feral children

Perhaps certain mental aspects can be learned at one age under certain circumstances, but at later ages or under inappropriate conditions learning is impossible, or greatly impaired. The lack of early education of the feral children could mean that they could never learn. It is difficult to draw conclusions from studies on feral children; each case was very different - the background of the feral child, the goals of the experimenter and the method of teaching all have to be taken into account. Of the five children, Kaspar Hauser appeared to be the most successful in learning how to talk, but Kaspar had not been raised in the wild.

I know, I know, I haven’t been posting. Apologies to my hypothetical reader.

movie mole: a history of violence

J & I reviewed A History of Violence, directed by David Cronenberg.

Nothing new here.

The film opens with a slow shot of a couple of guys, evidently criminals on the lam, “checking out” of a motel. This involves killing the folks who run the business, and the small girl who might have been a witness. We cut immediately to another small girl, screaming. She's had a nightmare about monsters, but her father, brother, and mother all pile into her bedroom to reassure her. The over-the-top contrast between the two sequences sets the tone for the film. Viggo Mortensen plays the devoted father of the small screamer, Tom Stall, who runs a diner in an Indiana town apparently without franchises, chain stores, or big box developments. When the criminals from the opening try to rob the diner, however, Tom goes into action, ruthlessly and gracefully killing both drifters and saving the employees and customers. The publicity that follows, presenting him as a hero, brings into the diner another group of scary men, this time mobsters from Philly who insist they know Tom as “Joey Cusack.” Although Tom's skill as a killer raises questions about his identity and threats to his family, it seems to empower his teenage son Jack, who finally stands up to a couple of high school bullies, and who seems to have inherited his father's ninja fighting skills. This comes in handy for another carefully choreographed scene of violent defense of self and family, in which the women are safely in the house, and father and son defend their turf.

What is the film saying about male violence, the american dream, redemption and forgiveness? Little enough about history. The stylized schematic quality of the film means there’s not much cultural or social context. And there’s not much personal history: we hear about Tom's transformation in becoming the family man we see at the beginning of the movie, but we don't see that transformation or know what motivated it.

The male protagonists (Tom and Jack) are both presented as soft, effeminate, gentle new-man types. But underneath, there’s violence. Tom’s wife Edie is a lawyer; Jack’s girlfriend tries to defuse a confrontation with the bully: the women try to avoid violence but the men know how to use it. She gets a restrining order and the the gangsters show up in the yard. And it turns her on even if she's also disgusted by it. Edie assures the sheriff that she trusts her husband is who he says, but then when they're alone, she rejects him. Tom begins to rape his wife, until Edie gets into it herself. We might suppose this shows that violence is a turn on for women as well as men, that everyone has that shadowy side underneath, or, more cynically, that it reflects a male fantasy about women being turned on by rape.

This film has been praised for the performances, which are generally good except for the stilted little blonde girl, and for the twists of the plot, which I found predictable, as well as for a critique of violence and its representations. The fighting and killing scenes are the most rapidly edited and kinetic parts of the movie, but some reviewers see the film as forcing us to interrogate our pleasure in these representations by holding the camera on the blasted, bleeding corpses of the dead, holding our attention to the consequences of violence, and placing the action hero in a version of the American dream—middle american heartland small town where neighbors greet each other on the streets, and the protagonist has a small business, a beautiful wife, two attractive children and a house in the country. Both Tom and Edie wear silver crosses, and one neighbor bids farewell by saying, “See you in church.” After killing his brother (who's been trying to kill him his whole life), Tom throws the gun in lake & bathes, baptism, rebirth, yadda yadda, yadda. Redemption is possible, but is apparently achieved by cleansing violence. The scenes of Tom's violence are all morally justified –he's acting in defense of self and family, the men he kills are not themselves redeemable.

But the notion that the wholesome heartland conceals a violent shadow is hardly new. (American Beauty, Blue Velvet) Nor is the gunslinger who tries to hang up his guns and gets pulled back to violence (Shane, Unforgiven).

The heterosexual nuclear family remains intact. Men defend it through righteous violence. Nothing new here.

religious discrimination legalized

Head Start Can Make Hiring Decisions Based on Religion, Says U.S. House
by Niko Kyriakou (from One world net and commondreams).

It's exhausting trying to keep up with how awful everything is.

lessons in darkness

Werner Herzog's 1992 film Lektionen in Finsternis is eerie, surreal, with science-fiction voice-over narration about a planet somewhere in our solar system, over footage of the Kuwaiti oil fires six months after the Gulf War in 1992. Swooping aerial shots of oil fires, oil fields, lakes of oil disguising itself as water, reflecting, bubbling, coating plant life, now dead. Strangely beautiful, always horrifying. A sweeping score of Verdi, Schubert, Wagner and Mahler. An hourlong tone poem, transporting, hypnotic.

on thin ice

it's melting, melting....

we've known rivers

Bill Moyers to the Society of Environmental Journalists,

They say denial is not a river in Egypt. It is, however, the governing philosophy in Washington. The President's contempt for science - for evidence that mounts everyday - is mind boggling. Here is a man who was quick to launch a 'preventative war' against Iraq on faulty intelligence and premature judgment but who refuses to take preventive action against a truly global menace about which the scientific evidence is overwhelming.

In a way, this is denial of respect for other humans, for the knowledge they produce, for the time and labor and attention they give to studying the material world. Also, of course, this is contempt for the material world. A religious point of view, perhaps.

cats and dogs and other companion animals

I feel the animal thing. Okay, it’s wrong, sort of; I mean, I know it’s misguided and people are more important. But that’s the thing, or a thing, anyway: that people love these animals. I dunno, when I think about the people I mostly feel angry because of course it’s wrong and we have to protest and try to make it right, but about the animals I am able to feel the sorrow and pain.

wrr: well katrina read

The storm and its aftermath have generated a wealth of information and commentary, much of which can be found on commondreams.org and Counterpunch.org.

It seems clear that global warming intensified the storm, and that the destruction of wetlands by giving them over to developers left New Orleans without some of its natural protections. And funding to maintain levees was diverted to tax cuts for the wealthy and military spending for the occupation of Iraq.

In mainstream media, the racism and classism of some of the initial reporting later gave way to increasing recognition of the racism and classism that left thousands of survivors to loot stores for luxury items like water and food, and to fire shots in the air in an effort to get the attention of helicopters that seemed to pass them by. Stories of community solidarity and of the working-class heroes of the relief effort have been left to alternative media, which has also reported on prison-like conditions at far-flung shelters and refugee camps.

Those who have remained in the city similarly find themselves faced with the sort of “order” familiar from places like Fallujah: The US Army Times has referred to the citizens of New Orleans as the “insurgency,”and the mercenary company Blackwater is operating in the city.

