnaws at moderate Republicans, and even many conservatives, as well, but I haven't heard any complain about it.

What Reagan did was a mirror image of what Billie Holiday did. When she wanted, as she put it, to "bounce something off that cracker," she used a song to send a message of defiance (real defiance -- as she well understood -- would have landed her in jail, or worse). Reagan, facing the descendents of Lady Day's nasty hecklers (and quite a few even more dangerous sorts) sang a cozy little lullaby of acceptance. Compare Billie's unspoken, but nonetheless clear I can't hit you the way I'd like to, but here's what I think of you, cracker to Reagan's equally clear I can't come straight out and agree with you, but you boys know I'm on your side. It's the same technique, with vastly different results.

It's amazing -- sometimes appalling -- what an artist can accomplish with a few words.

And Reagan is far from the only one to use the device.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south

John Ashcroft, who made his name as a politician opposing school desegregation in St. Louis, gave an interview to Southern Partisan magazine in 1998, which the editors introduced by  noting that he was a "champion of states' rights and traditional Southern values." Sounds fairly innocuous, but one of the traditional Southern values Southern Partisan promotes is the notion that the Declaration of Independence contains "deliberate lies" like the idea that all men are created equal.

According to Richard M. Quinn, the magazine's former editor, in the South the magazine "is considered mainstream conservative." If you read "conservative" as a longing to return to the "values" of the past, I suppose there's some truth in that. Here's the formula for a "mainstream conservative" magazine: recipes for sweet potato casserole, articles on country music and NASCAR, suspicion of central government and disdain for taxes -- I'm okay with this so far, but then there are:

* revisionist articles on why slavery wasn't as bad as it's detractors suggest (apparently slave owners were strong supporters of "family values"),

* paeans to former Klan leader David Dukes as "a Populist spokesperson for a recapturing of the American ideal,"

* praise for "the effectiveness of the original Ku Klux Klan,"

* political commentary on the fact that "Negroes, Asians, and Orientals... have no temperament for democracy" (the author goes on to pat himself on the back, of course, for being bravely "unpolitic" in asserting this),

* and a denigration of Martin Luther King as "a man whose role in history was to lead his people into a perpetual dependence on the welfare state."

Makes you wonder about a politician in the South who describes himself as a "mainstream conservative," doesn't it?

I don't know whether John Ashcroft subscribes to Richard Quinn's definitions of "state's rights" and "Southern values," but most of the readers of his magazine do, and you don't have to be an expert code-reader to recognize the I-am-one-of-you message Ashcroft was sending to those readers. There's just no other, more innocent explanation of Ashcroft's praise for the magazine as a source that "helps set the record straight." Or his to-the-barricades call for "traditionalists" to "stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda." These people are Confederate leaders and Ashcroft didn't want anyone to be taught that there was anything perverted about their agenda. As in the case of Trent Lott's statement, I can't come up with a reading of that sentence that any decent person would subscribe to.

Here's a fruit for the crows to pluck.

Trent Lott, Thad Cochrane, Phil Gramm, Jesse Helms, and Dick Armey have all been interviewed by Southern Partisan.

Mark Potok, editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Intelligence Report," describes an interview with the magazine as a way of pandering to an audience with racist leanings. It's a way of doing so without offending voters who would take less kindly to overt racist statements.

This wink and nod strategy isn't just a matter of nasty and unfair politics. The truly objectionable part of the whole thing is that when prominent politicians play this game, they leave hard-core, blatant racists with the impression that their beliefs are still respectable. They give people a license to be racist.

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Why are liberals harping on this so much now, and disdaining Republican "apologies?" Because it's a ugly game that has driven most of us crazy for as long as we've been aware of politics. You'd have to have been old enough to vote before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to remember a time when Republicans weren't playing this loathsome game. (And by sheer coincidence, 1964 happens to be the year Strom Thurmond became a Republican, as well as the first presidential election year in which Trent Lott was eligible to vote.) The rest of us have wondered all our political lives why most people weren't as outraged by it as we are. Finally, they are. Trent Lott's statement helps expose the game even to people who normally don't pay much attention to politics.

In the end, this isn't about politics, it's about moral accountability. It's about standing up in front of your audience and singing the song straight. And it's about time.

--------------------------------------

*Pat Buchanan: "What we are witnessing is the lynching of a good man who made a bad choice of words in a birthday tribute to an old man whose sins are no more scarlet than those of the rest of us."

The New York Times has started what looks like a very interesting series of articles on the Ten Commandments. Over the next ten days, they'll be taking one commandment each day and exploring how people reckon with it in their lives. How does a soldier, for instance, interpret the fifth commandment (the sixth if you're Jewish or Protestant) -- Thou shalt not kill?

The first article in the series is about a couple whose daughter died, and who found nothing but pain in the way they had always interpreted the first commandment -- as an assertion that everything that happens in the universe reflects the will of God. They were fortunate to connect with a rabbi who told them they didn't have to simply accept that commandment, but could challenge it.

So far, it looks like one of those rare occasions when the press takes seriously the moral struggles of people of faith, rather than defining religion as a set of simplistic rules.

A few days ago, I mentioned a moving essay Jeralyn Merritt wrote about passing on her sense of justice and compassion to her son. From today's New York Times comes a reminder that some people define "family values" in a somewhat less inspiring way:

Mr. Lott was staunchly opposed to [James] Meredith's integration of Ole Miss. "Yes, you could say that I favored segregation then," he told Time magazine in 1997. "I don't now." He added, "The main thing was, I felt the federal government had no business sending in troops to tell the state what to do."

Back at home, the turmoil at Ole Miss was roiling Pascagoula and even Mr. Lott's family. Ira Harkey Jr., editor of The Pascagoula Chronicle, was writing editorials denouncing racial violence and criticizing Barnett for fighting the integration of Ole Miss. In response, a group of local people — many of them shipyard workers, Mr. Harkey says — harassed him for months, threatening violence and even shooting out his office windows.

Some time later, Mr. Harkey said, he received a letter from a woman who told him that if he did not publish her letter it would prove "you are truly an integrationist and I hope you not only get a hole through your office door but through your stupid head." It was signed Iona W. Lott — Mr. Lott's mother.

"I called her, asked if she'd sent it to me, and she said she certainly had sent it to me and she meant every word," said Mr. Harkey, now 84.

Dwight Meredith is taking nominations for the "Koufax Award" for best left of center blogging in various categories. It's a nice opportunity to say something nice about a few good and hard-working people. Never let it be said I turned down the chance to offer a well-deserved compliment. My nominees:

1) Best Blog -- Eschaton. That's a no-brainer. I can't even think of a close runner-up.

2) Best Writing - I could come up with a dozen nominees off the top of my head, but for sheer style, grace, and wit, The Rittenhouse Review is in a league by itself.

3) Best Post -- A few nominees (and I'm certain some obvious ones have slipped my mind):

* Rittenhouse on "Al Gore and the Alpha Girls"

* Rittenhouse's skewering of the conservative attempt to make political capital out of the Pennsylvania coal mine tragedy.

* Rittenhouse's nuanced take on the Mike Taylor ad (Come to think of it, maybe Eschaton does have some competition for best blog)

* Ampersand on domestic violence and the men's rights movement.

* Ampersand on anti-Semitism.

* Ampersand's take down of Glenn Reynolds' post on feminist mankillers -- "Conservatives lie about feminists!" (The competition for best blog is heating up here)

* CalPundit on Glenn Reynolds and Martha Burk

* Making Light's post-election essay on political action.

* Making Light's September 11 anniversary post.

* PLA's list of examples of Bush administration secrecy

* PLA applying the Al Gore consistency standard to George Bush.

* PLA's extensive list of Bush lies.

* PLA's case for focusing on disarmament, not regime change in Iraq (and apparently we have another nominee for best blog.)

4) Best Single Issue Blog -- Talk Left and Ignatz (To be fair, both Jeralyn and Sam talk about things other than law -- but that's the main focus)

5) Best Comedy Blog -- The Poor Man or Sisyphus Shrugged -- tough choice. I'm assuming you can do stuff other than comedy and still fall under the category of "comedy blog" if one of the things you do best is make people laugh.

6) Best Comedy Post -- Once again, a dozen spring to mind, but nothing comes close to Pandagon's channeling Peggy Noonan chaneling Tupac Shakur.

7) Best Series -- It's a tie: PLA on thimerosal, autism and the Homeland Security bill, and everything Atrios has done recently on Trent Lott.

8) Best Commentor -- How can I choose between Ted Barlow and CalPundit ?

9) Best New Blog -- definitely need a list of nominees here.

10) Best Special Effects -- Alas, a blog , of course.

Kissinger Quits As Chairman of 9/11 Panel

I'm in a mild state of shock here, especially since Kissinger resigned under pressure to disclose his business clients. It's still possible in America today for business conflicts of interest to bring someone down? Amazing. I thought that old-fashioned little ethic had been swept away for good. A little crack of sunlight cuts through the clouds.

The Twelve Songs of Christmas (plus a few extra)

skippy would like to know your favorite Christmas carols. Here's my list, in no particular order (other than the fact that this is the order they're in on my iTunes Christmas playlist):

1) Merrry Christmas Baby -- by just about anybody (it's a hard song to screw up), but the Charles Brown original is as slow and gently sexy as it gets, and Etta James' version is just plain hot. Otis Redding's version also has a special place in my heart (well, actually, the feelings runs all through my body, but you probably don't want to hear about this thing I have for Otis Redding…).

2) Santa Baby -- Eartha Kitt (Madonna? Oh, please -- it's Christmas and there's only one Madonna.)

3) The Rebel Jesus -- Jackson Browne and The Chieftains. And perhaps we give a little to the poor/ If the generosity should seize us/ But if any one of us should interfere/ In the business of why they are poor/ They get the same as the rebel Jesus. Who says Christmas is only for Christians?

4) Santa Claus Go Straight To The Ghetto -- James Brown. What's Christmas without funk? If you still feel like dancing, try Clarence Carter's Back Door Santa or Wilson Pickett's version of Jingle Bells.

5) Merry Merry Christmas -- Koko Taylor. Hotter than Etta James (and that's saying something).

6) Nothing But A Child -- Steve Earle. Okay, strictly speaking, it's not a Christmas carol, but it's in the vicinity.

7) Father Xmas -- The Kinks. Father Christmas, give us some money. We'll beat you up if you make us annoyed… When Christmas gets stickily sentimental, this one saves my sanity.

8) St. Stephen's Day Murders -- Elvis Costello. Another antidote when I'm o.d.ing on Nat King Cole.

9) O Holy Night -- Rickie Lee Jones. Every version of this song I've ever heard has been by a singer with a big, show-off voice. Rickie Lee's version is quiet, humble, awe-struck and a little off-key. The first time I heard it, it seemed to me far closer to the spirit of the song, and now I don't want to hear any other version.

10) Jingle Bells -- Duke Ellington. Having heard too many badly done instrumental jazz Christmas carols as a child, I have a deep aversion to the form. But this one is the exception. Every conceivable variation on the theme is in here -- there was just no excuse for anybody else to record the song after Ellington. (Except Wilson Pickett, of course).

11) Good Morning Blues -- Ella Fitzgerald. The title doesn't sound Christmasy, and in its original incarnation it wasn't, but Ella twisted it up a bit and made it a classic. Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas is my second favorite Christmas album of all time.

12) Go Tell It On The Mountain -- Odetta. From the best Christmas album ever: Christmas Spirituals. In case you need reminding what the whole point of the holiday is -- and even if you don't.

I don't want to be fussy or anything, but who thought it was a good idea to name a plane that will be carrying troops and heavy weapons into combat "The Spirit of Strom Thurmond?"

James Carroll has written a beautiful tribute to Philip Berrigan and the continuing relevance of his moral vision.

US Set To Use Mines In Iraq
To prepare for a possible war with Baghdad, the Pentagon has stockpiled land mines at U.S. bases in countries ringing Iraq, according to Pentagon records. The decision to make the mines available comes despite a recent report by the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, concluding that their use in the 1991 Gulf War impeded U.S. forces while doing nothing to impair Iraqi forces.

The 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, which went into effect in 1999, has been signed by three-quarters or all nations, including all NATO countries except the United States and Turkey. It obligates countries to stop making, stockpiling and using landmines. A few reasons why the treaty has gained such widespread support:

* Experts estimate that there are currently 80 million land mines buried in 80 countries, and that it will take over 150 years to get rid of them all.

* Since 1975, landmines have killed over a million people.

* More than 20,000 people are killed or maimed by landmines each year.

* Ninety-five percent of those killed by landmines have been civilians.

* UNICEF estimates that 30-40 percent of mine victims are children under 15 years old.

* According to the International Red Cross, landmines kill or maim someone every 22 minutes.

* Because landmines remain in the ground for decades, they pose a continuing threat to civilians long after a war has ended. This enormously increases the difficulty of rebuilding war-ravaged countries.

* In May of 2001, 8 senior, retired U.S. admirals and generals wrote to President Bush stating that landmines "are outmoded weapons that have, time and again, proved to be a liability to our own troops." Mines have caused over 100,000 U.S. Army casualties since 1942.

I know there are intelligent and reasonable conservatives out there, because I got an e-mail from one of them yesterday. He objected -- very politely (God, I love people who object politely) -- to my statement that Trent Lott was not an aberration in the Republican Party and the party shouldn't get away with pretending that he is.

My reader had a point, and maybe I did overstate it a bit. (I've been known to do that kind of thing.) Unless someone can prove otherwise to me, I'll accept that George W. Bush doesn't have a racist bone in his body. (Or at least he's no worse than the rest of us. You don't grow up in America without ingesting a certain amount of racism) I suspect you'd have to go all the way back to Nixon to find a truly racist Republican president or presidential candidate. I'll even entertain the notion that the average Republican is no more racist than the average Democrat. But that isn't the issue.

For a generation, the Republican Party has coddled and mobilized racial bigotry for the sake of winning elections. It was a conscious policy, which Kevin Phillips, an advisor to Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign, described, in The Emerging Republican Majority, as an attempt to "make an ideological bid for the anti-civil rights South." Lee Atwater expanded that strategy by prodding tensions between blacks and working class white ethnics. The racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic Bob Jones University has been a traditional stop for Republican presidential candidates at least since Reagan. Republicans have been experimenting with how much subtle (and occasionally not so subtle) racism they can inject into campaign ads for as long as I can remember (and my political memory goes back a good thirty years).

The Republican Convention of 2000 and Bush's run as a "compassionate conservative" might look like an attempt to back away from that strategy, but at the same time Bush was hiring gospel choirs, he was speaking at BJU, pandering to Confederate flag wavers, refusing to condemn either a supporter who referred to the NAACP as "the national association of retarded people" or his own Louisiana campaign chairman who purchased mailing lists from former Klan leader David Duke. And in the end, of course, he "won" an election by disenfranchising voters, most of them African American.

