Politics

I noticed that the Andrew Jarecki documentary "Capturing the Friedmans" is playing at the Nickelodeon here in Santa Cruz. I saw this movie at Sundance last January, and it was intense, difficult to watch, and the best movie I saw there.

It's about a family in a posh Long Island city that disintegrates after Arnold Friedman, a computer teacher, and eventually his youngest son Jesse, are accused of child molestation in 1987. David Friedman, the eldest son, captured most of this period on home video, and the documentary uses this footage to give the viewer a first hand look at what was going on in the family.

The result is devastating. Arnold and Jesse Friedman were probably innocent of the charges, and the documentary very clearly makes the case that the police investigation was biased due to the hysteria involved whenever the spectre of child sexual abuse is encountered. Much of the testimony was suspect, including major witnesses who only remembered incidents with prompting from the police, or through hypnosis and recovered memory sessions. However, Arnold was a child molestor, and it's not out of the realm of possibility that he molested Jesse.

The documentary does a very good job of making the facts clear, and letting the audience draw their own conclusions. Arnold eventually died in prison, and Jesse was released a few years ago after spending 13 years in prison.

John Conroy, the author of "Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture", says that in every society there's a torturable class, a group that most people have no compassion for, and are not bothered if that group's rights are trampelled on. In the book, he details instances of torture as told to him by the torturers themselves in Israel, Northern Ireland, and a Chicago police precinct. I think that child molestors are a torturable class here in the United States, and they are by no means the only one. In a depressing bit of irony, Conroy's book was published in September, 2001. The 9/11 attacks, of course, set the stage for the broadened use of torture and the creation of a new torturable class, Arabs and muslims, in our society.

From the Daily Show:

Stewart: I'm confused. We think he has weapons, but if he doesn't ...

Colbert: Jon, don't confuse him actually having them with the threat posed by our thinking he has them. Just imagine what Saddam could do if he did what we're imagining he'll do. It's almost unimaginable.

Nicolas Buchele in the Arab News, Saudi Arabia, as reported on Salon:

"The new totalitarian regime prevailing in America and taking hold in its satellites around the world has learned important lessons from the failed experiments of the past. The first of these lessons is that the greatest liability to the survival of a regime is a strong and erratic leader ...

"Thus without Hitler's deranged ambitions, the Third Reich might really have lasted a thousand years. Similarly, if Stalin had kept his genocidal ambitions in check, the Soviet Union might have continued to enjoy its initial popularity among sections of the West and at home.

"With these examples in mind, the leader has been eliminated as a factor in U.S. politics. George W. Bush's very nullity as a politician throws into relief the fact that the United States has long been governed, not by its people, but by interests that are happy to remain largely anonymous, do not rely on individuals for their hold on power, and are recognizable in public mainly by a soothing corporate blue.

"Americans often seem baffled that others fail to admire their system of government. They know after all that in the United States there exists a lively culture of debate, where the whole lunatic spectrum of opinion can find a platform of one kind or another (though at the same time the difference between the political parties it is actually possible to elect is vanishingly small) ...

"They have a vibrant and largely unchecked artistic community. They have the First Amendment ...

"The reason for all this is that the new totalitarianism has learned a second lesson from its heavy-handed predecessors. If artists and intellectuals were able to do precisely nothing about Hitler or Stalin or any of the legion of tin-pot dictators around the world, it follows that you might as well have freedom of expression.

"In the new totalitarian system, people can say whatever they like, and it makes absolutely no difference.

"The impending war on Iraq is only one example among many of a supposedly sovereign public completely powerless in the face of a government bent on a course of action ...

"The most important lesson to the new totalitarianism, then, comes from ancient Rome, and is simply that people sufficiently supplied with bread and games will put up with anything."

I'm no conspiracist, and I don't know exactly how much I agree with the scenario outlined above, but I also find it hard to completely refute insofar as it applies to Iraq.

Dona nobis pacem.

An article on Salon by Robert Scheer pretty succinctly states my extreme unease about the likely war in Iraq.

You know, I've worked in the computer industry for about six years now, and in that time I've worked for some pretty lousy companies. I've gone to company meetings where I've been fed boatloads of bullshit, and for the most part, everybody in the meeting knew that it was indeed bullshit that was being served, the management that uttered it included. After six months (!) of allegations that do not pan out, shaky arguments for war that collapse under scrutiny, blunder after blunder in international diplomacy regarding our middle east policy (this goes back to the very beginning of our current administration, by the way), the pissing away of all international sympathy post 9/11, and a clear rejection and isolation by most if not all of our western and non-western allies, I feel a lot like I did during those goddamn company meetings.

Only this time, I can't just quit or go look for another job elsewhere. Even worse, the management was supposedly put in place at the behest of the workers (theoretically, even though it was the board of directors--read Supreme Court--who actually chose the CEO, to belabor a bad analogy).