That recent events display the failure of a whole approach to government—the dangers of unmitigated crony capitalism and the catastrophic consequences of favoring the wealth of the few over the welfare of the many—has of course not changed that government’s priorities. Halliburton has been contracted to clean up navy bases in Mississippi, and environmental controls on gasoline have been suspended, as has the Davis-Bacon act requiring federal contractors to pay at least the prevailing wage.

But articles on The Black Commentator and on Indymedia New Orleans have been calling for the right of return to New Orleans, and have provided accounts of resistance by the Algiers neighborhood and the Iberville housing project.

Naomi Klein, writing in The Nation magazine, has dissected some of what they are resisting, as well as reporting and supporting those efforts. She notes,
“Jimmy Reiss, chairman of the New Orleans Business Council, told Newsweek that he has been brainstorming about how "to use this catastrophe as a once-in-an-eon opportunity to change the dynamic." The Business Council's wish list is well-known: low wages, low taxes, more luxury condos and hotels. Before the flood, this highly profitable vision was already displacing thousands of poor African-Americans.” “Jordan Flaherty, a New Orleans-based labor organizer told [Klein,] "Now the developers have their big chance to disperse the obstacle to gentrification--poor people."

But Klein quotes from a statement by Community Labor United, a coalition of low-income groups in New Orleans:

"The people of New Orleans will not go quietly into the night, scattering across this country to become homeless in countless other cities while federal relief funds are funneled into rebuilding casinos, hotels, chemical plants.... We will not stand idly by while this disaster is used as an opportunity to replace our homes with newly built mansions and condos in a gentrified New Orleans."

The statement ‘went on to demand that a committee made up of evacuees "oversee FEMA, the Red Cross and other organizations collecting resources on behalf of our people.... We are calling for evacuees from our community to actively participate in the rebuilding of New Orleans." ‘

It's a radical concept [continues Klein]: The $10.5 billion released by Congress and the $500 million raised by private charities doesn't actually belong to the relief agencies or the government; it belongs to the victims. The agencies entrusted with the money should be accountable to them.

[….]Rather than handing over the reconstruction to the same corrupt elite that failed the city so spectacularly, the effort could be led by groups like Douglass Community Coalition. Before the hurricane this remarkable assembly of parents, teachers, students and artists was trying to reconstruct the city from the ravages of poverty by transforming Frederick Douglass Senior High School into a model of community learning. [….]Now that the funds are flowing, shouldn't they have the tools to rebuild every ailing public school in the city?

For a people's reconstruction process to become a reality (and to keep more contracts from going to Halliburton), the evacuees must be at the center of all decision-making. According to Curtis Muhammad of Community Labor United, the disaster's starkest lesson is that African-Americans cannot count on any level of government to protect them. […] That means the community groups that do represent African-Americans in Louisiana and Mississippi -- many of which lost staff, office space and equipment in the flood -- need our support now. Only a massive injection of cash and volunteers will enable them to do the crucial work of organizing evacuees -- currently scattered through forty-one states--into a powerful political constituency. The most pressing question is where evacuees will live over the next few months. A dangerous consensus is building that they should collect a little charity, apply for a job at the Houston Wal-Mart and move on. Muhammad and CLU, however, are calling for the right to return: they know that if evacuees are going to have houses and schools to come back to, many will need to return to their home states and fight for them.

[….]

Klein notes that those wanting to donate to a people's reconstruction can make checks out to the Vanguard Public Foundation, 383 Rhode Island St., Suite 301, San Francisco, CA 94103. Checks should be earmarked "People's Hurricane Fund."

She concludes,

There is only one thing that can compensate the victims of this most human of natural disasters, and that is what has been denied them throughout: power.

indymedia declaration

from New Orleans Indymedia
http://neworleans.indymedia.org/

Declaration of New Orleans
by Charles Montesquieu Saturday, Sep. 03, 2005 at 3:24 AM
charliemontesquieu@yahoo.com

A Declaration of The People of the United States of America Concerning the Present Crisis in the City of New Orleans.

In the name of the People of the United States of America, we declare:

That for the last four and a half years the President and his administration have served the interests of a few wealthy citizens and not the interests of the American People.

That he has acted with contempt for the People and for the Constitution and the laws of the United States.

That an edict of the Supreme Court made him President in 2000 and fraud made him President again in 2004.

That the President has pursued an unprecedented expansion of Executive powers that are a grave threat to the rights and liberties of the American People.

That he has made war on sovereign nations that are no threat to the American People.

That his "War on Terror" has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives without bringing those responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 to justice.

That the failure of his leadership in the present crisis in the City of New Orleans has resulted in the deaths of thousands more.

That he is derelict in every duty of his office.

Therefore, we resolve:

That President George W. Bush and his administration are illegitimate.

That he should resign from office and new elections should be held immediately.

That if he does not resign, the Congress of the United States should act to remove him from office.

That if the Congress should fail to act, the People will exercise their right to abolish this state and will establish a new government that will better secure their rights and liberties.

COPY AND DISTRIBUTE

history

That would be a yes.
(I'm a big fan of Get Your War On.)

falluja, louisiana

The USA has a great idea of how to "restore order": "Police and national guardsmen were accused of killing innocent people." Which of course is generally considered worse than police killing "guilty" people, though it seems to me a little like saying, oh, say, chattel slavery is worse than the convict-lease system. Not untrue, exactly, but kind of missing the point. I'm not the only one to have made the falluja comparison, but I had in mind less the incompetent failure to bring 'order' and more the violent conception of what order means.

gautier

my mother grew up in gautier (GO-chay), miss., which I’ve never seen mentioned in the international press, until now (see under biloxi), when it’s apparently been pretty much wiped off the map.

these were places I grew up visiting—gautier, pascagoula (where mom went to high school), gulfport, biloxi, and new orleans, where she lived after high school, where my parents honeymooned, where I visited as a child, where I visited for the mla, where I visited with my friend A, where things will never be the same.

The same, of course, wasn’t so great. Aside from the problems of global warming, wetland destruction, funding cuts, militaristic priorities, failures of planning, indifference of government, and the general badness of american capitalism, this is all also a reminder of the poverty of the area.

But it’s still hard for me to believe it was all on purpose.

dry

Then again, maybe A's house made it through undamaged.

looter

The real looters wear pinstripes.

katrina and the waves

New Orleans a Casualty of Iraq War In 2004, the Corps essentially stopped major work on the now-breached levee system that had protected New Orleans from flooding. It was the first such stoppage in 37 years, the Times-Picayune reported. "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay," Jefferson Parish emergency management chief Walter Maestri told the newspaper.

Fewer wetlands, more wet land. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. From 1956 to 1978, an estimated 50 square miles a year were lost. The rate of loss has now slowed to an estimated 24 square miles a year, in part because of much tighter restrictions on oil field dredging activities, but also because Louisiana is running out of wetlands to lose.

And global warming makes the storms worse.