That the Republican Party felt it had to present a tolerant face to America says something very good about the vast majority of Americans. We are a better country than we were forty years ago, and overt racism doesn't sell as well as it once did. But even while it was serving up that tolerant face, the party wanted the benefit of the racist vote. It got it. Having reaped the benefit, though, it ought to have to pay the price as well. Call it penance. Call it justice.

Trent Lott is an unrepentant racist, and I'll grant that most Republicans are not. But for me the fact that they aren't, that they know better, and are willing to exploit racism -- and to nourish and sustain it by doing so -- makes them morally worse than the poor dumb racists who are just looking desperately (and futilely) for someone more pitiful than them. That's something I've believed most of my life, and the Lott Affair just holds it up to the light so we can all take a good look at it.

That's why I not only want Trent Lott out as majority leader, I want it to be very clear that he's a Republican, that the Republican Party has provided a forum for people like Lott for decades. They're pretending they don't know what could make a man behave that way, and they shouldn't get away with it.

UPDATE: The New York Times has a good article this morning on the modern Republican Party's exploitation of race.

UPDATE 2: Well, this seems to be a trend. Paul Krugman has a particularly fine analysis of the Republican strategy on race. And I couldn't agree more with Krugman's reading of Bush's "rebuke" of Lott. He hasn't called for Lott to step down, and he won't unless he's pushed to the wall. He wants the benefit of looking like one of the good guys to most Americans, while at the same time keeping Lott in place and sending a simultaneous message that while politics forces him to say all that sanctimonious, politically correct nonsense, he doesn't really mean it. The issue isn't whether he really does or really doesn't mean it. The issue is a deceitful and disgusting strategy which abets racism, and -- as Krugman points out -- a press that overlooks it.

UPDATE 3: Tom Tomorrow dissects the Republican spin machine's current effort to deflect blame and CalPundit is all over the strange myth that conservatives responded with outrage to Lott's statement, while liberals took a pass.

UPDATE 4: If Republicans are going to enjoy the fruits of that poisonous tree, they shouldn't complain about the lot of racist crap used to fertilize it. -- The Flaming Moderate

This morning my local paper had a charming letter to the editor containing the usual cliches about the antiwar movement consisting of nothing but warmed over hippies. This is central California. The farmers are still mad about the sixties. And you’ve heard it before, right? You would think it would be kind of hard to sell the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Methodist Church Council of Bishops, and General Wesley Clark as warmed over hippies, but of course the message of how mainstream and serious the antiwar movement really is hasn’t gotten out yet.

It’s moving in the right direction, though. Yesterday Max pointed to United for Peace, which includes several church groups and other non-radicals along with the usual suspects. Today Salon has an article about Win Without War, a coalition which includes the National Council of Churches, NOW, NAACP, the Sierra Club, MoveOn, Working Assets, Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, Physicians for Social Responsibly and Veterans for Common Sense. This being fame-addicted America, it also has a fair share of celebrities (you can find their names, and add yours to their petition here) and while the media has ignored even huge antiwar demonstrations, it apparently finds it harder to ignore famous, even semi-famous, people. Janeane Garofalo got a chance to tear into the Iraq policy on "Good Morning America."

I prefer the voice of a less famous person, Rev. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, who told Salon that normally when the NCC takes a political stand, they provoke controversy among ordinary churchgoers. This time people aren’t criticizing them, they’re telling the Council to speak louder.

Watch out for those noisy Lutheran hippies.

Just go read The Watch on how the Information Awareness Office plans to keep an eye on everything we buy, read or ingest, with one exception -- guns.

Trent Lott on amnesia:

I was 7 years old when, you know, Strom first ran for president. I don't really remember anything about the campaign.

I wasn’t born when Strom Thurmond ran for president, but I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about the platform he ran on. I asked my 18-year-old son if he knew anything about Strom Thurmond, and he didn’t have any problem recalling the ugly details. The anti-teacher party has told us again and again that American schools are so bad that high school students don’t know a thing about the past, but somehow the election of 1948 seems to have made it into my son’s history books. Either Trent Lott is a liar, or his knowledge of American history is so pitiful that alone should disqualify him to be House Majority leader. And there’s some reason to suspect complete stupidity -- Lott couldn’t remember who ran against Harry Truman in 1948 either.

A hint, Senator.



But I’m still going for evil over ignorance -- a conclusion hard to avoid as Josh Marshall adds to the evidence and Pem digs into the Bob Jones University connection.

The one thing that is really important to point out here, though -- as both Slacktivist and Locust Eater have done -- is that Trent Lott is not an aberration within the Republican Party. He is the Republican Party. And not only should Lott not get away with this garbage, the GOP should not get away with pretending that they didn’t know about it and have nothing to do with it.

UPDATE: Uh...Senate Majority leader. I think I'll take a break from making fun of other people's ignorance until my own brain returns.

As you may have noticed, I didn’t post anything yesterday. It was one of those days when the total effect of the news leaves me feeling numb and dumb. I got up and looked at the front page of the Los Angeles Times and discovered that Bush and Company are not only talking about invading countries if they perceive a threat, but using nuclear weapons as well.

It was early, so I read the sentence again, thinking I must have misunderstood. Sane people don’t casually casually toss out threats to use nukes, right?

The anti-proliferation strategy codifies a national security evolution that began with last year's Sept. 11 attacks, and repeats the administration's threat to use preemptive and overwhelming force — including nuclear weapons — against what it perceives as imminent danger of an attack.

With this gang I suppose there’s always a possibility that tomorrow they’ll insist they were misunderstood or only kidding. What’s the matter with you liberals? You don’t have a sense of humor? What, you think we’re going to nuke a country just because we don’t like them?

North Korean missiles in Yemen are apparently no problem.

And while we’re on the subject of nuking countries we don’t trust, Christopher Hitchens, the humanitarian conscience of the hawks, has come out unabashedly in favor of American imperialism. Well, that’s been the implication running through most of what he’s written for the past year, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before he made it explicit.

Sort of like the Republicans running ads with uncomfortably racist undertones for an entire generation before the House Majority leader came out in favor of segregation. (Memo to Hitchens: If the imperialism piece causes you more grief than you intended, just say you didn’t intend to offend anybody, and then go on arguing implicitely for imperialism, without being quite so up front about it. That strategy seems to be working for Trent Lott.)

I was still trying not to step in the filth of birthday praise for a man who, according to the New York Times once said, "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negroes into our homes, our schools, our churches" -- only to learn that those weren’t exactly the ancient and for some inexplicable reason esteemed Senator’s words. Mikhaela Reid tracked down the more repulsive -- and apparently unprintable -- version of the speech that the Times didn’t quote. I have to admit, I can understand the Times not wanting racist garbage in their newspaper. The problem is, it would be nice if we didn’t have it in the Senate either.

Anyway, racism, imperialism and nuclear weapons all tied up in one day’s package (Merry Christmas!) had me feeling yesterday that I really didn’t want to read anymore news, and definitely didn’t want to talk about it. Today I want to scream about it. I hope you do, too. If we all do it together, maybe they'll hear us.

Hip Hip Hooray!

In defense of feminism
A few days ago, I started an e-mail conversation with an interesting and articulate 19-year-old woman. In the course of a conversation about the relevance of feminism she noted that she and her friends had all grown up without experiencing any discrimination because of their gender. I told her I thought that was wonderful, and that not many women I knew in college in the seventies, not even relatively privileged women, could have said the same thing. But I reminded her that the experience of a university student is not universal. Just as a single example, I noted that my husband teaches in a community college where many of the students are poor and either immigrants or the children of immigrants. And the girls are often going to school with no support from their families, because their families don’t think girls should be educated. He has a student right now who would like to go on to a university next year, but her parents do not believe it is right for a girl to leave home. My husband would call himself a feminist, and the advice he gives her, the help he provides in getting her where she wants to be, grows out of his feminist values.

Our conversation about the meaning of feminism follows.

………………………………

Helping poor and immigrant women get educated? Now, that is a cause worthy of feminism.

You’ve probably heard this before, Jeanne, but if the feminist movement is going to have any relevance to my generation you need to start talking more about causes like getting education and health care to poor women (as per your example) and talking less about how fashion magazines exploit us. Frankly, we bristle at your implication that we are merely passive receptacles of media images and that we don’t know how to think for ourselves.

I, and just about all of my peers since high school – both female AND male – support the equal rights of women to be healthy, independent, educated, and respected. But most of us would hesitate to call ourselves feminists, and that’s due to the unappealing dogma we’ve been hearing from self-proclaimed feminist leaders. Feminism may yet prove relevant in the US today, but it will need to re-consider what the most serious issues are currently facing women around the world. And that means thinking beyond bikinis and beauty pageants.

Best,

Julia

………………………………

Well, I have to admit, now I'm the one who's baffled. I gave you an example of a local issue I care about as a feminist, and your response is to tell me the problem with feminists is that they don't care enough about the thing I just told you I'm concerned with, and they worry too much about issues that I've never mentioned.

Do you see a small error in logic here?

Over the weekend I saw a cartoon, I think it was in the NY Times (I read a lot of papers, so sometimes I get them criss-crossed), that expressed pretty much what you're saying, I think. There was a series of panels with an obviously poor woman holding a child and talking about her needs -- child care, equal pay, access to education, health insurance -- and another woman, wearing a shirt that said "feminist" on it was not paying attention. Then, in the final panel, the "feminist" turned away and said something about Augusta and the importance of making sure women could get into fancy golf clubs.

The cartoon infuriated me because it couldn't possibly be more dishonest. I pay a lot of attention to "women's issues" in the news. I read a lot of feminist news feeds. I’m a pretty alert and aware feminist, and I never heard of Augusta until the issue started turning up in men's blogs. It wasn't something feminists I know were paying any attention to. Men still have the loudest voices, you see, and they determine what is news, and what they decide are the important "women's issues" are often things active feminists care little or nothing about. I still haven't written anything about Augusta because I don't know or care much about it. I vaguely know that it has something to do with some women (or is it one woman?) who want to join a golf club and can't because of their gender. And if somebody asked me what I thought, I'd probably say, gee, that doesn't seem fair, but it's not the kind of unfairness that animates me. In the same way, if someone asked me what I thought of beauty pageants, I’d have to say I find them somewhat creepy and anachronistic. But unless someone else brings it up, the topic wouldn’t enter my head.

In the entire time I've worked on this blog, I think the only time I've mentioned beauty pageants was when some of the Miss World contestants threatened to back out of the pageant to protest the stoning sentence of Amina Lawal -- and that was to praise them for using whatever influence they had to call attention to a horrible injustice. (I'm less pleased with their decision to back off from the boycott -- and I wonder why they did so -- but I haven't written much about it because it's been hard to find information about it.) The only time I remember mentioning media images effecting women is when I wrote about something every woman I know with a young daughter was talking about -- the fact that the popularity of pop princesses like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera was influencing the kind of clothing that was available for girls, and that it was getting hard to find clothes for seven-year-olds that didn't make them look like tiny hookers. I have no doubt that you're no passive consumer of media images. You're old enough and wise enough to know better. But I am concerned -- as is every mother I know -- about the image the media is selling to small children.

It sounds to me as if your image of feminists comes not from reading or listening to feminists but from passively accepting what anti-feminists tell you.

What do real feminists really care about?

This week, the Feminist Majority Foundation is focusing on issues that have been centerpieces of its activism for a long time -- lobbying to expand the International Security Force outside of Kabul in order to protect the lives of Afghan women, and urging the president to release UNFPA funds which provide essential maternal and child health care around the world and which will be used for everything from fighting AIDS in Haiti to training midwives in Algeria.

NOW is highlighting things like protecting the Family Leave Act, getting out information about Wal-mart’s treatment of its employees (the majority of whom are women), and court rulings that threaten access to reproductive services.

NOW’s Legal Defense and Education Fund focuses primarily on poverty, violence against women, and how "welfare reform" effects women.

Ms. Magazine fronts an article on how the recent election results effect women’s issues, a profile of Dolores Huerta, the co-founder of the United Farmworkers Union, and an article on UNFPA. (You might see a pattern here -- access to health care for women in developing countries is a bit of an obsession with real feminists.)

If you comb through those feminist publications and organizations, you might find something buried in there about beauty pageants and golf courses, but it is far from the central issue. There may, for all I know, be feminist organizations obsessed with things like that. And if there are, all I can say is that isn’t my feminism, and it isn’t the feminism of women I know and work with.

If you pay attention to feminist theory and activism, and also read the mainstream media, you’ll quickly discover that one of the downsides of calling yourself a feminist is that powerful people lie about you. Daily. And since they have more power and louder voices than you do, most of the time they’ll get away with it.

It’s your choice whether you want to let them get away with it.

Take care,

JD

Jeralyn Merritt’s Talk Left is on the short list of blogs I read everyday, even if I don’t really have time to read blogs. I do so partly because Jeralyn’s understanding of legal issues helps me make sense of so many things going on in the world today. But in all honesty, I read Jeralyn not just for information, but because her combination of intelligence and compassion are rare, and it gives me a little more faith in the world knowing that reasonable and decent people have some tools to slay the dragons.

It cheers me even more to know she’s passing on the tools. Today Jeralyn has a post up about her son Nic, a college senior, who is interning at Cardozo Law School Innocence Project and applying to law schools. It’s not just a piece on mom’s (well justified) pride. It’s a wonderful essay about passing important values on to children. I have an 18-year-old son, and while he’s nowhere near as far along the path to figuring out what he wants to do with his life as Nic is, I’ve had that same sense of pride and astonishment when I see my commitment to justice and compassion for others show up in him. It’s probably the best thing about being a mother.

You’ll hear politicians throw around the term "family values" all the time. But this is what family values are really about: passing on values like compassion and the genuine patriotism of believing the system can (and must) work. Our liberal family values -- when you think about it, they’re something to take enormous maternal (or paternal) pride in.

Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves (Part 3)
When I started adding the women who’ve been piling up in my "I really should add this one to my blogroll" list, I said I was going to almost double the number of women bloggers on the right. Actually, the number has increased a bit since then. There was an interesting side benefit to writing about women bloggers -- people started sending me names and URLs. Not bloggers asking to be put on the list, just readers who had other favorites they wanted to let me know about. I didn’t share the high opinion of all of them. A few were probably good, but wrote about things that just don’t interest me. But I was introduced to many good blogs that I never would have heard of (or would have taken a lot longer to find, at any rate) if I hadn’t raised the issue. Maybe it’s a reflection of one of those little pieces of women’s wisdom that gets handed around a lot: The first step in solving a problem is to start talking about it.