Anyway, I'm extremely envious of anyone who has dual citizenship right now, as I literally can not believe what my government is doing, and that a significant percentage of my fellow citizens do not appear to understand the long term consequences of our rushing headlong in to an unprovoked war in the world's most volatile region.

"Did you know that we now have England accusing the US of imperialism? It's true. South Africa is lecturing us on human rights. The justice minister of Germany recently called George Bush a Nazi. We've been more or less labelled a Nazi country--by Germany! I don't know about you, but I don't think that's a good sign." --Will Durst

"I tried to be open-minded about Bush's case for war. I waited for him to present the evidence for an imminent threat to the US. But months passed, and they hemmed and hawed. It was words, words, words....There was a shiftiness, a sleight of hand, a kind of blustery bravado and smugness: 'Well, we know, but we just can't tell you, because it would compromise national security.' Give me a break--we're about to go to war and kill or maim thousands of innocent people. Americans will die too. And they couldn't lay all their cards on the table?" --Camille Paglia

I actually miss the subtlety and broad-minded vision of George Herbert Walker Bush's administration, at this point. I don't agree with the policies of Bush 41, understand, but Jesus Save The Children, at least we wouldn't look like we just pissed in the Boullabaise in the eyes of the world.

According to this story on Salon, the newly crowned Miss America, a Harvard Law student, is doing a sort of bait-and-switch issue change from educating people about youth violence to abstinence before marriage. I couldn't care less about the Miss America pageant, really, but like a lot of other aspects of American culture (television shows, jokes, human interest news stories, commercials, mass market books) it's a great way to get a feel for how a certain kind of American thinks. The Miss America pageant has always had a sort of weirdly virginal aura about it, and the fact that this years incarnation is beating the drum for abstinence-only sex education, and that she is somehow connecting it with youth violence, is a fascinating peek in to the minds of conservative social warriors.

I wonder what the percentage of people who have sex before marriage is in this country? It's like at least 60-70%, and probably closer to 80%. Today's adolescents are entering puberty earlier, and young people are marrying later, than previous generations. I have no hard data to back this up, but it seems reasonable that your average young American gets married at 27 nowadays. If the average age of the onset of puberty is 12, that's an average of 15 years of being sexually aware before you're supposed to actually act on your sexual impulses. Now granted, if suddenly everyone stopped having premarital sex, the marriage age would drop, and I guess that would acceptable to your conservative abstinence advocate.

I think there's another dimension to this debate that's hardly ever discussed when talking about sex. It's emotional maturity. Relationships are complicated, and when you start dating in junior high or high school, you don't really have the tools to deal with the complexities of mature relationships. Teen dating is sort of the testing grounds by which you learn about how to have mature relationships, usually by learning things about yourself and the other person, and making a lot of mistakes. It's like the minor leagues.

Erika Harold, Miss America 2002, is 22 years old. She's probably smart, as few dummies get in to Harvard Law, and she's probably very attractive (I've never seen her), but I'd be willing to bet money that she's got some serious baggage based on what she's advocating. The sort of world she proposes is pretty strange: don't learn about the sexual part of yourself until you make a lifelong commitment to somebody. Of course, the disconnect in that message is that you're probably not ready to commit to someone for the rest of your life if you're not mature enough to deal with sex and physical attraction.

Or, to put it another way, if you're in a relationship where you don't fight at all, it's actually not a good thing, because you're probably willfully keeping the relationship shallow and not dealing with the sort of give-and-take that mature, long lasting relationships require.

That Miss America, supposedly the female embodiment of what we value in our society, is basically standing up and declaring that she's emotionally retarded is metaphorically pretty rich, and speaks volumes about American's lack of maturity when it comes to sexual matters.

This turned in to a long rant on anti-feminism, biological definitions of normal, and the rhetorical techniques of closet-bigotry. Since economy of diction is not my strong suit lately, the reader (I expect there will only be one: me, looking for typos) is warned.

I just read a post on Slashdot that is pretty incredible. The poster does one of those rhetorical pirouettes that I think I'll call the SomeOfMyBestFriends move, as in "How can you call me a racist? Some of my best friends are black, and they never blah blah blah...." Actually, it's not quite the SomeOfMyBestFriends move, but a variation, where you admit that such and such has done some good things, but on the whole such and such is actually causing more bad than good. I think I'll call it the SomeGoodThings,ButWhollyBad move. In this case, the such and such was feminism, a word so loaded nowadays I don't think I even know what it means any more.

In almost all cases, how the good things could come about at all without the such and such are never discussed. As in, "I fully support the idea that Jim Crow laws are bad, but the Civil Rights Movement did more harm than good." Or better yet, "The anti-war movement in the '60s did some good things, but it has screwed up our society so much in the process that we'd be better off it it never occured." I guess it's left as an exercise to the listener how the many positive social changes that have occured thanks to the '60s would have happened without the '60s actually taking place.