Looks like A’s house is one of the many flooded.

I prefered when they were just a band.

ironic

the angel of prehistory invents sculpture

"Its life size suggests it may well have been used as a sex aid by its Ice Age makers, scientists report."

a sloth supreme

I am loving this essay by Thomas Pynchon (link courtesy of Impostor Syndrome).

On the Supreme Court front we could worry and work on the appointment itself, as recommended by the republic of T .

Or we could keep working on social movements to pressure whoever is on the court as suggested by Carlos Fierro.

Or both, of course.

another bog girl

some leathery lecher

Matthias Schulz in Der Spiegel suggests the bog bodies were executed for violations of the moral decency laws, “shameful acts” like (according to Tacitus), cowardice in battle and “lewd” acts (which Schulz identifies for us as male homosexuality). I wonder if the Uchte girl was a coward in battle or a male homosexual. In fairness to Schulz, he does also say the disabled were thus dispensed with, and people also simply sometimes fell in.

So much for all that eerie human sacrifice to pagan gods.

The body was sliced to pieces by a peat harvesting machine. In Atwood’s story, the peat-cutter accidentally sliced off the bog man’s feet, but human manual labor does less damage than the machinery does.

wrr: independence day

Rahul Mahajan, writing three years ago in Counterpunch, observes that “ The question of how a movement for social justice deals with symbols like the Fourth of July or like the flag has always been a controversial one. At the height of the Vietnam War,” he notes, “when some were advocating burning the flag, others said we should wash it instead, try to reclaim the symbol instead of repudiate it.”

Mike Whitney takes the former approach, in a recent essay on dissidentvoice.org, titled “Show Your Independence on the 4th -- Burn a Flag.” He writes, “It’s odd that Congress would pass a bill banning flag burning on the same week that reports confirmed the US military used napalm in Iraq. Apparently, it’s alright to incinerate Iraqis, but not okay to burn a 5’x7’ piece of tri-colored cloth. For the Republican faithful, the action was just another cynical demonstration of feigned patriotism meant to divert attention from an increasingly bloody war.”

Mahajan further suggessts the Fourth of July myth not only diverts attention from the war but masks it by being its reverse. In the standard version of the American Revolution, Mahajan writes, “a small, relatively powerless band of American colonists took on a mighty empire that was on its way to ruling much of the world. It was a lopsided contest that the colonists won because they were fighting for their own freedom. . . . . Now, however, . . .America is the empire. It is the one in all history that has had the most control over the internal politics of the largest number of other countries.”

As Medea Benjamin puts it in her essay “Celebrating Independencein the Era of Empire,” posted yesterday to commondreams.org, “Our nation was founded on a determination to be free of domination by the British empire. The US Declaration of Independence proclaimed the need to fight the War of Independence against Britain because King George III had “kept among us standing armies” that committed intolerable “abuses and usurpations.” Today it is our government whose standing army is committing abuses and usurpations in foreign lands. Today it is our government that is in the business of empire-building. Even before 9/11, the US military maintained over 700 foreign military bases and installations and almost 250,000 troops in 130 countries.”

Mahajan further observes that, “The continued celebration of the Fourth, with its constant invocation of our founding, explicitly keeps us from coming to terms with [the nation’s current] role. . . .we can continue to believe that we are a force for freedom in the world only by refusing to come to terms with our actions.”

“The national mythology that keeps us in this mindset requires constant reinforcement. The Fourth, in the way it is typically celebrated, is an important part of that, helping to foster the historical amnesia that is so necessary to keep a populace befuddled and vulnerable to the manipulations of those in power.”

The historical amnesia Mahajan points to also applies to how we tell the 1776 story. Norman Solomon, in an essay on commondreams.org titled “Mourn on the Fourth of July,” points out that “Back in 1776, all the flowery oratory about freedom did nothing for black slaves, women, indentured servants or Native Americans.”

Citing political scientitst Michael Parenti, Solomon notes that “Most of the delegates who gathered in Philadelphia to draw up the Constitution were wealthy. And they "were determined that persons of birth and fortune should control the affairs of the nation and check the 'leveling impulses' of the propertyless multitude that composed 'the majority faction.’”

Marcus Raskin also addresses the some of the hypocrisies of the ruling class in an open letter to the Congressional Progressive Caucus, available on TomPaine.com. He writes in response to President Bush's call for Americans “to find a way to thank the men and women defending our freedom.”

Raskin suggests that today “It is hardly surprising that soldiers are praised and veterans' benefits are eviscerated, or that fire fighters and police officers praised for their bravery at the tragedy of 9/11 saw their benefits and raises disappear like the TV commercials that promise, then take away, and then promise again in an infinite series of lies.”

But, he argues, “There is another side to the United States.” Calling for a society based in generosity, economic and social justice, Raskin describes this as “the world of American aspiration and the inner meaning of America's social covenant.”

The reclaiming of the meaning of human equality expressed in the Declaration of Independence has a long tradition. It includes the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, which rewrote the earlier declaration to state that “all men and women are created equal.”

And it calls to mind a 1938 poem by Langston Hughes,which ends,

 O, let America be America again--

The land that never has been yet--

And yet must be--the land where every man is free.

The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again.

. . . 

From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,

We must take back our land again,

America!

O, yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath--

America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

We, the people, must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain--

All, all the stretch of these great green states--

And make America again!

cats! cats! cats!

All you have to do is say cats! and I'm interested. Cats lack a neocortex and therefore presumably lack symbol use and logic, but they do have a limbic systemand therefore feelings. Like you needed any evidence.

My cat speaks to me only in the imperative: Feed me, Pet me, Let me out, Play with me.

aaup yup

The American Association of University Professors recently issued a statement on Attacks on Academic Freedom and the Independence of Colleges and Universities:

The Ninety-first Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors expresses its deep concern over increased attacks on the academic freedom of teachers and scholars across the nation and the resulting threat these attacks pose to the tradition of institutional independence in American higher education. Individuals and groups outside the academic community, among them state officials, members of Congress, and candidates for political office, are, with increasing frequency, invoking an alleged political or ideological bias within the academic profession as the rationale for involving themselves with the substance of academic decisions and with the content of curriculum and teaching that have been traditionally and appropriately determined by members of the academic community. In some instances, these attacks have been marked by reprehensible tactics of intimidation and harassment.

This Meeting takes special notice of so-called academic bills of rights that have been introduced in at least one-fourth of state legislatures. These bills would, in effect, replace academic standards with political criteria for determining whether the faculty of a college or university is fostering a plurality of perspectives. Even when the pressures for them do not result in the passage of undesirable legislation, they represent a gratuitous and irresponsible disrespect for faculties in higher education and for the immense contribution they make to the betterment of our national life.

This interference in activities intrinsic to the academic community is anathema to this Association and to society at large, which can only benefit when academic freedom is preserved.