Some recent discoveries:

This Woman’s Work

Blog Sisters

Brief Intelligence

Bookslut

Just two days ago The Agonist linked to an Iraqi blogger. I’d seen the blog before, and found it intriguing, but wasn’t quite sure it was for real. Sean-Paul’s post made me a bit less suspicious that it was a hoax, and I decided I was going to follow it more carefully, and probably link to it. This morning I went to look at Where Is Raed and discovered that the blog has been shut down and its archives wiped out. Blogs disappear regularly, but this disappearance worries me.

Mikhaela Reid on the "problems" we could have avoided if Strom Thurmond had his way.

Fundamentalists Losing Favor with Public

WASHINGTON -- The American Family Association, a far right lobbying group in Washington, released results from a recent survey that shows mainstream Americans see evangelical Christians as one of the least likeable groups in the country.

Researchers from the Barna survey asked respondents how they felt about evangelicals, born-again Christians, ministers, and other groups of people in society. According to the survey, evangelicals came in tenth out of eleven, narrowly beating out prostitutes.

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?

(Via The Watch)

The Ladies' Wear Department

Aziz Poonawalla recently pointed out that some of my comments on "religious" issues and attempts to control women jibe with much of what he said in his post comparing burkas and bikinis. I agree, and I also think that his post is extremely thoughtful and interesting. If you haven't already read it, you should.

The first time I read the piece, two memories came back, both from when I was about twelve or thirteen. One was an overheard conversation between my mother and one of her friends. The friend was a little younger than my mother, in her early thirties at the time, and extremely pretty. She didn't know she was pretty, but she was. I remember hearing her tell my mother about a fight she just had with her husband because they had been invited to a "pool party" at his boss's house, and she had been the only woman there in a one-piece bathing suit. He was angry at her because he thought the one-piece made her look dowdy, and it made him look bad if everybody thought he had a dowdy, boring wife. Everyone already knew he was Catholic, and here she was, confirming all the stereotypes about uptight, puritanical Irish women. She had to wear something that made her uncomfortable so he could look good.

(Of course, on the other side, is a memory of wearing a bikini for the first time myself, when I was about fifteen. It was one of those early ‘60s, mod, belted numbers -- the kind Ursula Andress wore in Dr. No. Only this was the end of the decade, and tie dye or crochet would have been more in style. I got the bikini off the sale rack at Zody’s, with my first paycheck from my waitressing job, and was proud of that, but I also knew it was hopelessly out of style, and thought there was a distinct possibility that I looked like an idiot. I came outside wearing the suit, and before I got halfway down the steps of our apartment building, another friend of my mom's said, very loudly, "Christ, I'd kill to have a body like that again." My fragile little adolescent ego was kept aloft on that sentence for years. It would have been better, though, if my ego had not been so thoroughly crushed that it needed that sentence to get it off the ground.)

The other memory comes from Catholic school in the mid-sixties. A lot of things changed in the Catholic Church after Vatican II, and among the   more sudden, visable changes were nuns' habits. The Benedictines at my school had the classic penguin look: white wimple, black veil and floor length belted black dress, with a black scapular hanging in front. But one year we returned to school and found that the wimple had been reduced to a white band set back from the forehead, so that a little clump of hair showed in the front (I still remember a boy walking into the classroom the first day after summer vacation and blurting out, "Oh my God, Sister Hope's got hair!" -- It was Lucille Ball red, so it did kind of shock everyone). The veil was not much more than a hand-towel sized thing hanging from the headband. And it turned out that Sister Hope not only had hair, she had legs as well.

And I remember being well aware that Sister Hope -- who was one of the most dignified women I have ever known -- was not comfortable in her minimized habit, and I noticed that boys who would not have dared to get out of line the year before, suddenly felt free to tease her and joke with her, and in some small, subtle way the authority of the nuns, the only group of women I knew as a child who had some authority, slipped. Pope John XXIII is one of my heroes, and I think Vatican II was one of the high points in Church history. (I’m still looking forward -- probably in vain -- to Vatican III.) In the long run, I think nuns are better off out in the world and freed from restrictive clothing. More importantly, the nuns I know seem to think so. But when I was twelve, I knew that something had been lost as well as gained. That's often the way things work.

The point of all this being, I don't think clothes themselves have any intrinsic meaning. And yet they are loaded with meanings and implications for the person wearing them -- especially for women. And that’s probably why, though I’ve never been offended by any item of clothing, I’m angry to the bone when someone with power tells a person with less power what to wear.

I wasn't planning to post anything today, but I happened to notice a small item at the bottom of the Los Angeles Times' obituary page this morning that I couldn't fail to at least mention.

Philip Berrigan died Friday night.

The irony, for me, is that on my desktop is a sticky with a link to an article I read a couple of weeks ago, and wanted to come back and write about. I just needed to work some things out in my head first. (I'm not there yet -- as will soon be apparent.) The article is about a man who a lot of people might call a relic of the sixties, who, unlike many people well-known for their activism in that decade, was still fighting with the same passion he had more than thirty years ago. The man, of course, was Phil Berrigan.

In 1968, Father Phil Berrigan, his brother Daniel and seven other anti-war protesters went into a draft board office in Catonsville, Maryland, scooped up draft records, carried them out to the parking lot, and set them on fire with a batch of homemade napalm. Then they waited for the police to come and arrest them.

I was fifteen. I was in my first year of public school, after spending eight years with priests and nuns. A few months earlier, the first political candidate I had ever campaigned for had been gunned down in Los Angeles, not far from where I was living at the time. Not long before that the most eloquent spokesman for peace and justice since Jesus was murdered in Memphis. That year Americans got to see a picture of a prisoner shot in the head by a South Vietnamese general, our ally. The war had gone on so long that as a fifteen-year-old in 1968, I literally could not remember a time when Vietnam wasn't in the news. I literally did not believe the war would ever end.

Which might -- or might not -- explain why I thought the action of the Catonsville Nine, the simple commitment to life and Christian pacifism expressed in the action of using the most grotesque weapon of that war to oppose the war was perfect. It summed up the horror of the war in a way that no words could. I have a vague memory of Dan Berrigan telling an interviewer to remember that the substance they used to destroy paper was also used on the skin of human beings. Visualize it and remember.

When I was fifteen, I couldn't stop visualizing it. That was the effect that Dan and Phil Berrigan had on me. I simply could not forget, ever, that every day my country was burning the skin off human beings, and that in some way I, as an American, was morally responsible for that violence. And that, of course, was their point.

I'm less certain of the wisdom of that action now. We've all seen too much of the simple, unbending morality of religious certitude, and the idea that it justifies things that might not otherwise be justifiable, and I have to question it, even when it is a moral commitment I share.

And yet, when I read the article about Phil Berrigan's continued activism a couple of weeks ago, his unbreakable sense that in fighting the "Pax America," he was still engaged in the same Biblically rooted struggle that he'd been fighting for most of his life, I have to admit I felt that something was gloriously right and just in the world. I wouldn't join him in smashing the implements of war. But I admit to a certain sense of satisfaction in knowing that, as an old man, Phil Berrigan was still doing it.

Damn! It's probably not a good idea to write when I'm this angry, but I have to get this off my chest. I just got an e-mail responding to the post I put up this morning about trying to draw attention to women bloggers. The gentlemen informed me in no uncertain terms that the only reason I get any attention from other bloggers is because I'm a woman. All the people who have linked to things I've written have done so only because of some dumb affirmative action ethic.

Silly me. I didn't even know it was be kind to dumb broads month.

I was sort of vaguely under the impression that I get quite a few links because I work hard to find stories, and facts behind stories, that a lot of other people miss. I thought it might have had something to do with the fact that I'm a fairly decent writer. Apparently not.

Did you ever have words flung at you that feel like fists?

The freedom-hating, anti-capitalist feminist Andrew Sullivan went after the other day takes a bite out of Andy. Think he'll ever learn that it isn't nice to lie about what someone said ?

What Jill Nelson said that Andrew Sullivan defined as an example of feminists who hate free societies:

I don’t buy that the issue’s the pageant, the abortion, the bathing suit, or the burka. What this is really about is men protecting men’s domination of women across geography and religion to perpetuate the tyranny of an acceptable womanhood created and enforced by men.

The status of women as defined by religion is being used by men as a convenient front to cloak the real issues men are concerned about — oil, globalization, control of the world’s resources and power foremost among them. Yet the truth is that most religions are misogynistic and oppressive toward women, and who asked for these defenders anyway?

While I’m well aware of both the real impact and profound symbolism of exporting Western values, standards and most of all products, around the world as part of globalization, I don’t believe that Muslim or Christian men are really concerned about the rights of women. As far as I’m concerned it’s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burkas in order to survive.

In a world where, East or West, Muslim or Christian, Jew or Hindu, millions of women and children live in poverty and ignorance, without education, health care, or decent housing, in communities and countries fraught with violence — often from the hands of the very men who swear they’re concerned about protecting us — you’d be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of women who care about Miss World or any other beauty pageant.

It’s time for women to speak out against the violence toward others done in the name of protecting the sanctity of women. The truth is that it doesn’t positively alter the life of any woman, anywhere, if the Miss World pageant is driven out of Nigeria, or if a physician who performs abortions is murdered, or if Muslim and Christian clerics engage in wars of intolerant words that incite real violence.

Isn’t it past time that women, across geography and religion, talk, unite, and raise our voices for what women really want and need? Certainly there must be a way for us to join in a discussion of how we believe the world can become more fair and equitable. If nothing else, we must raise our voices and declare that there must be an end to intolerance and violence. We can start with that being done in our names.

Now if someone could only explain to me why I know Andrew Sullivan's name, in fact can't avoid hearing Andrew Sullivan's name, but until now I've never heard the name of a woman who writes this eloquently and sensibly -- or maybe someone already did.

I agree with Jeralyn about John Kerry, but I still think this 1971 cartoon (via Eve Tushnet) is funny.

Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves (Part 2)
I got an amusing e-mail this morning from a reader who was offended by the very idea of a "sexist list" of women bloggers. Well, as somebody more articulate than me once said (I can't remember who, probably either Winston Churchill, Dorothy Parker, or Mark Twain -- between the three of them, they seem to have said pretty much everything worth saying): What's the point of writing if you can't offend someone? The kicker was the remark that men don't make an issue of things like this. You'd never hear a male blogger say that he was putting someone on his blogroll just because he was a man. Men are above that sort of nonsense. (By the way, does anybody remember Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins in "My Fair Lady," singing the hilarious ode to clueless misogyny, "A Hymn To Him," perhaps better known by its refrain: "Why Can't A Woman Be More Like a Man?" -- I don't know what made that pop into my head.) Men never complain about unfairness.

Honey, give me more than my fair share and I promise I won't complain about it either. Word of honor -- I'll take it like a man.

Now the truth is, I'm not adding a lot of women to my list because they're women. I'm adding them because they're good, interesting writers who I enjoy reading. In fact, a lot of them stayed off my list longer than they should have because even though I started writing this blog thinking I would write about nearly everything that interested me, at some point I realized that I had an audience that was primarily interested in politics, and while some of the women I'm adding are purely or mostly political writers (and some of them pretty gender-neutral in their writing), a lot mix political, personal, spiritual and a lot of other issues together -- as I do, but with a different balance. They didn't seem to quite fit on my blogroll.

There was a element of sexism in my sense that they didn't fit. Sexism isn't just flat out hatred of women. It involves all kinds of subtle ways we devalue women's lives and contributions. We all grow up so immersed in sexism that it effects everyone. Including women. And including women who define themselves as feminists. And when I thought some styles of women's writing "didn't fit," what I was thinking, I realized, is that because a lot of women tend to approach things from a very different angle than men, there was something not quite right about it. Different, therefore wrong. Even though I liked it.

But eventually I realized it's my blogroll, I can do whatever I want with it. (I grew up in a time when women -- at least poor, Irish Catholic women -- didn't think, let alone say, "I can do whatever I want" with anything, so sometimes it takes me awhile to find those words -- another little legacy of sexism.) If my blogroll's got people on it who write about needlepoint and church suppers and decorating and volunteer work and fat and chocolate and two-year-olds' temper tantrums and homeschooling and why John Ashcroft is one of the poorest excuses for a human being God ever made, and that's not what most people (especially male people) expect when they read a political blog, well, that's what it is. That's the way a lot of women write and think -- valuing experience and interesting connections, not argument. Men just aren't used to it because it's the way we talk to each other, not to them. (Most of them anyway. I do know a few wonderful men who are in on the secret.) Maybe if we start, they'll get used to it. Maybe we'll change the way people think about political discourse. (Believe me, there's a lot of overlap between politics and cleaning up after small children.)

So, diatribe completed, here is my latest batch of first-rate women bloggers. I hope they are especially offensive and blatantly female today. If they're not, I may have to take up the slack. Otherwise, what's the point of writing?

The Bitter Shack of Resentment

Easy Bake Coven

Mad Musings of Me

The Reader

Noli Irritare Leones

I think I'm entirely too female. I answered c to every question.

District Attorney Robert Morgenthau asked a judge today to throw out the convictions of the men accused in the Central Park jogger case. Glenn Reynolds has a smart and fair discussion of the topic, although he lets Ann Coulter off the hook too lightly. CalPundit picks up the slack.

Terrific. I came up number one in "googles adult nasty jokes." My mother would be so proud…

From the e-mail bag: Nigeria
After posting a couple of pieces about Nigeria over the past few days, I discovered that I have a lot of very intelligent readers who were ready to give me lessons in the history of Nigeria -- which was very helpful of them, because as I was writing I had been thinking that in order to make any sense of things, I really needed to find out more about Nigerian history than I knew, especially recent history. I also got a lot of mail from people who were upset that I failed to grasp the subtle concept that religion (or one particular religion anyway) is a horrible thing that makes people crazy. I'm afraid I don't feel any further enlightened after reading those letters. Below are a sampling of the ones I found interesting.

.......................................................

One of the things that gets overlooked in analysis of these unfortunate riots is that they have less to do about some dramatic, symbolic clash between Islam and the West, and more to do about the politics of Nigeria. Nigeria is another cobbled-together imperialist state, like Yugoslavia or Uganda/Rwanda, and therefore is divided between animists/Christians in the South and Muslims in the north. The reason this division is so sore is a problem endemic to Nigeria, it has little to do with "those crazy Muslim fanatics" and more with Nigerian history. You cannot magnify the situation to be a microcosm of the world, it simply does not work. -- Dylan Suher

……………………………..

In 1999 Obasanjo won a democratic election, taking over from a caretaker dictator after the previous dictator Abacha died. Obasanjo has had a couple years to deliver a better economy and basically could not…The rise of fundamentalism is due to the failure of the democratic forces. This is where fundamentalism and dependence on religion comes from. When people work so hard and still cannot succeed, they have to find answers somewhere. In our society it's easy to see how your work is rewarded, so religion isn't as important.