I think it might relate to an idea that strikes me as extremely sophmoric: that good effects should only properly come from good and ideologically sound causes. And the obverse is: it can't be really that good if it comes from imperfect sources. I guess this is why some people feel betrayed when they learn that Martin Luther King cheated on his wife, or can't accept that a stint in the army may have helped somebody get their life in order, or that foolish decisions and mistakes may actually help people mature and gain wisdom.

In any case, the original posting on Slashdot basically claimed that feminism was a backlash against nature. Nature, in this context, means the biological and evolutionary hard-wiring that makes men more aggresive than women, makes men the sexual initiators, and explains why women garden (they are nurturers) while men play sports (they are pursuers, and need to hone up on the old hunting/bread-winning skills).

The SomeGoodThings,ButWhollybad argument is that while feminism legitimately pointed out that not all women want to nurture, and there should be some tolerance of men and women who do not fit exactly into the traditional sex roles, women and men are more unhappy today because feminism has attempted to deny men and women their genetic and evolutionary nature, and in fact have made women who are naturally submissive ashamed or their attitudes.

The poster then goes on to undercut his own argument when he (I'm guessing its a he, based on tone, and whatnot) lays out a system where each individual should be allowed to live whatever life they want:

"Some men do not feel driven to beat everyone at some particular game. Maybe they like to be tied up and spanked by a dominatrix because of the pressure they feel in day to day life of having to always be in competition. Perhaps some homosexual men are really driven by an urge to submit. Why not leave these men alone, and let them live their lives the way that makes them happy?
Some women do not feel driven to find a man to rescue them, take care of them, and then have their babies wash their laundry and clean their toilets for the rest of their lives. But the women who DO feel that way should be allowed to live the lives that make them happy. They should not be forced to go to college, become lawyers, and wait until they're 45 to have one mildly retarded child."

There's a lot to analyze in this little gem. What's especially weird about it is that he makes it seem like feminists are against S&M, homosexuality, and motherhood, which either shows an amazing ignorance of liberal culture or is purposefully misleading.

The only part of that characterization that has any truck at all is feminism's take on motherhood, which is complicated and difficult to tease out. Most feminists, I think, aren't against motherhood, but rather the expectation that to be fulfilled as a woman you must be a mother, and that to be a mother is to accept the traditional role of motherhood. And some women want to have children and a career, which I don't think is an exclusively feminist notion at all, especially in this day and age.

What I'd really like to know is, who has been forced in to go to college, become a lawyer, and have "mildly retarted" children because of feminism? Are there women who have felt that it was their duty to put off having children and pursue a career? Of course. But, I thought we were supposed to live and let live? Why is this attitude wrong? Why is it that women who make those particular decisions are not autonomous mental agents, but rather slaves to the ideology of feminism?

If I had to generalize the basic tenets of feminism, it is that women should be treated as autonomous mental agents, and both officially and socially should not be prevented from making decisions for themselves.

I don't know too many people that would disagree with this definition. That practically no women in my general age group think of themselves as feminists shows that this definition is either unsatisfactory, or that anti-feminists have been successful in portraying feminism unfavorably, or the feminist movement hasn't been nearly effective enough in transcending its own rhetoric, or something else entirely that I haven't thought of.

In some ways, it's probably easier for me to call myself a feminist than a woman. As a male, I will obviously not align myself with those feminist theorists who see masculinity as fundamentally pathological. I will also disagree with those theorists who don't think that there is any such thing as consensual sex between men and women. In general, I'll disagree with anybody who thinks there's something double-plus good about just being a female, and that goes the same for those who think there's something fundamentally better about maleness as well. I can sort of prima facie reject those ideas without too much effort.

But if I was a woman, there's a lot of theory and lingo to wade through to get to that point. And it takes a commitment to a more abstract notion of feminism, so its no wonder most women my age just said, "to hell with this." They've more or less internalized most of the biggies of second-wave feminism: careers, sex, education, and just in general seeing themselves as the equals of males.

Meanwhile, feminism retreated to academia, and began the prerequisite bickering of all ivory tower lodgers. Phyllis Chesler, one of the old-guard second wavers, mostly managed to piss off her intended audience in Letters to a Young Feminist, a book whose patronizing tone and inability to understand why young women are not interested in the same things as their feminist forebearers typifies the wide gap between the generations.

At this point, I've probably gone on too long here, and bored the hell out of anyone who managed to get to this point, so I'll end this by maybe bringing this back to the point about imperfect vessels of change. Second-wave feminism accomplished enough for most women to chuck the label "feminism" and not feel bad about it. Unfortunately, in doing so, there's no unified voice advocating rational gender equity, and by rational I mean a view that accepts some basic biological differences between men and women, but nonetheless advocates women's autonomy, both institutionally and socially.