(Posted 6/15/05)

rose is a rose is a rose

It’s that time of year once again, when I listen to my favorite song by Elliot Smith.

charity of the day

The Apostrophe Protection Society has it's work cut out for it.

heh heh.

bog blog

Well, I can’t figure out how to get hello to post more than one picture per post. But the above is a reconstruction of the Yde bog girl, pre-bog. My, what a big forehead she has.

People preserved for thousands of years in peat bogs were apparently for the most part human sacrifices, ritual murders of some sort, perhaps to ensure the fertility of the land (they alll had a last meal of seeds).

And what a great metaphor it is, too. Seamus Heaney has his own readings of Tolland Man and the various mysterious bog people.

She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint's kept body,

Also Margaret Atwood has a story about The Bog Man and apparently so do many other fiction writers. Think of the possibilities. Preserved, leathery skin and melted bones, weird resonances of resistance and collapse. Violent sacrifice, hidden meanings, secrets to be dug up, unearthed, discovered. The foul filth of the peat, tomb, womb, shitlike source of energy. Or, bogged down.

Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

wrr: gulag guantanamo

This from an editorial posted June 2nd to the Nation's website:

Amnesty International secretary general Irene Khan's scorching description of Guantánamo as "the gulag of our times" has provoked a new White House line: Stories of torture and mistreatment of terror detainees are the fabrications of repatriated ex-prisoners who "hate America" and are trained to lie, as George W. Bush declared at a May 31 press conference. [. . . ] For three and a half years, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other monitoring groups, frustrated by official stonewalling, have maintained a cautious approach to torture allegations. It has taken repeated breaches in the Administration's wall of secrecy--through investigative reporting, the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act requests and court orders--to document the patterns Amnesty describes. And scarcely a week goes by without further r supporting evidence. Just days before Bush's remarks, the New York Times detailed cover-ups in the sadistic killings of two prisoners at Bagram. No sooner did Newsweek, under Pentagon pressure, retract its Koran-desecration story than reports of Koran desecrations emerged from the Defense Department's own records. Lieut. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that he "never approved" the use of intensive sleep deprivation, guard dogs and excessive noise in interrogations at Abu Ghraib. Now the latest document cache obtained by the ACLU includes a memo over Sanchez's signature, dated September 14, 2003, explicitly approving techniques for "significantly increasing the fear level in a detainee"--including (surprise!) sleep deprivation, noise and "presence of military working dogs." [ . . . ] Guantánamo's hundreds do not compare with Stalin's millions, but the gulag is a fair analogy--how else to describe an international network of cells and interrogation centers holding prisoners without charge, for indeterminate terms, beyond reach of any court? But Bush's torture system and his obsession with secret executive authority are shaped by the contradictions of democracy: courts that won't cooperate, legislators who ask questions, reporters who drag secrets into the light. Harnessing those forces--whether through Congressional committees, new legal actions or citizen protests--is today's great task.

Next, from a piece by Gary Leupp posted June 3rd to Counterpunch. Responding to the comments of Bush and Cheney about the Amnesty report as “absurd”, Leupp observes,

Those of us in the reality-based community are not inclined to dismiss an Amnesty International report out of hand. I myself am sometimes disappointed with Amnesty International, especially when they accuse certain organizations I respect of human rights violations on a par with those of the governments they seek to topple. I think it necessary to distinguish between the violence of the oppressed and the violence of the oppressor. One is "political" whether one so distinguishes or not, and Amnesty International's politics tends towards the legitimatization of state power over the right to rebel. In any case, the organization does a lot of good work, [. . . ]. Only fools would call their reports "absurd," not to be taken seriously. [ . . . ] William Schultz, head of Amnesty's U.S. Section, responds that it is "worth noting that this administration never finds it 'absurd' when we criticize Cuba or China, or when we condemned the violations in Iraq under Saddam Hussein." Indeed U.S. administrations routinely reference Amnesty International reports when they want to attack some foreign foe. But the fascistic epistemology current in ruling circles dictates that truth cannot negatively affect the USA. Facts and intelligence must be fixed around U.S. Interests. [ . . . ] “ what Amnesty International says is true." The battle to determine what is slowly takes shape, as the implications of the lies so plainly spelled out in the Downing Street Memo and so many other documents impact those still awake among us. The Bush administration knowingly and willfully attacked a sovereign country, illegally, unprovoked, on the basis of deliberately manufactured lies, using the emotions produced by 9-11, general ignorance, and a compliant press to promote the cause.

Now a January 3rd posting to Counterpunch by Mike Whitney, for further reflections on the function of Guantanamo.

The prison facility at Guantanamo Bay is the brightest star in the Bush firmament. It towers over the political landscape like a monument to human cruelty. That's why the administration chose to slap it up in full view of the world. It's their way of announcing that the fundamental rules of the game have changed. [ . . .] There's no need for Guantanamo. The United States has plenty of experience concealing political prisoners from the public. The CIA has been transporting enemy suspects to hidden locations since its inception. Certainly, an increase of 600 prisoners or so wouldn't have caused much of a stir if they were tucked away in some remote corner[s] of the earth. But, that's not the purpose of Guantanamo. Guantanamo is intended to send a message that the internationally accepted norms of justice have been rescinded. From now on, all law proceeds from Washington. [ . . .] Guantanamo embodies the ethos of the Bush administration; an aggressive and inflexible dogma that regards force as the organizing principle of society. In this respect, Guantanamo is less notable as a jail than it is as a summary of a particular world view. In fact, the facility is a realization of the new world order; a chilling vision of oppression in brick-and-mortar. [ . . .] Guantanamo wasn't created to address the nebulous threat of global terrorism. [ ....] Rather, it was built to broadcast the launching of a global police state, administered by the United States and in brazen defiance of universally accepted standards of justice. [...] Guantanamo is the collaborative vision of American plutocrats who are close to the administration and who affect policy decisions through their respective think tanks and lobbyists. If that wasn't true, we would have heard squeals of protest echoing from every corner of the nation. Instead, (apart from a scattering of human rights groups and the ACLU) there's been hardly a peep from the country's elites. For the most part, "the privileged few" have no problem with a system that categorically denies its victims even minimal human rights. The disparity in wealth sadly disposes many of these plutocrats to more autocratic government. [ ....]. Guantanamo is not anomaly, but the full-flowering of the Bush ideology. [...] Guantanamo is the logical extension of the corporate system. It focuses on dispatching potential enemies with maximum efficiency. The prison's main architect, Secretary Rumsfeld, has tried to meet the requirements of global commerce by producing a precision model of detention; applying his [. . . ] sensibility for organization with a "top-down" business strategy that sidesteps all the burdensome laws of due process. He has, in fact, created the modern-day terror-camp, free from any legal encumbrances and operating with complete impunity. However horrible the crime, no one is ever held accountable [...]