It's not specifically Muslim. Just a few months ago I read an article which mentioned at length the rise of Christian fundamentalism in Nigeria -- "The Next Christianity," from the Atlantic.

The thing that is hard to understand is that the West was happy Abacha was gone, and tried to help out. Specifically the IMF went in and took care of the old debt and gave out economic advice. So why turn against the West in this way?

The answer is that the IMF, despite it's good intentions, hands out economic advice that is simply hurting the people of Nigeria to the point of starvation. Raise taxes, cut social spending, balance the budget and privatize sound like good ideas, but they are simply not working for Nigeria's economy.

Add to this the general deflation of commodity prices brought on by the deflation of the US dollar, and Nigeria's exports have seen universal price collapse. Oil, coffee, cocoa, all fell through the floor. The problem hasn't been fixed and so of course they're still suffering.

When people are suffering like this they turn to groups that they have no natural inclination to join. In a shrinking economy, this is what people do -- they retreat to their tribes and fight over the scraps. -- Eric

…………………

I wanted to comment on something you wrote:

"And isn't it strange that there is a sudden need to control women in the most brutal way imaginable in a country where very strong and radical women in the Niger Delta are standing up for their rights, and achieving a great deal? Is there a connection? And why am I the only one who seems to wonder about that?"

I think you are implying that increased activism by women in the Niger Delta agitated enough conservative Nigerian men in the North to repress local women/the Pageant. While plausible, I don't think it works in Nigeria. Please correct me if my interpretations of your post are incorrect.

[Ed. note: A little bit incorrect. I didn't mean to suggest there was a direct correlation. I just found it curious that within one country there were some very forceful women getting international attention, and at roughly the same time there is a movement to suppress and even brutalize women. The interplay of assertion of rights and backlash is often subtle and strange, and I was more wondering aloud about it than asserting an answer.]

Nigerians tend to think locally first. Seeing Northern and Southern Nigerians argue over their then military government at a forum many years ago was quite illustrative to me of the significant divisions within the Nigerian polity. This was reinforced as I spent a couple of years meeting expat Nigerian political types and reading Nigerian media while working as a researcher in Washington. I would be surprised if a crackpot semi-Islamic Hausa or Fulani politician would feel remotely threatened by a bunch of Ibo or Ogoni Christian/traditional faith women protesting oil production in their back yard. An obvious exception would be if his family had a direct financial stake in the oil scheme.

As the NYT article you linked to shows (though I disagree with the writer's assertion that the Federal system in Nigeria is necessarily bad) the assertion of an overtly Islamic society is (and has been) a regional and ethnic issue for the Hausa and Fulani Northerners. Non-Hausa and Fulani immigrants to the North often convert to Christianity as means of self-identification. The Muslims and Christians have been fighting in the north central belt well before the reinstitution of democracy in 1999, usually in the spring and with much higher death rates than the Miss World riots.

As to why you seem to be the only person wondering about all this, it's because most Americans don't care about Africa until there is an external political argument that can be illustrated there. The warblog folk are all happy to talk about Nigeria now because there is both a Muslim villain (no he's not clergy but so what?) and because of the way the western media covers it (neutrally reporting fighting between Muslims and Christians; conservatives would rather point out the Muslims started it). I don't want to open a media bias discussion with you, but in the latter case the story is often framed among conservatives about defenseless Christians story being attacked by the Muslims. My reading certainly shows the Muslims started this, but the Christians quite definitely fought back, which as a Christian I'm rather perversely proud of. But none of this makes good warblog copy does it? -- M. Herman Yam

Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves
Me and my big mouth. Not long ago I criticized TAPPED for not including a reasonable sample of women writers on their blogroll. It's not just a matter of numbers. Women often bring different perspectives to issues, and readers lose out if all they hear are men's voices -- no matter how interesting and intelligent those men are (and TAPPED's choices are all terrific).

This morning I got an e-mail from Jim Capozzola pointing out another blogroll with an overabundance of y chromosomes. He's right -- twenty-nine bloggers, and only two women (I hope I got it right this time. I miscounted TAPPED's list -- which probably justifies their decision to leave an innumerate like me off their list, although they still have no excuse for passing over the other women I mentioned.). One of the two women, I admit, I'd never heard of, but was glad to discover. I'll be adding Mikhaela's News Blog to my blogroll, too -- and reading it often. The other woman I read every day -- before anyone else does, in fact.

I'll spare you the re-run of the rant -- although I would like to send you over to Elayne Riggs , who had some interesting comments on the topic and then some equally interesting follow-up comments, exploring it from a different angle than I did. Pem has more to say on the need for women's voices.

All of this got me thinking about the number of women on my blogroll. A quick glance will tell you men vastly outnumber women on the list, but I've got a pretty respectable number of women, too -- sixteen (possibly more, there are a few people on my list whose gender I'm not certain of). I haven't made any particular effort to search out women writers, although I admit when I find a good new blog, the fact that it's written by a woman is a plus. It makes blogtopia (thank you skippy ) a little less lonely.

I've also got a file full of blogs that I've been looking at and considering adding to the blogroll. Some of them are blogs I've discovered through someone else's blogroll, a mention in someone's post, or through my own referrer log. Quite a few are blogs by people who've asked me to add them to my blogroll, and I found them interesting enough that I added them to my file to look at a few more times before deciding to put them over on the right. (One interesting phenomenon: I've never gotten a request from a woman blogger to be added to the blogroll. I don't know why.)

Anyway, there's something funny about my file of blogs to look at. About half the blogs on it are by women. A lot of them have been there quite a while, and I've almost put them up several times, but just as I was about to, they'd decide to revamp the blog's look, or go on hiatus, or write in a purely personal way that, while interesting, didn't really reflect what attracted me to the blog in the first place. So I ended up with a big file stuffed with wonderful women bloggers. The past week or so, I've been thinking it might be interesting to post them all together -- and Jim' e-mail, I think, just gave me an excuse to do so. But the list is now so long, I'm afraid if I put them all up, the ones at the bottom of the list will just get ignored. So over the next few days, I'll be roughly doubling the number of women on my blogroll. Here, in no particular order, are the first five:

The Watch

Plucky Punk's Happy Land

(Woolgathering)

This Land Is My Land

Deep Language

The best news of the day: Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the Egyptian pro-democracy advocate who was imprisoned because of his efforts to monitor elections in that country, has been granted a retrial by Egypt's highest court, and his been released from prison.

There are two excellent articles in today's Salon that deal with women's issues. And -- hallelujah! -- neither one is premium.

The first is about the roughly 325 women (there's no exact count), mostly maquiladora workers, who have been murdered in Ciudad Juarez in the past ten years, and how globalization contributed to the social conditions that made those crimes both more likely and more unsolvable.

The second must-read article is an interview with Geraldine Brooks about the complicated history of women in Islam. It's inevitably sketchy, but it's a good -- and interesting -- introduction to the topic.

Are you ever haunted by a news story? I'm still trying to put together pieces of the puzzle to understand how and why more than 200 people died in rioting over the Miss World pageant in Nigeria. Everyone but me seems to have put the pieces together already and mentally filed the story away, but I think that's because most commentators started with big, simple pieces. The more pieces I find, the less sense it all makes. Some pieces:

* Sister Semira Carrozzo, a nun who runs a school for both Muslim and Christian children in Kaduna, says that relations between the groups, until now, have been good. When the rioting broke out, Muslim friends immediately called to make sure she was all right.

* Two years ago more than 2,000 people died in a month of religious rioting in Kaduna over the new state government's imposition of sharia (Islamic) law on the sizeable Christian minority. There were also violent clashes in 1987 and 1992.

* According to Sister Carrozzo, those respsonsible were primarily unemployed boys between the ages of 17 and 18, " all ready to sell themselves for 100 naira," and easy to manipulate.

* Every commentary I've read begins with the fact that the riots were a response to an article by a Nigerian journalist which was offensive to Muslims. But a reporter in Kaduna could find very few people in Kaduna who had heard of the article, or who even knew anything about the Miss World pageant. The riots didn't start until four days after the article was published.

* Some of the wounded say they were shot by soldiers firing randomly into crowds.

* There will be a presidential election in Nigeria in April. Amnesty International expects to see increased violence in Nigeria in the months leading up to the election.

* Some of the rioters were shouting campaign slogans and circulating political posters.

* The population of Kaduna is 1 million. Both Christians and Muslims claim to be the majority.

* Northern Nigerian politicians have attempted in many ways to reveal the "weakness" of the current president, Olusegun Obasanjo, who is a southerner. The cancellation of the Miss World pageant is viewed in Nigeria as a major blow to his administration.

* There is oil in southern Nigeria. There is no oil in northern Nigeria.

* Nigeria has few police and relies on vigilante groups for much of its law enforcement. According to Amnesty International, these groups have been responsible for hundreds of extrajudicial killings in recent years. Many of the groups are ethnic militias, or ethnically-based political groups who combine intimidation of political opponents with law enforcement activities.

As is so often the case in following a story, it probably would have been easier to form a judgment if I'd collected fewer puzzle pieces.

………………………………

Some sources:
The truth behind the Miss World riots

Ugly saga of Miss World reveals split

NIGERIA: Vigilante violence in the south and south-east

Nigeria's Violence Not a Simple Christian-Muslim Clash

Kevin Raybould has some very interesting things to say about liberal attitudes toward the press. Because there's a myth of a "liberal press," which anyone with progressive views who reads and watches the news knows is a distortion on a grand scale, a lot of us develop a kind of siege mentality, assuming the press is one huge, right-wing, corporate-paid mob, which will always be against us. And if we think we can't win, we won't. It's another example, I think, of leftists preferring to see themselves as brave and lonely outsiders, battling lost causes, instead of doing the hard work of making our voices heard.

"What would you have done differently after Afghanistan?" Anyone seriously dissenting from current policy needs to be able to answer that question. Sean-Paul Kelley deserves a lot of credit for beginning to pull together some answers. I look forward to future posts on the subject.

CalPundit reviews Kenneth Pollack's The Threatening Storm.

I'm stretching back here, but even though I saw Matt Yglesias' comment on Glenn Reynolds' crusade against the raging hordes of man-killing feminists a few days ago, I made the mistake of not coming back to read the comments. Read the comments. (I was especially interested in the mix-up over the words patriotism and patriarchy. Sometimes mistakes are very revealing.)

One problem with political blogging is that there's far too much news and information that I'd like to say something about. Sometimes, when I'm drowning in it, I make lists, with headlines and URLs, of things I'd like to come back to. At times, I'm looking at so many articles that I want to just list them all on the blog -- here are a few blatant examples of sexism and here are a few subtler ones, here's one of corporate greed and here's one of individual human kindness; on one side I've got a few examples of the light that people of faith bring into the world, and on the other proof that there is no greater evil than a mean person who thinks God is on his side.

Occasionally I do that. More often, I just trash all the headlines and URLs and start fresh -- God knows, there will always be more examples of misogyny, greed, saints and demons coming around the pike -- sometimes all rolled into one article.

The problem for me is that, for the most part, I'm not a "here are more examples of things I like and dislike" kind of writer. My frustration with the mainstream press is only partly that they miss stories I think are important and want to call attention to (which is one of the values of blogs -- all those pairs of eyes combing back pages, small newspapers, foreign news, the Congressional record, and Defense Department reports, for buried treasure -- armies of I.F. Stone wannabes.) My bigger issue is the miniscule attempt to understand anything, to put things in context, to connect bits and pieces of information in any reasonable way. Or even to throw a lot of contradictory stuff together and admit, "I can't make any sense of this chaos whatsoever." The press has too many quick answers, and not enough modest questions. And no one seems to remember last week's stories, let alone even a small bit of history.

Connections and contradictions -- that's what interests me. My lists of things to write about usually consist of articles that speak to each other in some way that I can't immediately explain. I hope that by writing I can at least begin tying threads together.

Last week, I posted a conversation that focused in part on conflicts between respect for minority cultures and women's rights. After reading it, Ampersand sent me a link to a very interesting and relevant article, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? by Susan Moller Okin. (Another value of blogs: Interesting people send you interesting stuff.) The premise of Okin's essay is that many non-European cultures (she focuses on immigrants to Europe) are much more patriarchal, and have traditions far more damaging to women, than Western liberal societies in general, and that to grant "group rights" to minorities in the name of multiculturalism is to lock women within those minority groups into oppression. No one should have a cultural right to oppress another person.

I've got to admit, it's a compelling argument, and one that articulates well a lot of inchoate thoughts I've attempted to pull together.

She opens with a stunning example: In the eighties, France began permitting polygamy -- but only for immigrants from countries that allowed it. This accommodation of minority cultural rights at the expense of women's rights was obviously an enormous mistake. Reporters who interviewed immigrant women stuck in polygamous marriages found that they all regarded it as a nightmare, made worse by the crowded conditions they lived in after moving to France, which often led to violence among women, or directed at each other's children (Leila Ahmed, in Women and Gender In Islam documents similar patterns of violence in polygamous marriages, and an awareness in Muslim literature as far back as the middle ages that polygamy made women's lives miserable.) Eventually, the French government realized its mistake and banned polygamous marriages. One wife will be legally recognized; all other marriages are annulled.

In case you missed the full implication of that, I'll spell it out. Message to wives number 2 through 4, and all their children: You're on your own, guys. You may starve, but at least you're no longer oppressed.

Merci, I guess.

God only knows why the French started accepting polygamous marriages, but they didn't end them because they were bad for women; they ended them because 30-member families were a drain on the welfare state.

And if political correctness was running rampant in France in the eighties, then why, at roughly the same time polygamous marriages were being accepted, were the French banning Muslim girls wearing headscarves from public schools , on the grounds that it was both a violation of the separation of church and state -- although crosses and yarmulkes were permitted -- and a violation of women's rights?

That's not a rhetorical question. There's a contradiction there that I honestly can't make much sense of. I'm not sure how much "political correctness" comes into play, but if it's there at all, it's clearly not the only factor, and it combines with some obvious insensitivity to valid cultural differences that deserve to be respected. The relevant question doesn't seem to be "Were the French too politically correct?" but rather "Do the French have any sense of when to draw lines and when to leave people alone?" (And let's follow it up with the obvious question -- Do we?) Ban headscarves and allow polygamy? Throw together one part political correctness and one part boneheaded cultural insensitivity, stir it up, and I don't know what to call it. For lack of a more politically correct term, stupidity will have to do.

No sooner did I finish reading Okin's essay, than I stumbled across an article illustrating the complexity of the issue: In October, an Australian judge ruled that a 50-year-old Aboriginal man (who had murdered his former wife) was not guilty of raping a 15-year-old girl because her parents had sold her to him in marriage. Since the arrangement was "traditional," the judge ruled, the man had every reason to believe that punching a child, putting his foot on her neck, firing off a rifle when she resisted him, and raping her were "morally correct." It was just part of his culture.

Political correctness gone stark raving? Could be. You could just as easily read it as cultural imperialism on steroids. The strongest objections to the ruling came from Aboriginal women, who were angry not only about the lack of protection for women, but about the way the court "pathologized" their culture. Arranged marriages were traditional, they pointed out, but in a context that contained many provisions for ensuring women's safety. Those conditions no longer exist (wiped away, to a large extent, by colonialism and its residue), and rape and violence against women are not "traditional." The women resented the insult to their culture. A bit more "political correctness," more awareness of the culture, might be called for. Valuing women's lives might be a nice little touch as well.

Just as I was thinking about the conflict between women's rights and cultures that devalue those rights, the Miss World riots erupted, which seemed to exemplify that conflict in the extreme. Salman Rushdie and Andrew Sullivan both described the riots as Muslim attacks on liberal Western culture. And they made a few good points. The riots began when a Nigerian woman journalist, Isioma Daniel, casually wrote that if Mohammed had seen the Miss World contestants, he might have chosen one as his wife. And certainly there aren't many liberal values more sacrosanct than the right to say whatever you damn well please, and if people are offended, that's their problem. I liked Rushdie's arrogant call for "more Rushdies." There is no doubt that the Muslim world needs more reasonable and moderate critics of the madness. (I don't mean to suggest that the critics aren't there, but their voices aren't often heard -- and why is a part of a whole other discussion.) But sometimes outrageous, deliberately provocative voices make people appreciate the moderates -- so a few more Rushdies probably wouldn't hurt either.

But unlike the always sure of themselves Messers Sullivan and Rusdie (that Victorian certitude seems to require a Victiorian title of respect), I was also left with a lot of unanswered questions -- some, perhaps, irrelevant, but refusing to go away nonetheless.

When did beauty contests -- just another way to exploit women -- become the epitome of Western liberal values?

Why did the contestants, who initially refused to go to Nigeria to protest the stoning sentence of Amina Lawal, back down? (Their protests made the newspapers; the backing away was virtually silent) What kind of pressure was put on them, or what persuasion offered? Why did Amina Lawal suddenly stop mattering?

And why did this happen in Nigeria, when there are other Muslim countries in Africa, even countries with Christian-Muslim conflicts, where nothing like this has happened? (Sunday's NY Times had an article -- on the back page of the opinion section -- exploring some possible answers to that question, but the simpler answers offered by the writers with bigger names are more likely to become the common wisdom.)

And why, in all the posturing about the fatwa issued against the Nigerian journalist, did no one seem to notice that it was a politician who issued it, and clerics and Islamic scholars who told him what he could do with his fatwa?

And isn't it strange that there is a sudden need to control women in the most brutal way imaginable in a country where very strong and radical women in the Niger Delta are standing up for their rights, and achieving a great deal? Is there a connection? And why am I the only one who seems to wonder about that? Is it really such a strange question?

And should I read anything into the fact that both Rushdie and Sullivan aim a good measure of their anger about the Miss World riots at feminists, who seem to be culpable because they failed to appreciate how important a part of Western liberal values beauty pageants are? (And will the gentlemen be disappointed to learn that Isioma Daniel apparently doesn't share their anti-feminism, since her next writing will appear in the feminist publication conservatives most love to mock -- writing not about Miss World, but about a topic neither one of them has considered worthy of notice: the radical women of the Niger Delta. I've been combing the press for months digging up stories on those women, and I wouldn't miss that article. Somehow I don't think Andrew Sullivan will be reading it. Isioma Daniel served her purpose for him as a means of attacking Muslims; what she has to say about women fighting the oil companies will probably be less compelling.

And in Sullivan's bizarre attempt to blame "puritanical, anti-capitalist feminists" who "hate free societies," do I hear a message to Western women: You'd better be grateful for the oppression we have here, because obviously our form of patriarchy is better than their form of patriarchy?

Thank you, I guess.

And while I'm on the subject of our own brand of patriarchy, I have to mention two recent articles. The first is about marketing plain white sleeveless undershirts under the charming name "wife beaters." There's even a company that sells the shirts on the Web that has, as part of its advertising, a "Wife Beater Hall of Fame," including Ike Turner and Mike Tyson, and offers a discount to anyone providing court records, a restraining order, or a probation officer's phone number to prove a domestic violence conviction. Capitalism in action. (Will capitalists be apologizing for this outrage? Can we take them seriously if they allow this dark side of capitalism to go unchallenged?) The seriousness with which the LA Times takes this ugly trivialization of violence against women is probably summed up in the article's headline: Politically incorrect fashion term: Legitimizing the use of 'wife beater' to describe a type of undershirt worn by the hip has struck a nerve. "Politically incorrect" is, of course, a very fashionable thing to be -- and probably will remain so after the tee shirt has joined shoulder pads and bell-bottoms on the Goodwill racks. Fashionable battering. Suddenly our brand of patriarchy isn't looking so good.

And while we're on the subject of women and the darker edges of capitalism, you must read Liza Featherstone's article on Wal-Mart in the current issue of The Nation:

From the Third World factories in which its cheap products are made, to the floor of your local Wal-Mart, where they're displayed and sold, it is women who bear the brunt of the company's relentless cost-cutting.

I just hope Andrew Sullivan doesn't read it and decide that Wal-Mart's right to make a fortune off female poverty is another Western liberal value we're required to stand up for.

Ain't Too Proud To Beg
Actually, under normal conditions I am too proud to beg, but a woman in my town, Maliha Zulfacar, who is a native of Afghanistan, and who used to teach at Kabul University, is trying to raise money to build a child-care center at the University, both to educate children and to allow women to study, work and teach at the school. If you read this blog, you know how important programs like this are, and so, just in case you're thinking of making a charitable contribution this month and aren't quite sure where to put your money, I thought I'd make a suggestion.

A while back, I ranted a little about TAPPED's failure to notice that there were plenty of women with blogs worth reading. In case anyone's interested, Ms. magazine just started a blog called Ms. Musings (which I've added to my blogroll), and in one of the first posts asks for links to good blogs written by women. I've already mailed links to a few of my favorites. You might want to let them know some of yours.

The Los Angeles Times had a pretty good article today on the Iraqi Kurds, but toward the end, I tripped over this odd (to me, anyway) paragraph:

Economically, Kurdistan remains in limbo. A new fast-food outlet complete with golden arches has introduced Big Macs and Happy Meals -- but as McDonal's. "I have to wait until sanctions end to make it the real thing," said owner Suleiman Kasab, a former hamburger flipper at a McDonald's in Austria.

Why does the American press fixate on US corporate hegemony as the ultimate goal for every society? Last week, I mentioned a Time article on Iranian dissent which was accompanied by a photo of an imitation Carl’s Jr. in Tehran, which I thought implied that the important thing about rebellion against clerical control of Iran is not the possibility that Iranians may soon be more free than they have ever been, but that they will soon get to eat real hamburgers. In the LA Times article, the implicit becomes explicit: One of the biggest problems the Kurds have is that their McDonald’s doesn’t have a d in it. I don’t know, but among all the problems in the economy of Kurdistan, I doubt that the lack of genuine Happy Meals is high on many people’s priority list.

More on Turkey and the Kurds

This entry has also been posted at Stand Down -- the anti-war blog that explores reasons for opposing war with Iraq from multiple politcal perspectives. If you'd like to comment, you can do so here.



Christopher Hitchens had a tough Thanksgiving week. First Bush appointed his least favorite war criminal, to head the investigation into possible intelligence failures that preceded the September 11 attacks. To his credit, Hitchens was quick to denounce the decision, and not a shred of historical revision appeared in his essay. I was a little afraid Hitchens might have changed his mind and decided that secretly bombing Cambodia was actually a preemptive strike, and killing Allende was a model for regime change, but fortunately Hitchens does, apparently, still have some integrity (although there was that strangely gratuitous final paragraph in which he seemed to suggest that people who agree with him about Kissinger are paranoid, but I won't pick on him too much for that -- just on a rhetorical level, making a case that the people who agree with you are paranoid is a little tricky, and you have to have some pity on a man trying to pull it off.)

But Bush was apparently not done make Hitchens' life miserable. For the coup de grace, he sold out the Kurds. Okay, "sold out the Kurds," might be an exaggeration at this stage. But certainly it's reasonable to see some discomforting moves in that direction in the New York Times Thanksgiving Day revelation that the administration is "mounting a major effort to enlist the support of the new Islamic government of Turkey for a northern front if there is a war with Iraq," including offering economic aid for their support. (Am I hypersensitive, or does the term "hit man" spring to anyone else's mind when they read about paying one country to attack another?) The administration also made it clear that they won't support a separate Kurdish state in northern Iraq -- a concern for Turkey, which has its own problems with uppity Kurds. (Minorities get a little restive when they're tortured, and asked to serve as human mine detectors.)

That lack of American support for a Kurdish state isn't necessarily a huge problem. The Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without their own state, and if they wanted to make a case for Kurdish independence, they'd certainly have a good one. But the Iraqi Kurds have disavowed the call for an independent state, and want only a Kurdish region set aside as part of a democratic Iraqi federation. At least that's the best they think they can get, and they're willing to settle for it. (The Turkish Kurds have not yet given up on the idea of an independent Kurdistan -- so any move by the US to assure the Turks that the Kurds will never have a homeland is selling them out. Sadly, there was never much hope that it would be otherwise.)

The bigger danger for the Kurds, if the Turks are a major part of Bush's war strategy, is that northern Iraq could end up with a new name -- Turkey. The main issue is -- surprise -- oil. Kirkuk and Mosul, two cities in northern Iraq, are loaded with oil. Turkey has almost none. Not only would the Turks like to get their hands on that oil for its own sake, they want to keep it out of the hands of the Kurds. A wealthy and powerful Kurdish region is not something they want on their southern border. Wealth and power tend to make oppressed minorities a little hard to deal with. In September, Ozdem Sanberk, the former Turkish ambassador to Britain, told a reporter, "If the U.S. intervenes, and in the first days the Kurds enter Kirkuk and Mosul, the Turkish army will move in." In fact, the Turkish army already has troops inside the Iraqi Kurdish zone, and is already planning to send more to stop any flow of Kurdish refugees into Turkey when full-scale war breaks out.

Hamid Efendi, the top Iraqi Kurdish military commander, says that if the U.S. attacks, his forces will immediately go after Kirkuk and Mosul. Massoud Barzani, a prominent Kurdish leader, insists that Kirkuk, which lies just outside the current Kurdish autonomous zone, should be the capital of the Kurdish region in a post-Saddam Iraqi federation. ( His principle rival, Jalal Talabani has shown more flexibility on the issue, and has played down the possibility of Turkish opportunism, but has also complained of being left out of both military planning and planning for post-war reconstruction.) Mosul is within the Kurdish controlled no-fly zone. Turkey has an Ottoman-era claim to the two cities, and since the Gulf War Turkish nationalist politicians and media have been reminding Turks of the "Turkishness" of the region. There is a substantial Turkmen minority in the Kirkuk, as well, and the Turks could easily use the cover of protecting the rights of fellow Turks in order to occupy northern Iraq. (They have a history of doing that sort of thing, of course.)

For now, I'll set aside questions about the wisdom of relying heavily on the support of a country with severe human rights problems, (particularly regarding the Kurds, and including Kurdish women), as well as the issue of whether this is a good time to support a government in the hands of a party with Islamist roots. Turkey's AK Party appears relatively moderate, and willing to work with secularists (despite its somewhat disturbing chairman) and might prove that Islamic democracy is not a contradiction in terms. But they haven't proven it yet, and wariness, at the very least, is certainly called for.

Focusing only on the Kurds, however, it's seems pretty clear that the Bush administration can't juggle alliances with the Kurds and the Turks. It will have to choose. And it looks like it may already have done so.

This entry has also been posted at Stand Down -- the anti-war blog that explores reasons for opposing war with Iraq from multiple politcal perspectives. If you'd like to comment, you can do so here.

The outpouring of mainstream religious opposition to war with Iraq demonstrates both how weak the ethical case for war is, and how wide and mainstream (and difficult to categorize and demonize) the opposition really is. The Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago, an organization of the city's Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders, was formed in 1984, and in 18 years has never issued a statement on a national issue. They just found an issue they could all agree on and felt they needed to issue a statement about -- the conditions for justifying war with Iraq, they said, have not been met. The religious leaders expressed the belief that opposition to the war represents "a broad spectrum of society," and that they hope that their public opposition will help President Bush realize that even "normally conservative and cautious" Americans believe that war should not be pre-emptive and unilateral, but should always be seen as a last resort.

A young woman is raped by her cousin, and her family, ashamed (of the victim, not the rapist) sends her away to a place where she has to work 364 days a year, with no pay and little food, where she is beaten and humiliated, made to pray all the time, and forbidden contact with the outside world. Damn those crazy, misogynist, religious fanatics -- all of them.

Alum's past hinders Philly school naming

WEST CHESTER, Pennsylvania (AP) -- When Bayard Rustin died in 1987, President Reagan said the civil rights activist who organized the 1963 rally at which Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech had "won the undying love of all who cherish freedom."

But that love apparently has limits in Rustin's hometown.

School board officials in West Chester are reconsidering their decision to name a new high school after Rustin following complaints from some board members that they had been unaware he was a conscientious objector during World War II, and that he was gay…

What year is it again? This is so stupid I don't even want to comment. Just let it stand as a monument to ignorance.

Signs of Hope and Reason
In Turkey, an atheist and an Islamist have written a book together exploring issues including the existence of God and the role of women from their differing points of view. It's a little bit of a gimmick, but as Sanar Yurdatapan, the atheist, pointed out, secularists who buy the book because they want to hear what he has to say are going to be stuck with half a book by an Islamist, and Islamists who buy the book might just end up reading something by a secularist. If nothing else, their relationship holds out the promise that people with wildly divergent ideas can have respect, even affection, for one another. It's a beginning.

Let's see -- make cranberry sauce and croutons for the stuffing, bake the pumpkin pie, go buy flowers, (oh dear, and I just remembered that I didn't buy cream -- my daughter has decided that making our own butter is a Thanksgiving tradition, a tradition that only goes back to last year, but, hey, this is California, we make it up as we go along), clean the house, pick up my son at the Greyhound station (call at noonish to make sure he actually has managed to find the bus station -- he can be a little scattered sometimes), find time to play chess with a seven-year-old who's going to get very bored while I'm doing all those things -- and that's just today.