Whitney's view dovetails with Naomi Klein's comments from the May 30th issue of the Nation, in which she points out that

As an interrogation tool, torture is a bust. But when it comes to social control, nothing works quite like torture. [ . . .] This is torture's true purpose: to terrorize--not only the people in Guantánamo's cages and Syria's isolation cells but also, and more important, the broader community that hears about these abuses. Torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist--the individual prisoner's will and the collective will. This is not a controversial claim. In 2001 the US NGO Physicians for Human Rights published a manual on treating torture survivors that noted: "perpetrators often attempt to justify their acts of torture and ill treatment by the need to gather information. Such conceptualizations obscure the purpose of torture....The aim of torture is to dehumanize the victim, break his/her will, and at the same time, set horrific examples for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities."

While the Nation and Amnesty International have seen the Supreme Court's rulings on the cases Guantanamo detainees as positive signs setting limits on executive power, others are less sanguine. Jean-Claude Paye, writing in the May issue of Monthly Review, notes that the in the decision on the Rasul vs. Bush case affecting foreign nationals,

it would appear that the Supreme Court has not called into question the U.S. claim to punish at its total discretion those charged with the supposed offense of being “illegal combatants”—that is, of daring to oppose U.S. forces anywhere in the world. A trial merely gives the petitioner a chance to prove that he was “engaged [neither] in combat [n]or in acts of terrorism against the United States.”

(that is, the onus is on the accused to prove innocence). In the case of Hamdi vs Rumsfeld, affecting US nationals detained at Guantanamo,

The ruling recognizes the executive’s power to incarcerate a U.S. citizen accused of terrorism without trial, and even without charges. However, unlike the Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court does not sanction the unlimited detention of prisoners. It reaffirms “the fundamental nature of a citizen’s right to be free from involuntary confinement by his own government without due process of law.” The Court concluded that “although Congress authorized the detention of combatants in the narrow circumstances alleged here, due process demands that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decisionmaker.”

(Again, the burden is placed on the detainee to contest the detention, rather than on the government to prove its justice. Moreover, the “narrow circumstances” of the current state of emergency are themselves left to the vagaries of executive decision). Although Paye discusses the opportunities these decisions might present, he stresses that

The “war against terrorism” has provided all executive branches of the leading Western governments with a perfect opportunity to make some deep adjustments to society. These changes are so far-reaching that they approach a shedding of the old political regime. We in the West are witnessing a reversal of the role of criminal procedure right across the board. Its usual function—to guarantee fundamental freedoms and cap the powers of police and government—is morphing into the opposite, a suspension of constitutional order. By extending exceptional proceedings to all stages of the criminal process—from inquiry to trial—private life is being invaded and the expression of public freedoms chilled.

And he concludes,

A state of emergency that takes indefinite hold, and affects all public and private spheres, brings about a political sea change. It marks an end to the formal separation of powers, and gives the executive the kind of authority allotted to judges: the authority to state and interpret the law, the authoritarian power of dictatorship.

ch-ch-ch-chainges

My neighborhood drugstore, the very one they rob at the beginning of Drugstore Cowboy , is closing. It was a little, independent, family-owned kinda place that had been there for years and years, of course. I called to get a prescription refilled, and the number had been disconnected. I went by, and it's all desolate and almost empty as they're cleaning out, and the sign on the door says all their prescription records have been transferred to Walgreens. So that's it, nothing left but the corporate chains. I find it depressing beyond all reason.

xtian amerika

Irony Deficiency
George W Bush on National Prayer Day said that 'Those who kill in the name of a great religion are evil people,” but failed to draw the obvious conclusion.

Just Us, Someday
Rev Carlton Veazey explains why Justice Sunday puts the USA on the brink of theocracy. Amy Goodman talks with a social justice Baptist about the antidisestablishmentarian aims of Justice Sunday. And BagnewsNotes explores the media presentation of "Justice Sunday."

Theocracy in action
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled a Virginia county can refuse to let a witch give the invocation at its meetings by limiting the privilege to clergy representing Judeo-Christian monotheism. The daily Kos reports that the East Waynesville Baptist Church has just kicked out all its Democratic members. And Trevor Blake at American Samizdat relays reports of religious bias at the Air Force Academy (big duh), on tax dollars funding bible school in Alaska, and on a Pennsylvania Christian Community Development Corporation receiving federal funding.

How did we get here?
The Columbia Journalism Review discusses how evangelical Christians are creating an alternative universe of faith-based news. Boston Review offers an account of how evangelical Protestantism came to dominate American religion.

For more of the “good news” see TheocracyWatch, which also has links (scroll down on that page) to other groups monitoring our movement toward a society like that presented in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents. See also The Revealer, put out by NYU’s center for Religion and Media.

cutthroat feminism

SF students pointed out today we’ve read at least three books in which a woman slits a man’s throat—The Man in the High Castle, The Female Man, and now Parable of the Sower.

I didn’t choose them on purpose, I swear. They laughed. We laughed. We joked about possibilities for a scholarly paper on this motif. (Perhaps invoking Helene Cixous’s Castration or Decapitation? )

I hope they don’t castigate me on the evaluations as a wild woman with a steak knife. Though I’d be in some good company.

get out

Juan Cole, who is smart as all get out, has a piece on the campaign against Joseph Massad at Columbia (instigated by the David Project and abetted by the NYTimes)

One of the things Massad is alleged to have said (but apparently did not say) to a student is “If you're going to deny the atrocities being committed against Palestinians, then you can get out of my classroom.” Now, of course one can’t simply kick out an enrolled student. But what about saying such a thing up front, on the first day of class? Like, in a class on the Holocaust (such as some of my colleagues have taught), saying, "If you think the Holocaust didn’t happen, maybe you shouldn’t be taking this class," it seems to me a perfectly reasonable position. I mean, who wants to waste time with the non-reality-based?

fafblog! yes!

It was a blogger problem!

Thursday, April 21, 2005

Some BlogSpot blogs are occasionally getting redirected to the Blogger.com homepage right now. Since this problem is sporadic, you should be able to simply load the BlogSpot address again and have it work normally. If not, try clearing your browser's cache and cookies first, and then reloading it. We'll get this fixed as soon as possible.

Update: This has now been fixed.

Hooray.

fafless!

Fafblog has vanished.
It was there
and now it's not.

Tragic.

love me love me love me

Ah, how we have fallen from the days of "Love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal," when the problem was liberals weren't radicals. That's still the problem, from my perspective. But from more public, better funded perspectives, the problem with liberals is they're not conservative.

Here's a couple rebuttals to the panic about liberals in the liberal arts.

Media matters dissects the Washington Post report of a recent study on the topic. The article also notes that education makes people more liberal:

Moreover, available data suggest that highly educated Americans may be more left-leaning than the general population. Exit polls from the November 2004 presidential election indicate that 55 percent of voters who have postgraduate study experience voted for Democrat John Kerry, compared to 44 percent for Republican George W. Bush. (Interestingly, when New Yorker staff writer Nicholas Lemann asked Bush adviser Karl Rove how to identify "who's a Democrat" as opposed to a Republican for a 2003 profile, Rove answered: "Somebody with a doctorate.")

Billmon at the Whiskey Bar puts it all in perspective.

And the Medium Lobster weighs in at Fafblog.

hot pussy

zulie relaxing 

blogger mysteries

I finally figured out how to add links to the sidebar. So proud of myself. Then the whole sidebar disappeared. Then it came back. Font size changes of its own accord, and becomes impossible to change back. And now that I'm trying to figure out how to post summaries/hide the long part, and well, things are not working out as simply as I'd foolishly hoped.

movie mole: born into brothels

J & I reviewed Born Into Brothels,winner of this year's Academy Award for best documentary.
The film was directed by British photojournalist Zana Briski and US film editor Ross Kauffman.Born Into Brothelsfollows Briski's project of teaching photography to a group of children who live in Sonagachhi--Calcutta, India's red-light district--as well as Briski's efforts to get these children of sex workers admitted into boarding schools.

The children—the girls Suchitra, Tapasi, Shanti, Puja, and Kochi, and the boys Gour, Manik, and Avijit—take time away from their schoolwork and chores to photograph their world and to critique their own and each other's photos. They also accompany Briski on trips to the ocean and the zoo. Some of the children are quite talented—one of Suchitra's photos is featured on the cover of an Amnesty International calendar, and Avijit is invited by the World Press Photo Foundation in Amsterdam to be part of their Children's Jury in 2002. The children's work has been auctioned at Sotheby's, and is featured in a book documenting the project as well. Proceeds from these ventures are returned to the children though the Kids With Cameras foundation, which Briski set up to support similar projects around the world. A current Kids with Cameras project is developing an arts school for the children of the Sonagachhi area.

Born Into Brothels has been praised for its stunning visuals, for the heartwarming charm of the children, for its presentation of the saving powers or art and creativity, and for the small but uplifting triumphs of Briski's outreach work. Moreover, the filmmakers' interest in returning profits to the Sonagachhi community is a commendable attempt to avoid the dangers of exploitation attendant on such documentary projects.

On the other hand, the film has also been criticized on several counts. Partha Banerjee, who worked as a translator on the film, chiefly during post-production, has noted publicly that some of the film's scenes are staged, and he calls the film's music choices “troubling,” both for the use of glitzy Bollywood tunes, and for the unacknowledged lifting of the final tune from Oscar-winning Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray's celebrated Apu Trilogy. Further, Banerjee observes that Born Into Brothels fails to inform viewers that the Sonagachhi district has benefited from years of activism by sex workers themselves as well as by local social workers, medical practitioners, and other activists. For instance, the sex workers and their allies have set up financial institutions, health clinics, sex education schools, and blood banks in the district, and the HIV rate among sex workers in Sonagachhi is only 5% instead of 80% as in other areas like Mumbai.

Journalist Sabyasachi Bandopadhyay, writing in Indian Express, notes that Indian activists including film director Gautam Ghosh, novelist Samaresh Majumder, bureaucrat Nitin Ganguly and University professor Mani Nag have helped set up workshops, schools, clinics, and day-care centers in Sonagachhi. In addition, much work has been done by the Durbar Women's Coordination Committee, an umbrella organization of sex workers in West Bengal, which has 65,000 members.

Journalist Seema Sirohi, writing for OutlookIndia, notes that some members of the Durbar Committee have complained about feeling “used” by Briski's work, and that others have questioned whether the filmmakers obtained legal permissions from the sex workers involved in the film. Briski and Kauffman have said that they will not be screening Born Into Brothels in India, because many of the children's mothers asked for their identities to be protected. Sirohi notes that other activists who helped Briski would like the opportunity to see the film, and that international screenings do not precisely “protect” the identities of those in the film.

emails: the life of the mind

>>>> F----,

>>>> Having now read the 4 dunye articles you sent me cites for, I feel compelled to write and ask what's up with your stranger inside article, since it became clear to me while reading these articles that yours is better than all four put together. (ok, it's true I never liked xxxx xxxxxxx anyway, but he's so patronizing!). Anyway, have you sent that somewhere? If not, send it to Callaloo--the best of these 4 articles was in there--I bet they'd publish yours.

. In other news, not much. If we can find a babysitter we may go see a new documentary on Martin and Lyons on monday, which would be fun. Homophiles unite, I always say!

>>>> xoxo

>>>> K

>>>Hey, K---,

>>>Thanks! I sent it to Cinema Journal. Then I lost the acknowledgment letter. So now I don't know what to do about asking them what's up with it. Maybe the letter told me how long to wait before asking. Maybe it gave me a manuscript number to refer to. But I don't know, and my apt. is so chaotic I can't find the letter (I saw it in the vicinity of the desk a couple months ago....). Any suggestions? (I sent it in August or September.)

>>>xo,

>>>f

>> Hey-

>> I'd just write them and ask. The worst that can happen is that they answer and scold you for not citing your number or something...

>> Hey, since I have you on the line (metaphorically) what exactly does diegesis mean? I'm guessing it's the film term for plot-level but I can't really remember...

>> xo

>> K

>Thanks. Will do.....

>And yes. Narratological more generally, but I guess most common re film.

>xo,

>f

>

>OED:

> diegesis, n.

> Add: b. [a. F. diégèse, introduced in this sense by E. Souriau1953, L'Univers Filmique 7.] spec. The narrative presented by a cinematographic film or literary work; the fictional time, place, characters, and events which constitute the universe of the narrative.

> > Sigh. I must say that your speed and eptitude (is that even a word?)with the good uses of the web come closer than anything else I've encountered to persuading me that I should buck up and learn how to do it...maybe over the summer...For now I'm trying to figure out enough about blinds (who cares?) to buy some that will keep my kid from waking up at, literally, dawn's first light. Horridly bourgeois, I know, but my sanity is dependent on not getting woken by her everyday at 6 am.

xo

K

> The only reason I've gotten so speedy and ept is that I waste a huge amount of time browsing around. (Much easier than actual, you know, work.)

>You could get her one of those sleep masks I find so helpful.

>xo,

>f

>

hmmm sleep mask...worth a try. I was considering giving her gin, myself.