I'll be too busy to write anything for the next few days -- and anyway, it's Thanksgiving, and I'm not going to waste a perfectly good holiday (probably my favorite, in fact, because it is the only big one that is quiet, cardless, and presentless) fretting about the state of the world, but I did want to remind everybody that the day after Thanksgiving is Buy Nothing Day -- when you can take a swipe at consumerism and over-consumption just by refusing to be part of the biggest shopping day of the year. Stay home, sleep late, teach your kids how to play a card game you remember playing as a kid, read a book, listen to music, ride your bike, help out at the local shelter (what, you don't think homeless people need to eat the day after Thanksgiving?). Just don't shop. You don't need any more junk, and you know it. It's your holiday, not Walmarts.

And if you have time (and at least one child to read to), go to a library and pick up one last thing before Thanksgiving -- a copy of Barbara Cohen's book, Molly's Pilgrim. It's about a Russian Jewish girl who everyone at school makes fun of. At Thanksgiving time, the other kids tease her because she's never heard of the holiday. Then Molly's class gets an assignment to make a pilgrim doll. Molly tries to explain to her mother what pilgrims are -- people who move to a new country so they can practice their faith without being oppressed -- and, of course Molly's mother understands exactly what that experience is like, and makes Molly a pilgrim doll that looks exactly like her. It's a great lesson -- pilgrims aren't all dour people in black and white (in fact, maybe the first pilgrims were not really even all that dour); we still have pilgrims, and will as long as we remain a country worth coming to. It's also a beautifully written book that renews the meaning of the holiday. (Now if only it didn't make me cry every time I read it...) If you have any children around who are over five or so, old enough to sit still for a fairly long picture book, you've got a good excuse to read a wonderful story. After all, you're not going shopping, right?

UPDATE: The Agonist has found the "Buy Nothing Day" ad in an unexpected (but appropriate) place.

Glenn Reynolds may not realize it, but he's been dressed, stuffed and is ready for basting. It's a couple of days early, but Happy Thanksgiving!

Where are the leaders in the Muslim world who are trying to make real reforms? Some of them are still hiding under burqas.

A year ago, there were few newspapers available in Kabul. Now there are sixty. It sounds promising, but the press in Afghanistan isn't dealing with some of the most important issues facing the country -- particularly women's issues and stories about the warlords' crimes -- because some Afghan journalists believe the government is still so vulnerable that it shouldn't be criticized.

Enter aina -- a French group trying to help build an independent media in Afghanistan. One of their projects involves teaching Afghan women how to make television documentaries -- particularly on topics the local press isn't covering. So far, the women have made films on child labor, teenage marriages, and women imprisoned for refusing to marry. They are currently planning an hour-long documentary on the condition of women in the country. The entire film crew will be made up of women -- in order to make it easier for the women they interview to feel comfortable talking about their lives.

Their films are being shown on French television, but not in Afghanistan, where state-run television is becoming increasingly conservative, recently banning images of women singing or dancing, for instance, out of fear that "the Taliban and Al Qaeda are still around and could use it as propaganda."

The reformist voices are there. But they're still being silenced.

"I also understand how tender the free enterprise system can be." -- George Bush, White House press conference, Washington, D.C., July 9, 2002

Maybe I don't understand this story because I've never had tender feelings about business. I come from a long line of the kind of people the free enterprise system chews up and spits out. You can shake the family tree as long as you like and not a single entrepreneur will drop out, not even a reasonably paid wage slave. Failure runs in the blood.

But somehow -- just in an abstract way -- I always thought capitalism was supposed to reward people for providing a service. I thought it was efficient. I thought the whole point was that if you screw up, you pay for your mess. There's no escaping the consequences of your mistakes. And the people who screw up least make out the best.

When did that change?

Until recently, Hamid Karzai was guarded by US military bodyguards. They did a damn good job, too -- foiling an assassination attempt last September. You've got to give our military credit -- when they're doing the right thing, they're the best. But Bush, Inc., of course, has a deep-seated belief that whatever government can do, business can do better. So the State Department hired a private military corporation to guard Karzai. Not surprisingly, the company is one of George Bush's major financial supporters -- DynCorp.

If the name sounds familiar, it might be because this is the same DynCorp whose employees, according to a lawsuit by an aircraft mechanic who worked for the company, participated in a sex trafficking ring while working for the UN in Bosnia -- buying and selling girls as young as twelve as sexual slaves. When Ben Johnston, the mechanic, blew the whistle, he was fired because he "brought discredit to the company." Another employee, Kathryn Bolkovac also spoke out on what was happening. She was fired as well. No one involved in the ring ever faced criminal charges.

Ben Johnston revealed not only the sex ring DynCorp employees were running, but also the fact that fraud was rampant, and that it was common practice for DynCorp mechanics to work on airplanes while falling down drunk. These are planes, you understand, that U.S. military personnel would be flying, not realizing that they'd put their lives in the hands of drunken mechanics.

That's what the company is infamous for. But they've had a few other problems as well. You might remember a tragic story from last year -- a plane carrying a family of Baptist missionaries was shot down in Peru. The plane had been mistakenly identified as belonging to drug smugglers. Veronica Bowers and her 7-month-old daughter were killed. But it was more than a tragedy. There were measures the crew of the surveillance plane were supposed to follow to prevent such mistakes, and didn't. The death of Veronica Bowers and her baby wasn't just a tragic error, it was the result of recklessness. And according to an article in last week's New Republic, the reckless and incompetent spotters worked for DynCorp.

And then there was that little narcotics trafficking incident in Colombia. DynCorp is the main U.S. anti-narcotics contractor in Colombia, employing pilots and other workers in the drug war. Last year a Colombian newsweekly ran a cover story describing the pilots as "lawless Rambos."

And maybe I should also mention that lawsuit for allegedly spraying Ecuadorian peasant farmers and Amazonian Indians with toxic chemicals. At least two children died from exposure to the poisons.

I know I don't have much of a head for business, but I grew up believing that prostitution, drug dealing and reckless disregard for the lives of others were the kinds of things that got you into a whole lot of trouble.

When did that change?

I'm not sure, but let's try out a theory: It changed when we found ourselves stuck with a president who spent his entire life screwing up and never learning that there was such a thing as consequences, a man who therefore came to believe, "I do not need to explain why I say things. — That's the interesting thing about being the President. — Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." A man who apparently believes the same rule applies to his friends and contributors.

Your Monday To Do List

Did you vote yet? (No, not that election. I'm still trying to forget that one…) Lou Dobbs wants to know if you think the media is liberal, conservative, or neutral. (The poll is on the left-hand side of the page -- scroll down a bit). As they say, vote early and vote often. (Via Busy Busy Busy)

You have to read two pieces at Alas, a blog -- the first, a further exploration of the men's rights movement, looks at why some men feel shame and guilt when faced with feminism, and why opposing patriarchy is just as important for men as it is for women; and the second reveals what you learn about George Bush when you draw him. (Have you ever noticed there are some bloggers so good you can't keep up with how many exceptional things they write?)

And speaking of people who write so many interesting things it's hard to keep track of them all, don't miss Jim Capozzola's "Al Gore and The Alpha Girls." It's not only witty and insightful -- you just start with the assumption that you get wit and insight when you go to The Rittenhouse Review, right? -- it's one of the most perceptive pieces on journalism and opinion that I've ever read. Go discover why so much punditry consists of one long sour note.

And of course you already read Slacktivist, didn't you? You didn't? Go! And I'm not just telling you that because I'm mentioned in it. (Although I would like to tell WebBlocker that while I often write this blog in my robe -- hey, how fancy are you dressed at 5 o'clock in the morning? -- full nudity I don't do. And you should be grateful for that.)

And, in a far more serious vein, you probably already heard that the Supreme Court will be reviewing the Miranda decision, and I hope you already know that when legal issues are in the news (and, lately, that would be every day, wouldn't it?), the one site you must visit is the indispensable Talk Left . But if you haven't read Jeralyn's analysis of the case, you should.

Hijabs and Democracy at the Tehran Carl's Jr.

Over the past week or so I've had an interesting e-mail conversation with a reader about how politics, religion, women's rights, business, cultural values (and sensitivity) and a lot of other things all weave together. At some point I realized that a lot of the issues we were talking about were things I hadn't seen much conversation about between people with basically liberal values. Mostly the "conversation" (if you want to call it that) has consisted of liberals defending themselves against attacks by conservatives -- attacks that have been outrageous and irrelevant. That the right wing use of the issues has been stupid and opportunistic, however, doesn't mean there aren't issues here to discuss. Are liberals too culturally sensitive, too "politically correct"? Is there a conflict between standing up for women's rights and refusing to demonize people who don't value those rights? How do you separate encouraging democracy from creating a corporate-friendly (and exploitative) environment? Those are just a few of the questions that arose.

It occurred to me that other readers might be interested in the debate so far -- and might like to contribute their own thoughts. And so, here it is:

In a message dated 11/14/2002, John Steppling writes:

I draw your attention to the Richard Just article in The American Prospect. Liberals for the war. What bothers me about this argument is the claim that the only argument for an anti-war position is that Saddam can be deterred. Well, I for one don't argue that and I am against the war. This assumption that Saddam is somehow a threat is what really gets glossed over. Apparently asking for evidence is just part of a bygone era. The received wisdom is now that he is a threat to America and I guess everyone else too.

The other big reason to be against this war is that it creates a precedent for future pre-emptive action and encourages and excuses civil liberty abuses domestically.

Saddam is bad -- ok -- and he has about 18 planes left and an ambivalent army and little in the way of a future, but I guess he's a lot easier to deal with than North Korea or Saudi Arabia.

Yours, JS

I thought the Richard Just article was interesting. Obviously I disagree with him, but he makes a reasonable case -- probably more or less the case Hitchens would make if he weren't so full of bile (along with the other things he's full of). I agreed with a lot of what Just said -- liberals have always had an ambition to make the world a better place, liberals are the ones who are supposed to pay attention to human rights (surely an issue in Iraq) -- I agree completely. I'm sort of a wary Wilsonian. I would like to believe in the possibility of using power to make the world better, but I've read enough history (and literature, for that matter) to know that even with the most genuinely idealistic motives, that ambition can turn sour. And there are always people waiting to take advantage of idealism and twist it into something else. That doesn't mean I completely abandon hope, but you have to be very careful about fixing your eye on the prize and not seeing all the traps in the way of getting there -- including your own arrogance about your "values."

And in this case, we're not even starting with ideals. The motives are so blatantly greedy and cynical. That's why Just completely loses me at the end when he talks about how liberals should encourage wars that will "repair the earth." First, that requires me to accept the idea that Bush is interested in repairing the earth -- which is just laughable. Then I have to believe that the precedent set by a preemptive strike would not matter, that when the strongest country decides it can overthrow other regimes at will, that doesn't gouge a hole in the idea of justice and liberal ideals.

Take care,

JD

I have been thinking about your last note -- on the Just article. It's the dilemma we keep circling. How to make the world better, how to deal with the built-in problems of power and the limitations of democracy and the delusions of the hegemonic culture.

I can't say I have any real answers at all. I know trying to support women's rights in Muslim countries is right, and yet it seems that support becomes part of a fabric of Barbie Dolls, Starbucks, and Blockbusters franchises -- how to tweeze it apart and how to begin the educating, at home at least, of a society so numbed to its own privilege and its own form of misery.

Don't know.

JS

I was intrigued by your comment about the relationship between supporting women's rights and having that turn weirdly into support for a corporate-friendly universe. There's no logic in that, of course, but I know what you mean. I've been on the verge of putting something similar into words for awhile, but I can't get it to come together in any reasonable way.

There was an article awhile back in the NY Times about a woman in the Netherlands, an immigrant from Somalia, who is a strong voice against Dutch laws that aim at "respect" for immigrant cultures, because she sees those laws used by Muslim men to protect their cultural right to oppress women. She's gotten many death threats -- an amazingly brave woman.

Many conservative Muslims, of course, see her as attacking their culture. I started to write something about her, but I got sidetracked, and then I noticed right-wing blogs picking up the story -- and using it, of course, to attack Muslim culture. Which made me realize that as much as, of course, my heart is with this woman, in some way her critics have a point, -- well, that's putting it much too strongly, but at some level I understand their anger -- she's providing ammunition for people to make broad, nasty attacks on Muslim culture. But I don't think she has an alternative either. Those are "attacks" that have to be made. She's wonderful, and I applaud everything she's doing. I just hope she gets some Muslim support -- people who are able to back her criticisms, without attacking the culture. (Thank God for the students in Iran who have come out for that professor they're threatening to execute.)

That sounds off topic. I often go round in circles before I get anywhere, sorry. I was thinking that just as the bigots are ready to pounce when someone makes a criticism that has to be made, the Starbucks and Walmarts (not to mention the Halliburtons and Exxons) seem to be waiting for an infusion of American values to become a turn to American consumer culture. Our values are often turned against us. And it certainly seems that most Americans don't see a big difference between supporting American values and expanding American corporate influence. There was an article in Time a few weeks ago about the loosening of clerical control of Iran, but the picture they put with it was of smiling countergirls in hijabs in a pseudo-Carl's Jr. As if the fact that some Iranians are eating hamburgers is a sign that democracy is just around the corner -- or people questioning clerical rule leads directly to Carl's Jr. franchises. There's a difference between hamburgers and democracy -- I don't know why that's such a hard idea to get across.

Best,

JD

The old cultural imperialism bugaboo. These are bone hard issues for the left, because we place enormous value on women's rights, and we also value cultural differences, and at some level those values are in conflict in much of the world (maybe slightly less so for feminists than for leftists with less focus on women's issues, because feminists long ago got used to saying, the hell with cultural sensitivity, genital mutilation is an outrage.)

Call it p.c. if you want, and it certainly can dissolve into that kind of mindlessness, but there's a genuine value at the core of that cultural sensitivity, and one I don't want to lose. If my only choices are a mindless "mustn't criticize anyone's culture" or "convert them or kill them" -- I'll take the former. But I don't think those are the only choices.

Anyway, speaking about how cultures become twisted in the ways that radical Islam clearly has ("radical Islam" is a stupid phrase -- but I haven't got a better one handy), and about keeping consumerism and American values separate, and keeping the xenophobes from co-opting the issue of reforming Islam (or, at least, creating the conditions for reasonable Muslims to reclaim it), and how assimilated Muslims are, and the whole idea of cultural sensitivity versus women's rights -- do I have enough issues there, or should I toss in a few more? -- there are a lot of threads to explore:

First, did you read the article in Salon recently on Oriana Fallaci ? She's pulled a Hitchens and written a book defending Western civilization from the Muslim hordes. I haven't read Fallaci's book (don't plan to, either), but the author of the Salon piece says that it has "more bigotry" than "any other book worth reading" and he gives a few repulsive examples. But then he tries to dig some worthwhile stuff out from under the dirt. He suggests that despite its nastiness, even racism, Fallaci's book is "a bracing response to the moral equivocation, the multi-culti political correctness, the minimization and denial of the danger of Islamo-fascism" that you find on the left. Which is sort of what you're saying, I think, only without the borderline acceptance of la Fallaci's operatic bigotry.