Reminds me of a (what I like to think of as) a recent "Ithaca moment":mp went to see her acupuncturist, 

who's also a dyke mom and pal of ours, and was telling her about AL's recent slide into a mini-version

of hothead paisan (tho only at home, thankfully)--hitting, using "mean words", general non-compliance and 

outright defiance at every turn--and the acupucnturist (I am not making this up) said to give her pickles and

greens, because she's having an upper giao or something deficiency.

xoxo

K

a dangerous thing

Capitol bill aims to control ‘leftist’ profs
The Law Could Let Students Sue For Untolerated Beliefs.
Tallahassee — Republicans on the House Choice and Innovation Committee voted along party lines Tuesday to pass a bill that aims to stamp out “leftist totalitarianism” by “dictator professors” in the classrooms of Florida’s universities.
The Academic Freedom Bill of Rights, sponsored by Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, passed 8-to-2 despite strenuous objections from the only two Democrats on the committee.

The article quotes Baxley saying, “Freedom is a dangerous thing, and you might be exposed to things you don’t want to hear."

comas for the poor!

Juan Cole suggests that the “use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan.”

Let's be fair, however; their motives surely aren't religious. Congress and the pResident are very concerned with making sure that that woman in a persistent vegetative state (Florida?) gets fed. But they are less worried about the hunger of the conscious.

So they’ve cut food stamp funding, though nearly 4 million households in the US go hungry.

The solution is obvious: put the poor into comas, and then our legislators will help them get fed through tubes!

Oh, but then who will pay for the tubes? In Texas, thanks to W, the state can terminate life support against a guardian's will, if they can't pay. And Molly Ivins, citing Digby, notes

Those who passed this bill are the same politicians who want to outlaw medical malpractice suits like the one that provided the care for Terry Schiavo for many years while she was in "a persistent vegetative state." They are the same politicians who have just finished changing bankruptcy law so that it is now much harder for families hit by tragedies like this one to get out from under the staggering medical bills. How dare they talk about morality?

march march

Well I went to the peace march on the 2-year anniversary of the last invasion of Iraq.

I didn’t find it as uplifting as some there apparently did.

I mostly felt disappointed it was so small, irritated it hadn’t been better advertised, demoralized that such events seem to have no impact on an administration that just ignores whatever it doesn’t want to deal with.

But not going would have been worse.

Might have been more uplifting in New York or London.

democracy, inc.

W has been taking credit for promoting democracy in the middle east. But Juan Cole points out that it’s a sham, on several counts.

More broadly, Dilip Hiro notes that “The history of the past six decades shows that whenever there has been conflict between furthering democracy in the region and advancing American national interests, U.S. administrations have invariably opted for the latter course.”

(For some reason he omits the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s republic in favor of reinstalling the Shah, when the prime minister planned to nationalize Iran’s oil.)

costs of war

There are the tens of thousands of dead, the wounded, the demoralized, the displaced, and the increasing numbers of insurgents. And then there’s this:

The $151 billion already allocated for the U.S. war in Iraq could have purchased:
*Housing vouchers for 23 million families or
*Health care for 27 million uninsured Americans or
*3 million new elementary school teachers or
*Two years worth of: food for half the hungry people in the world AND a comprehensive global AIDS treatment and prevention program AND clean water and sanitation throughout the developing world AND childhood immunizations for all children in the developing world.
SEE THE REPORT

cold equations

The student report in sf class on Tom Godwin’s story “The Cold Equations” argued that the story was, indeed, simply about the laws of nature. It was a good report, because he laid out a number of possible readings. But he entirely rejected those that didn’t simply take the story on its own terms.

Since for that day we had also read “No Woman Born,” by C.L. Moore, one of the few women publishing regularly in the 40s-50s era sf magazines, a story about a woman whose brain is installed in a metal body, I had made some flippant comment at the beginning of class about it being “gender day.” The student reporting on “TCE” referred back to that comment in the course of his disparaging comments about possible feminist readings.

No doubt I will be lambasted in the student evaluation forms for being “too feministic.” This is (most of) the follow-up email I sent to the class:

Our discussion of “The Cold Equations” brought up a number of important points about the process of literary interpretation. That the story is about the laws of nature as immutable seems fairly clear. The point is explicitly and repeatedly made in the text: we read of “law not of men’s choosing” (293) “physical law” (303, twice), “the laws of nature” (305, twice), “laws that knew neither hatred nor compassion” (306) “a law that . . . was incapable of sympathy” (307) “forces that killed with neither hatred nor malice” (313), and so on. Any reading that did not acknowledge that this is the central thesis of the story would be seriously flawed by missing something that isexplicitly stated, and clearly central to the narrative.

On the other hand, any reading that stopped with this point would be awfully thin (or superficial, depending on which direction you like to take your spatial metaphors). That the stowaway is a girl—-both female and young (and pretty)-- is also repeatedly stressed in the story. Pilot Barton’s discovery that “It was a girl” gets its own paragraph (295). She wears “perfume” (295) and “lipstick” (299), and is skilled in the traditionally feminine arts of cooking, sewing, and “nursing” (297). “Pretty girls” (303) are not jettisoned on earth, but Marilyn is subject to a “law that recognized neither innocence nor youth nor beauty” (307)—so we know by inference that she has all three of those useless qualities. Not only is her gender important, but so too is her youth. She’s compared to a “pup” (295) anddescribed as a “kid” (298) and a “child” (300), and, more pathetically, a “lonely little child” (307) and “small and limp like a little rag doll”(299)—a comparison marked by its association with both youth and femininity (since, stereotypically, it’s girls who play with dolls).

These characteristics are presented as significant to the pilot’s emotional response to the situation, and (since the pilot is the character through whom the narrative is focalized, the central consciousness through whose perceptions the narrative proceeds), therefore central to the emotional or rhetorical effect of the story for the reader. We’re told that “had the stowaway been a man,” it would all have been over in a few minutes (295), and that the pilot will “fear” the “nights” when the girl “would come in his dreams to die again” (307).

From this point the possibilities for interpretation get more interesting, because more complex. One could take the observations about the gender and youth of the stowaway as part of an explanation of how the story works to set up its argument—that is, for instance, by playing on readers’ (conventional) expectations that girls are most deserving of protection.

A further twist might be to engage in what’s sometimes called a“hermeneutics of suspicion,” which critic and theorist Jonathan Culler describes as seeking “to expose the unexamined assumptions on which a text may rely” and valuing a text for the ways “it helps us to rethink issuesof moment today” (Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction,Oxford: Oxford U P, 1997, 68).

One version of this would be the argument that the frontier is representedas masculine territory. We read of “men scattered wide across the frontier” (293); the laws of the space frontier are “hard and relentless”(296). While one might suggest that the “men of the frontier” (306, twice) are “men” in the generic sense of “humans,” there is no evidence that there are women on the frontier (the exploration parties on Woden are evidently all male).

Although presumably there are males on earth and the colonies, who might be as ignorant of frontier life as Marilyn is, that wouldn’t necessarily contradict the reading of the frontier as masculine, since cultural conventions often suggest some men are more masculine than others—one might think of the western genre’s opposition between the gunslinger and the citified dandy, or, for those of you who’ve read Regeneration in World Views, perhaps the hostility felt by Sassoon for the elderly civilian gents he encounters. It may be notable that the only male earth resident specifically mentioned in the story is Marilyn and Gerry’s father, a shopkeeper presumably well past the age of the “men of the frontier.” It might also be relevant that Woden is the Norse god of war.

Another possible move would be that of considering the legal or regulatory context in which the story places the physical laws it highlights. That is, for instance, one might raise the question of why it isn’t standard procedure for the EDS pilot to look in the closet before taking off. The relevant “issue of moment today” in that framework would be the conceptual slippage whereby contingent effects appear to be inevitable, and the ways such slippage can justify a status quo (in the story, perhaps the masculinity and political order of the frontier—since stowaways both ignorant and outlaw will be jettisoned).

Anyway, my point here isn’t that any of these interpretations is the Right One, but that stronger interpretations will take account of more textual details, and provide explanations that go beyond the obvious. Culler suggests that, often, part of the process of interpretation is what he calls “playing the ‘about’ game: ‘so, what is this work really about?’” He notes that

This question is not prompted by the obscurity of a text; it is even more appropriate for simple texts than for wickedly complex ones. In this game the answer must meet certain conditions: it cannot be obvious, for instance, it must be speculative. To say ‘Hamlet is about a prince in Denmark’ is to refuse to play the game. But ‘Hamlet is about the breakdown of the Elizabethan world order,’ or ‘Hamlet is about men’s fear of feminine sexuality,’ or ‘Hamlet is about the unreliability of signs’ count as possible answers. (Literary Theory, 64)

nuclear summers

The American Sociological Association responds to Lawrence Summers.

Excerpt:
Harvard University President Lawrence Summers' recent statement that innate differences between the sexes might explain women's poor representation in science and engineering has generated strong public debate. Summers' "call for more research" . . . suggests that there is no overwhelming body of serious scholarship that informs this topic. Yet there is substantial research that provides clear and compelling evidence that women, like men, flourish in science, just as in other occupational pursuits, when they are given the opportunity and a supportive environment.

read. the. assignment.

Gave back papers in the fairy tales class. One student was upset-- “I don’t understand this”-- because he’d gotten a C for a paper that didn’t comment on any original tale. He said “I was writing my own, that was the assignment.”

No, this was the assignment:

Write a new version of an old tale. For instance, you might retell "Cinderella" from the perspective of one of her stepsisters, or "Hansel and Gretel" in the style of Carter. Your revision should provide insight into the values, themes, or significance of the original.

I read it to him from the syllabus. “Well, it could be a loose interpretation of Hansel and Gretel. . . . I’m really irritated. I put a lot of work into this.”

But it didn’t respond to the assignment.

No doubt he will burn me on the student evaluation form, as not making assignments clear or not grading fairly.

*sigh*

economically irresponsible

The Bush administration is the first in 70 years to oversee a net loss of private sector jobs, according to Paul Craig Roberts, of all people, Assistant Secretary of the Treasure in the Reagan administration.

Now about all that Social Insecurity bull.

In his first State of the Union address (February 27, 2001), W Bush promised to protect “all $2.6 trillion of the Social Security surplus for Social Security, and for Social Security alone" to maintain the Social Security trust fund.

Now he says, "Every dime that goes in from payroll taxes is spent. It's spent on retirees, and if there's excess, it's spent on government programs.” “There is no trust."

No trust is right. The money is disappeared because the government has been spending it on war and other hobbies.

But all we really need to do to fix it is tax the rich.

teaching notes

Fairy Tales 2/23/05

Continued discussion of Jack Zipes’ essay on Disney. One student in particular was clearly upset that the article was “biased” against Disney, and pointed out repeatedly that Disney just intended to make a successful film—not to destroy fairy tales. Another student pointed out the passage where Zipes notes

Of course, it would be a great exaggeration to maintain that Disney’s spell totally divested the classical fairy tales of their meaning and invested them with his own. But it would not be an exaggeration to assert that Disney was a radical filmmaker who changed our way of viewing fairy tales, and that his revolutionary technical means capitalized on American innocence and utopianism to reinforce the social and political status quo. (333)

I also noted that, in the process of interpreting texts, the author’s intent is only one piece of information we may bring to bear in interpreting (along with social and historical context, responses of readers, effects of form—we’d begun by talking about shifts from written to filmed form). The discontented student said he wanted some facts instead of these opinions, wanted to know what Disney himself said about what he did. And I did note that what Disney said was he wanted to make a successful film, and that motives are often mixed (e.g., the Grimms wanted to preserve German folk culture, to win the approval of literary critics, and to make money). I also asked the class how it might change their interpretation of the tale to know either that Disney wanted to make money, or wanted to make art, or wanted to promote his views of the world, and another student said it wouldn’t really change her view, because the movie (we’d just seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) was what it was. And another said writers always want to present their view of the world. But I fear the discontented student remains unhappy-- probably convinced I am biased. If I don’t come up with another way to address this sort of thing, I may simply have to stop teaching this course.

Science Fiction 2/25/05

We discussed Heinlein’s “The Roads Must Roll,” but didn’t get to “They”; two stories per class may be too much. (On the other hand, I did spend some time at the beginning discussing magazine publishing of stories in the 40s&c, so if the Lem report last time had been shorter, we’d have had more time today.)

But I must find better ways to elicit analysis of this. The story drives me crazy, frankly. I loathe Heinlein, have done ever since I got to the part in Stranger in a Strange Land where we’re told (authoritatively) that women really want to be raped, and I threw the book away. But he’s the “Dean of SF” and all that, so it seems wrong not to include him.

But “The Roads Must Roll” is anti-union: the technicians grievances are presented as completely unjustified, and the narrative events have more weight that the sop to labor in the references to a previous, justified strike. It’s anti-leftist—the story’s “Functionalism” is an anticommunist portrait of something supposed to be like Marxism. Unlike “functionalism,” neither socialism nor Marxism actually argues against the value of human equality (more the contrary--and indeed the story's references to the "little people" seem to suggest that the vision of "TRMR" is not really endorsing a belief in equality--paradoxically enough, perhaps, it rather confirms the leftist critique that bourgeois democracy is not truly democratic). The idea of the power of the essential workers is perhaps modeled on the communist notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat"--which Marx suggested as an intermediate stage before the withering away of the state (and which Lenin & Stalin took up as part of their rhetoric for the USSR). Like the Lenin/Stalin models, though, Van Kleeck's plan seems to be more a vision of individual power (& VK’s neurotic compensation) than of actual collective control. And the story glorifies the strong silent brilliant kingly manly technocrat who has to leave the little woman at home to attend to his important job. Blech. Anyway, I wanted to get them to see this as problematic, but I couldn’t make it happen without just putting it out there, which I was reluctant to do. Feh. Meanwhile “They” is a solipsistic fantasy of being the center of the universe. Blech.