The issue is, can we get the "bracing" honesty without passing through xenophobia, and if we don't manage it, aren't we ceding the issue to the bigots?

One of the ideas the Salon article brings up is that we have to grapple with the notion of religion, its values and its darkness -- which is something neither the left nor the right does a very good job of. On both ends of the political spectrum, and all through the middle as well, most of us approach religion in one of two stupid ways. Either we go around attacking other people's religions without any attempt to understand them (Hitchens is the master of this because he despises all religion -- this is a man who told a Salon interviewer that he felt "exhilaration" about the war because "there has to be a stand made against the worst kind of tyranny that there ever could be, which is religious," and he's not just talking about fundamentalist Islam, he sees this as a war against "the religious worldview" -- and while he gets some good shots in here and there, he can be astoundingly dense about the nourishment people draw from religion, not to mention what it would mean to a society to lose thousands of years of moral teaching). If we don't attack, we put on our nice faces and insist that all religion is fundamentally good and we should never criticize. Neither of those approaches is terribly helpful.

As usual, I'm probably spinning off topic here, but sometimes my way of making sense of what I don't know is to look at its connection to something I do understand, and what comes to my mind is my own difficulty recently in writing about the Catholic Church. I grew up in the Church and had a lot of horrible experiences in it, but right now my attitude toward it is a combination of respect for its traditions -- no, actually, it goes deeper than that: I think the moral questions the Catholic Church asks and even its symbols and rituals are irreplaceable -- and fury at its misogyny, its homophobia, its anti-Semitism, its power games, its hypocrisy…well, I could go on forever about my anger at the Church, but the point is that when I started writing on this site, I sometimes wrote about what I knew of the horrors in the Church. But something disturbing happened. I'd see what I wrote picked up by other bloggers and twisted. Often unintentionally, I think. There were people who just had a gut level mistrust of religion and they'd pick up things I wrote with a "see I told you religion is bad" attitude. And I eventually stopped writing about it because I had no interest in attacking the Church and I don't want to feed misunderstanding. What I wanted to do was explore the way the good and the bad wove together -- but I discovered that that was very difficult to do in a public forum. Not impossible -- but I had to be careful about the way I went about it.

I promise, I'll eventually get back to Islam. And there really is a connection.

Lately, it's gotten even harder because the Church has gotten easier to attack, and people are taking nastier shots at it. I don't know if you've followed the sex scandals in the Church at all, but about a week ago, the bishops apparently softened their policy toward pedophile priests. I haven't delved into the details, so I don't really know how good, bad, or indifferent the new policy is, but there was one horrible thing, and that was when Bishop Gregory lashed out at people who are supposedly hostile to the Church and all it stands for and who are just using the scandal to destroy it. Now, I admire Bishop Gregory, he's a good man, but that was a stupid thing to say. He seemed to be attacking the victims' groups -- the very people he desperately needs to listen to.

Anyway, I gathered some articles about it because I wanted to write something, because I think, as someone who stands slightly outside the circle of the Church, but still respectful, even admiring, of it, (basically the same situation many Arab intellectuals find themselves in, I suspect, in regards to Islam) I understand some things that neither people fully in it nor people indifferent or hostile to it do.

But I ended up not writing what I intended to, because I started running across some obscene comments about the bishops that made me queasy. And at the same time the bishops issued a really good statement opposing war with Iraq -- bringing up all the ethical and moral issues that I wish everyone was dealing with. I saw a lot of rightwingers using the pedophile scandal to attack the bishops' moral authority, and making a connection with their statement on Iraq in a way that I thought was unfair. It's not just that I think their moral authority is important because right now, politically, they agree with me. I think the kinds of moral questions they ask are important to deal with, even when I disagree with them. And so I couldn't write about the things I understood about how power operates in the Church, because at the moment I have a sense that there is a greater danger in the voice of the Church being silenced than there is in the abuse of clerical power.

I can't tell you how ironic I find that. I grew up knowing the Church's power to silence people. I never expected to see it silenced. That doesn't mean I'm one bit less angry about the abuse of power, but I'm reluctant to speak of it because it's so easy for people to use anything I say to attack the Church in ways that it doesn't deserve to be attacked.

Now if I, from outside the Church, feel that way, imagine how people who have more commitment to it than I do, even very liberal, reform-minded people, feel. There was a op-ed piece recently by Andrew Greeley, who's a liberal priest, someone who's never been reluctant to criticize the Church, but he basically repeated what Bishop Gregory said -- the victims' group leaders are power hungry and the media is out to get us. People under attack -- even good, thoughtful people -- are not terribly open to the possibility of reform. And outrageous attacks put even sympathetic apostates like me on the defensive.

I've just finished reading two books by Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan feminist, one on gender relationships in Muslim societies, and the other on Islam and democracy, and I'm in the middle of a book by Leila Ahmed on the history of women under Islam, and while both authors are vehement in their denunciations of how women in Islamic cultures have been treated, and honest about the misogyny that is an inescapable element of Muslim tradition (and I find their denunciations a lot more "bracing" and honest and than those of people like Fallaci and Hitchens who have ulterior motives for their attacks, besides not understanding the cultures), they also -- especially Mernissi -- see a situation far more complex than most of us appreciate. And also, rather than rejecting the religion outright, they search for alternate readings, and traditions that were lost along the way, as an alternative to the misogyny. Reading Leila Ahmed, who wonders how the lives of Muslim women would be different if some of the less misogynist scholarly traditions (and there are some) had taken hold reminded me a lot of the former Catholic priest James Carroll writing about how the Catholic Church might have been different if Peter Abelard's voice, for example, had become a central part of the tradition. In any faith, I think people who search the tradition for what could have been and might yet be are precious. Neither the Bible nor the Koran are fundamentally anti-female, and many women find support in both books.

I read an interview some time back with Kanan Makiya, a professor of Middle East studies at Brandeis and an Iraqi dissident, who said that part of the problem with Islam in much of the Arab world today is that Arab intellectuals abandoned it -- and that left religion in the hands of imbeciles. I think there's something to that. (I also think we've got a similar problem in this country -- although obviously on a much smaller scale -- with the decline of the old mainstream churches and the growth of both dumbed down smiley face religion -- the kind you find in a lot of popular religious books -- and, well, the imbeciles and thugs, Falwell and worse.)

I think some intellectuals in the Arab world are trying to claim Islam back. That’s why the situation with Hashem Aghajari in Iran is so interesting. He's a threat to the clerics because he's talking about texts being interpretable -- meaning isn't set in stone. That's something Leila Ahmed talks about a lot -- the need to get back from the clerics the power to argue about meaning. (I mean, fundamentally, it's the quintessential feminist demand: Let us tell and interpret our own stories.) I'm obviously not an expert, but some reformist Muslims I've read suggest that the whole idea of clerical mediation between God and man is foreign to Islam anyway -- a power grab that has no basis in the Koran. In any case, Aghajari is not attacking Islam, he's attacking powerful people trying to control the meaning of Islam. And on the one hand, he was sentenced to death for that, but on the other hand, he's apparently gotten overwhelming support -- although, of course, there's a backlash as well. But maybe that support suggests a longing to peel faith and power apart. And maybe there's your Reformation. There's a real struggle for the soul of Islam here that's very heartening -- and it's in the streets, not just a fight among clerics, politicians, and intellectuals.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that if we go looking for honest criticism of how Islam has interwoven itself with some brutal power relationships -- and reading Ahmed, it's pretty obvious that's not a recent development, although it has recently gotten more dangerous, at least for us -- those are the people we should be paying attention to, not Fallaci or Hitchens or Bush or Falwell. Or even Huntington. Because they know what they're talking about, in the first place. And their critique obviously comes without any nasty assumptions about Western superiority, even with love for what is best in the culture (Love is a quality you can't miss in Mernissi's books.) And generally it comes with an awareness of Western complicity -- which you're never going to get from the right -- a refusal to let the West off the hook. I don't remotely mean you can blame imperialism for the problems, but if you take honesty about how the West has reinforced and encouraged a lot of garbage in the Arab world out of the mix, you end up with a very distorted picture. I don't ever expect to see Oprah choosing Nawal el Saadawi or Taslima Nasrin for her book club, but I'd like to see intelligent people on the left spend less time defending themselves against Christopher Hitchens and more time exploring the legitimate critics of the darker elements of Islamic culture, not the crypto-colonialist ones. You want non-pc honesty -- that's where it is.

This letter's gotten much too long for me to deal with assimilation. My experience makes me think Muslims are a lot more assimilated in the US than in Europe, but I may be wrong, and even if I'm right, I don't know why that would be true. Well, I have some theories, but I've already written too much, so I'll drop that for now.

Look forward to hearing from you,

JD

On supporting women's rights and Wal Mart invasions: I think this is related to the culture imperialism discussion. That woman in the Netherlands is indeed right. The culture of Islam at present, in many contexts, is very repressive in regard to women. There are signs it is changing a bit -- but of course hard line Judaism is also oppressive in regard to women, and one might argue so is Christianity in its more extreme manifestations. So why is it that Islam has been so hijacked by the radical elements?

I think it's partly something inherent in the belief system itself -- even if this sounds quite un-PC. Is it because, as some have argued, that Islam has had no reformation? No Martin Luther or Calvin? Perhaps -- although the parallels don't quite match up. It's probably more to do with the historical forces around those countries -- feudalism being forced to leap into the modern world, and Imperialistic powers helping keep big chunks of the Islamic world in their feudal state and propping up western friendly (business friendly) military regimes. The natural course of evolution is derailed.

Still, I think (as a five year resident of Europe) that Muslim culture has refused any form of assimilation in the countries where it has immigrated. The Netherlands is amazingly tolerant -- and it's been a tense dynamic from the start there -- and in different ways in France and Spain as well. In France, there is no denying that Muslims have been more self-isolating and difficult to deal with than, say, the west African community. Each situation in Europe is slightly different, but this refusal to assimilate has led to the Pim Fortuyn syndrome. Now Fortuyn wasn't a particularly nice man, but he also wasn't a demon, and when he said Islam was backward and intolerant, it struck a chord in Holland. Suddenly people were coming out and saying, well, yeah, I do find the Muslims all around me rather self isolating and their preaching against homosexuals and women's rights flies in the face of our tolerant traditions.

To some degree this happened with LePen in France in the same way (and LePen, like Haider, is a nightmare). And from personal experience, in Paris, the Arab and Muslim community is simply hostile and downright threatening at times.

My liberal (even Marxist) training kept looking for the economic and social analysis of this, but to be honest, it became harder and harder not to just admit that Islam was creating its own problems. The belief system trumps the national and even clan alliance. This is why so little in the way of moderate Muslim protest has occurred anywhere by dissenting Muslims. Notions of dissent are strangely absent -- and you're quite right that Iranian student protests are a welcome change to this (interesting, this is Persian though!).

The endless sensitivity about cultural offense becomes tiresome, to be frank. I've lived an awful lot of places: Mexico, Thailand, France, England, and now Poland -- and traveled to a lot of others -- and it's always been the Islamic countries and communities that have created problems -- which I know is making me sound like Samuel Huntington, but the cultural bias against women, to return to the original point, is simply so obvious that its hard not to condemn it outright. And even if the historical and material forces are behind this strange deformed curve in its social evolution, I would argue Muslims must start organizing against the radical influence. And the only organization I see is that of Muslim feminists -- and almost the entire Arab world is close to irrational in its defense of all Islamic society.

Arafat and the Palestinians are another example of this in a way. The Muslim community never comes out and really denounces suicide bombing and the gangsterism of the Syrian government or the corruption of the House of Saud. And this leads us back to the corruption of the US government and its invasion of Iraq (when probably a better case could be made for regime change in Saudi Arabia.)

I guess the final point is much what you said -- democracy and educational advance is not McDonalds and Baywatch. I think the values we should be exporting are choices about education and this can only come from showing that there are choices, and from this will lead, one hopes, a growth of tolerance. Its also important, no matter what, that women's rights be defended -- and if this includes (as it probably does) a clear distinction between those rights and racism and cultural bias (so the far right doesn't co-opt the issue) then that's what it includes. I believe Islam must reform itself -- which doesn't mean Islam or Muslims are "bad," it simply means a step toward self-critique is long overdue.

Best, JS

So much to discuss.

I will start with where I live -- Poland -- 99% Roman Catholic -- and I see the way that religion has meant a lot to people who needed John Paul when he helped create an order to the opposition to Communism, but I also see (given the backward, anti-modernist leanings of this Pope) the way it now contributes to the low-grade xenophobia and near paranoia of the Polish lower classes. Religion clearly is something more than people like Hitchens would like it to be -- so much of western culture can be traced to Church writing (from the New Testament to Augustine to Tillich) and this legacy seems in danger of utter debasement at the hands of current Catholic leaders (the leader of Opus Dei a saint?).

I can't help but see organized religion as institutionally corrupt at this point -- the excesses of far right Christians in the US and the Radio Maria types in Poland (or Opus Dei in Latin America and elsewhere) have seemed to gain in power and credibility. [ed. note: the cabinet appointed by Pedro Carmona, who briefly replaced Hugo Chavez as president of Venezuela in a coup last April, consisted of several members of Opus Dei; the organization has also achieved some measure of influence in the US.] I am no expert in this area but one does see parallels to what is happening in Islam.

Let me jump topics though and touch on this question of cultural sensitivity. I guess I am of the opinion that this sensitivity, as too often expressed these days, is rather over-valued and misdirected. Cultures change -- this seems to me to be the lesson of history -- and those that don't tend to self destruct. The Academic post-modern left (the PC police as I see it) seem to want, at least sub-consciously, to keep all cultures in a state of pristine and unchanging separation. I am all for preserving those aspects of a culture that should be preserved -- but stoning women to death for adultery and general lack of rights fall into the category of things I feel comfortable in arguing need reform.

That said, the fact that the west (meaning the US mostly), asks, in appearance anyway, for democracy in the Muslim world and then finds that the early election results have voted in mostly anti-democratic parties makes one pause. Of course mostly men voted and few women were even allowed to -- and as Stalin said, its not the voting that matters, but rather the counting. Does this mean one abandons the Muslim women who are working for change? I don't think so, but then the US just voted support for an administration that is clearly of an authoritarian bent (and a country that remains homophobic in a great many places and racist in others). The US simply cannot be seen (as we have talked about) as a leader of liberal values of tolerance and humanism.

So I think its important to keep the negative and militant aspects of Islam in mind. Just off the top of my head I can recall King Feisal of Iraq being murdered, and President Shishakli of Syria a few years later, and then Hamadi of what was North Yemen and Sadat, and Mouawad of Lebanon, and Boudiaf of Algeria (not to mention the various attempts at assassination in that country) and attempts on Mubarak -- and so on and on. Islam's militarist mind set is hard to deny -- and while this isn't to say that Islamic culture isn't full of singular and historically important advances, it is to say that over the entire post Ottoman-Arab war period the region has been nothing except violent (and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Ba'ath Party sympathies with National Socialism ).

I will again quickly point out the endless conflicts the US has found itself in -- so perhaps it's simply the unwavering ignorance of mankind. However, I do think there is something in Islamic culture that tends toward reactions of a martial type, and what part of this is the product of post colonial residue and US foreign policy is hard to say. Clearly US policy in propping up western-friendly but corrupt and brutal leaders has done nothing to promote societal and cultural evolution.

I keep returning to the absence of moderate Muslim dissent and commentary. Almost the only ones I do hear are western educated and live in either Europe or the US. There are exceptions to be sure -- and probably it's hard to get word out in many circumstances. The compromised media in the US is certainly tending toward this as well ( I heard not a mention of the anti-Bush protests in Prague -- which Fox called Czechoslovakia a full three times -- and it was, according to Polish TV, a very large and peaceful protest) and I increasingly think this is of the utmost importance.

So yes, the idiot racist and bigoted and myopic Republicans and Democrats need to be debated (as they demonize Islam), and as you say, without the knee jerk apologetics of so much of the left these days. The opposition needs to be sober and honest and not look for strategies and opportunity. The best and most articulate argument I have heard against the war was from Pat Buchanan -- not a Democrat or a far left analyst. One does not need to take sides on all issues -- if Sharon is bad, that doesn't make Palestinian leadership good -- and it's time for US analysts to cram on history a bit -- investigate the American foreign policy that helped create the mess in the Middle East, while not trying to excuse the Islamists who issue fatwas on novelists they don't like and issue death sentences on most any dissent anywhere, anytime.

American leadership will only make things worse, but voices are needed to keep trying to tweeze apart the complexities of recent history and to look honestly at what is wrong and oppose it, at least philosophically.

Regards, JS

Well, I woke up this morning and thought I should add a couple more thoughts.

Let me give you an example of what I call over cultural sensitivity. In the Paris bus station (in Banilieu -- the Euro Lines station that handles all international bus traffic), there is a waiting area upstairs next to where you board. At the far end I happened to walk into what looked like a public restroom -- and was quickly kicked out and told in angry French/Arabic that this was a Muslim area and the whole end of this part of the waiting room was for Muslims and prayer. I had to wonder what this had to do with my needing to use the washroom -- but in any case I didn't see a Christian waiting area nor a meditation area for Buddhists or Jews, only this rather large area for Muslims that was cut off from everyone else.

Now I have no problem with an area for prayer -- but beyond that it seems to show a lack of respect for other cultures and religions. The four noble truths of Buddha are all about respect and honor and not fixating on the illusions around you -- but respect for self and others is most prominent.

This brings us to the problem I have with a lot of Islamic attitudes -- a lack of respect for other religions and beliefs. A novel is offensive -- ok, but why does the publisher have to apologize to the Muslim community? He wouldn't apologize to the Christian community, I'm guessing -- nor the Hindu. But then they would simply condemn a book that offended them and not issue death sentences.

So I think there is a kind of over sensitivity on the part of Muslims about Islam, and a kind of strident response to much that is different, and this is probably, again, education. The lack of education does tend to breed an inward looking ignorance that is in step with all fundamentalist behavior -- whether Morman, or Baptist, or Hindu.

So I don't want to sound culturally insensitive -- I'm not, and I think the bigoted rhetoric of so much of the right these days is exactly a precursor to worse kinds of behavior that will make them what they behold. Ashcroft isn't really all that far behind Mullah Omar at heart. But I do think Islam is in desperate need of coherent self criticism or it risks annihilation. Assimilation is a complex process that involves more than just learning the language of a new country. It also means accepting certain norms and values. In America, due to its history probably, Muslims have assimilated better -- but certainly not in Europe. My girlfriend covered her head and wore very modest clothes while we traveled through Islamic countries -- and this is what one might expect Muslims to do in non-Muslim countries -- show that kind of respect to the customs of the people they are living and travelling among.

How much of Islamic irrationality is born of fear and hatred of women I wonder? Another complicated question.

JS

Well, yes, I think we can probably agree that stoning women is a bad thing. And jailing and torturing gay men. And suicide bombings. And executing children -- no, wait, we do that too, don't we? Forget I mentioned it.

But is anybody speaking in favor of those things? Ok, maybe that's too rhetorical a question. Is anyone on the left failing to adequately condemn those outrages? And that one I mean as an honest, non-rhetorical question. I'm willing to admit there may be some truth in that charge, but, honestly, I don't see it. The impression I get from the right is that leftists are barely aware those things exist, or don't care, but it's human rights groups like Amnesty and HRW -- which I constantly hear conservatives write off as "liberal," (they aren't, but if conservatives are rejecting their work, maybe there's some truth in the label) -- that struggled to draw attention to those kinds of things when most people couldn't have cared less. And feminist groups as well. I've been a member of Amnesty International for almost 20 years, and I've written "freedom writer" letters on behalf of people whose rights were being abused to every continent on earth except Antarctica. I don't think those are issues I've avoided, and I don't have a sense that they're issues other liberals have avoided either.

I know you're right, though, about tolerance for immigrants sliding over into tolerance of intolerance or acceptance of unconscionable beliefs. It happens. I'm not thinking of Muslims here, but I know of two problems that friends in education and social work deal with in relating to immigrants. A lot of immigrants bring from their own cultures the idea that education is for men. Not only are girls not encouraged to go to college, sometimes they're told flat out that they are not allowed to go. What's a high school counselor to do -- tell a young woman, the hell with your parents, this is America, if you want to go to college, go? Well, if you're down to that as a last resort, I'd say, yes. Don't tolerate misogyny. But the truth is, that girl is going to be a lot more comfortable in college if she has her parents moral support, and if you can avoid barging in and saying to the parents, look guys, you've got these idiotic cultural assumptions about women's abilities and you're just going to have to dump them now that you're here, it's better to do so.

And I've heard of similar problems in child welfare. People bring to this country some brutal notions of what constitutes reasonable child rearing practices. Of course, they are the same ideas Americans had a couple of generations ago, but still -- we've moved forward, and we can't let people go around sticking their children's hands in a flame in order to teach them not to play near the stove. I'm not being facetious. I grew up in a brutal home, and I don't have any tolerance for the smallest abuse of children, physical or verbal. But once again, barging in with a "what's the matter with you uncivilized brutes" attitude is not terribly effective. It's not a matter of saying, "Well, gee, that's their culture and we have to accept it," it's a matter of trying to understand the culture so that you can work with the parents to make things better for the kids. (Of course, I would say the same things about some fundie Christians, who have their own weird notions of child rearing.) But if you have to get them out, get them out. Beating children is not a cultural or religious value -- at least not one anyone should put up with. (Now if only we could get Jeb Bush to agree with that.)

But sometimes educators and social workers let things slide, and while I'd say overwork, or occasionally simple laziness, were bigger factors, a lack of desire to confront an ugly cultural difference can play a role too, and that kind of "cultural sensitivity" is stupid and wrong. And, sure, I'd agree with you that a publisher apologizing for a slur against Muslims in a novel is in the same category and beyond the pale. I'm sure you'd also agree that threatening the funding of an art exhibit because it offends Catholic sensibilities or of a gay-themed play because the local evangelicals aren't happy is equally beyond the pale. I don't have a problem saying Muslims can be idiots, as long as we extend that to recognize that they don't have exclusive rights to idiocy. Plenty of competition, unfortunately.

Can I come back to that issue of stoning for a minute? One interesting thing about the Amina Lawal case in Nigeria is that, as I understand it (and, once again, I'm no expert), although stoning is mentioned as a punishment in the Koran -- as it is in the Bible -- it hasn't been recent practice in any part of the Arab world. What's happened in Nigeria is that central government authority collapsed, and now you've got a bunch of men vying for power, and one of the means of exerting power is to say, we can do whatever we want and you have no way of stopping us. The outrageousness of the sentence is the point. It's meant to be provocative. The president of Nigeria has repeatedly condemned the decision, but his condemnation means nothing -- he doesn't have the power to enforce it. And part of the reason for the horrible sentence is to show that he has no power to enforce it. In fact, Muslims all over the world, including in Nigeria, including even in Amina Lawal's own village, have condemned the sentence. (I wrote about this awhile back, but unfortunately Blogger ate some of my archives so I can't find my links). To condemn someone for adultery, according to the Koran, you need four eye witnesses. You can read that as saying you shouldn't condemn anyone for adultery -- because how many people have sex in front of four witnesses? It's like Jesus saying don't cast the stone unless you've never sinned -- he didn't say straight out, don't stone the adulteress, but he created a condition that made doing so impossible. A sly bit of humanity and decency in both cases. The point is, the decision has little to do with culture or religion, and everything to do with groups of men fighting for power over the body of a poverty-stricken young woman.

Which I guess lends a lot of credence to your theory that hatred of women is at the root of a lot of the insanity. It doesn't grow out of a religious text, but out of a nearly psychotic need to control women. Fatima Mernissi has a theory that part of the problem, ironically enough, is that Muslims are less puritanical than Christians. Christianity has viewed women as virtually sexless -- well, most women, there's always the Madonna and the whore division -- while Muslims see women as being just as sexual as men. In some ways, that's a good thing, but it has also made men nervous. They have more need to control women. And that way a certain madness lies. Take it for what it's worth -- I'm not sure, but I thought it was an interesting idea.

One more quick, possibly incoherent thought -- just about the nightmarish list of assassinations in the Muslim world. You're right, it's a gruesome list, but worse than, say, the history of bloody coups in Africa and Latin America? I suppose I mean that only partly as a rhetorical question. I'm not sure how you'd decide which group of people had the nastiest history. What would be the basis of comparison? Which is to say, I'm not sure it's true that the post-colonial Muslim world has more bloodshed than anyone else. I'm not sure it isn't true either. But I don't think we want to tote up the numbers of dead, or weigh the blood. I think you have to look at the individual stories.

Obviously I'm not in any way trying to justify assassination as a way of getting rid of any leader, no matter how tyrannical (I differ from the current administration on that little point) -- but in this country a lot of people have a sense that all those assassinations are of people trying to reform Arab countries, or modernize them (or even "civilize" them, if you get far enough to the right.) And that supposedly proves that nothing can be accomplished in the Middle East, because "good," moderate leaders will always get killed by fanatics.

The model is Sadat -- Saint Anwar, who worked so hard for peace, but was murdered by Islamists who presumably hated peace. Which has a small amount of truth in it, and a lot of lies. (Most lies have some shriveled little truth buried in them somewhere, don't you think?) I mean, Sadat did some good and brave things, but what Egyptians saw was a man who dressed his wife in designer clothes and went on skiing vacations in Europe while the economy of Egypt was tanking. And when people complained, he censored the press, jailed his opponents and had demonstrators killed. Mubarak is even worse.

I'm not attempting to gloss over the violence, but it's important not to fall into the trap -- I don't think you do, but I think most Americans do -- of thinking he was assassinated because he made a deal with Israel and that proves no Arab leader can be reasonable and get away with it. The fundamentalists didn't kill the peacemaker Sadat, they killed the tyrant Sadat. But because in this country we're primarily aware of Sadat as a peacemaker -- that's a complexity it's hard to take in. And I think if you just make lists of all the atrocities, it reconfirms that false image.

As usual, I've written too much. Back to you…

JD

I do agree that Latin America and Africa rival Islam in bloodshed -- but what I was trying to point up was a general pattern of militancy in the Islamic world, where you have almost no free press and almost no rights for women and dissent is seen as a threat to the regimes in power. One can say, yes, Sadat was killed because he was a tyrant (of sorts) but why have the ultra-reactionary anti-democratic parties done so well recently in Morocco, Algeria, and Pakistan? The Miss World riots are just the most recent demonstration of this excessive sensitivity on the part of the culture.

The lack of democratic values (and humanistic values) seems connected to the climate that Islam produces. Since almost 1800 there has been little sustained liberal-humanism in Islamic countries (the House of Saud is hugely guilty here as they have, over the last fifty years, funded first the Muslim Brotherhood, and of late, Osama Bin Ladin ). There is a critique that says such liberal values are a product of western thought, and the Enlightenment, but I might argue that almost all religious teaching (in theory at least) and most civilizations are founded on respect for others -- and I am not sure I can say that about Islam.

I must say that I have found a number of moderate Muslim voices however, in various blogs, where the criticism is articulate and very much anchored in Koranic teaching, so the phenomenon of "radical Islam" cannot, in the end, be said to be a direct result of the teaching of Mohammed. That said, I don't find similar patterns of violence in other place, don't find as many terrorist organizations elsewhere, and don't find this deep-seated intolerance in quite so substantial a way in other cultures.

I do think I am guilty in some respects of demonizing (or singling out) Islam, but that is what the discussion started with. Clearly the Crusades led to four centuries of Christian barbarity and I am sure I could find examples of even Buddhist militancy. I still think the particular historical situation in the Muslim world, or at least the Arab world, has intensified the backward and reactionary dimension to the culture. It has not always been so, but it certainly seems so now.

As for the sensitivity issue -- I didn't want to sound like the liberals and the left were advocating stoning, just that the logic of avoiding a critical position because of "cultural sensitivity" can create an atmosphere of avoidance of all critical positions. I feel the left has often insisted on taking sides, and this logic, also, tends toward an avoidance of critical awareness.

But your points are well taken. And indeed, the right is using the demonizing of Islam to create an illusory war -- a war against the abstract noun of terror -- when they should be examining the practices and policy that has led to so much resentment and try and work toward a strategy that supports the moderate and progressive voices in the developing world, instead of always looking for the most business friendly regime to support.

I do think however, that assimilation is important -- if your culture refuses to embrace in any way the values of your new country, I suspect that conflict will follow. And I guess I do think those parents need to be told to send their daughter to school -- even if she is uncomfortable without parental support -- because the next daughter will be a bit less uncomfortable and so on.

I wonder just how different the history of the middle east (and Islam ) would be if oil hadn't been discovered in the Gulf. The post-colonial world of Latin America and Africa, while violent and troubled, is still essentially different from that of the Arab world. Petro dollars have influenced a good deal -- and there is a lot of blood on the hands of the House of Saud, and of the oil companies who helped leverage support for them from, mostly, the US and England. If people are denied education and jobs and the opportunity to join the modern world, and all they have to turn to are the fundamentalist radicals at the Mosque -- they are going to learn nothing except intolerance. This is not to say I still don't find real problems at the heart of Muslim culture --- but I want to make clear an emphasis on the role of oil wealth and how it has affected Islam.

A good discussion, and I feel you've changed my position, a bit anyway, and that's always a good thing.

Regards JS