Conservatism reborn in twisted sisterhood

 
CONTINUITY OF IDENTITY. Final point about tradition: Continuity is key. Once a tradition has been disrupted, it's very hard to revive it without falling into the "catch the past in amber" mentality I dissed below. It can definitely be done--renaissances are possible. But it's hard.

And continuity is one way in which tradition makes an institution mimic a person. This point is especially close to my heart because I've changed so many of my habits and beliefs over time. When I was first preparing to be baptized, it was really frightening to think that I was heading for such a decisive break with the past. Who would "I" be? Would I be rejecting my past self, starting over, like an amnesiac? It was perversely comforting to remember that baptism doesn't remove the ingrained habits of sin; oh good, something I can keep! And since then I've very much struggled with the question of how to unite elements of my past with who I am now. How to reject old ways without disrupting one's own identity? What can be salvaged from the past--what is the old Adam that must be put off, and what can be reborn through baptism into Christ's death and resurrection? I think being part of a living tradition has really helped me understand how to view my own life, how to shape my own sense of self.
posted by Eve at 2:57 PM

 
SO DOES "TRADITION MUST BE ADAPTIVE" MEAN "ANYTHING GOES"? Uh, no. I reserve the right to consider any particular adaptation LAME. And, of course, there's a big difference between a living tradition and a series of reversals, rejections, and capitulations to fleeting cultural fads, even if the series maintains some superficial elements of similarity.
posted by Eve at 2:48 PM

 
TRADITION VS. THE PAST: When people talk about tradition and "traditionalism," they're often thinking of something that I would consider to be closer to nostalgia than to love of tradition. Jaroslav Pelikan has the sharp one-liner, "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living," and I think there's a lot of truth there. I had never entered into an explicitly traditional institution until college, and so figuring out what tradition is, how it operates, its development and its beauties and its characteristic drawbacks and tensions, has interested me for years.

The first and most basic point is that tradition is not about restoring some real or imagined past era. Tradition gives an institution (a nation, a debating society, a university) a persona; it makes the institution more like a person. And this is necessary in order to make the institution a possible object of human loyalties, since all our loyalties are to persons. (This was what I found the most interesting insight of Reflections on the Revolution in France.) But like a personality, a tradition-based persona must be adaptive and constantly renewed. Traditions need to link the present to the future as well as to the past. A society with a living tradition is instantly distinguishable from a Miss Havisham society desperately trying to capture the past in amber (or a Miniver Cheevy society seeking to revive some imaginary version of the past).

A member of the debating society that prompted these thoughts once said that he believed conservatism should be felt, as a wound. I think that's eloquent, compelling, and true; but the temptation for so many conservatives is to localize the source of that wound. It's the Industrial Revolution's fault, or it's the 1960s' fault, or it's Constantine's fault, or Ockham's, etc. When the source of the wound is identified as certain historical events, rather than the Fall, there's a strong tendency to either seek a utopian restoration (which shares all the problems common to utopian projects) or nurture one's nostalgia, cultivating and taking pride in one's useless alienation from the present times. (And, of course, denying how decisively one has been shaped by those times!) A living tradition works against this tendency, by showing how a society can adapt and respond even to radical changes without losing its distinctive character. (My debating society has weathered--and more than weathered, has gained immensely from its responses to--the rise of the drug culture; Yale College's first class of women; the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of the campus right; and many, many intra-Yale and intra-POR upheavals. A debate caucus today looks very different from one in 1953, and yet the accumulated traditions have only made the organization more aesthetically rich and philosophically and personally intense.)

I've also found that tradition's roots are often very odd--and that isn't a point against tradition! Tradition often develops and accumulates in a Hayekish spontaneous-order kind of way, but along the way traditions also result from jokes, accidents, and misreadings. The misunderstanding, or intentional redirection, of a tradition can actually be much richer than the initial tradition. Learning the history of these traditions need not become an exercise in debunking; it can instead prompt self-consciousness, a sense of humor and humility, and a desire to engage in similar re-understandings or re-envisionings oneself. There's a contemporary tendency to think that something's genesis is its explanation, but if you experience a living tradition and study its history you find that how other people receive and reshape a tradition is usually at least as important as what the initial intent behind it was. You can even see this in the root of the word, which, if I'm remembering this right, is the same as the root for "translate" and "traitor"--"to pass on." [Does this mean you're a "living Constitution" type now?--Ed. No, because there are significant differences between how a tradition and a law work in society; for only one example, there's a huge difference between a misreading or re-interpretation that's embraced in a bottom-up fashion by the people it affects, and a misreading or re-interpretation that's imposed from the top down by judicial oligarchs. But that is probably a topic for another day... next week.]
posted by Eve at 1:27 PM

 
EMPTY NICHES. One day--I think it was during the year I spent in New Haven after graduation--a Catholic friend and I were walking through campus when he pointed to one of the many pseudo-Gothic buildings. "Look there," he said; I looked there and came up blank. What was to see that I hadn't seen a thousand times before?

"Look at the niches."

Oh. As soon as he said that, I realized what those strange recesses were--the large, lozenge-shaped nooks, with crownlike roofs, that had been carved into the building's walls at its corners and high points. They were familiar because I saw them every Sunday at church--except there, they had statues in them. Yale's were empty. Add Chesterton's essay "The Architect of Spears," stir, and you have the recipe for great intellectual restlessness, the dissatisfaction that prompts philosophy. What's supposed to go in those niches? What should I honor? What should Yale honor? Where do my projects, questions, and desires hook onto this educational institution and its confused, tarnished sense of itself? That is just the beginning of the quest.
posted by Eve at 12:09 PM

 
LATE THIS AFTERNOON, I'm heading up to Fair New Haven for the 50th Anniversary Banquet of my college debating society. I will of course not be blogging a) during the hectic weekend, nor b) about the activities of the POR. (Although I will probably file a report from the conference on Roe v. Wade that will take place tomorrow at Yale Law.) But the group has been much on my mind lately, and so today's blogging will be devoted to POR-related things of extra-Yalien interest.
posted by Eve at 11:52 AM

 
Bright college years with pleasure rife,
The shortest, gladdest years of life;
How swiftly are ye gliding by!
Oh, why does time so quickly fly!
The seasons come, the seasons go,
The earth is green or white with snow,
But time and change shall naught avail
To break the friendships formed at Yale.

In afteryears, should troubles rise
To cloud the blue of sunny skies,
How bright will seem through mem'ry's haze,
Those happy, golden, by-gone days!
Oh, let us strive that ever we
May let these words out watchcry be,
Where'er upon life's seas we sail:
"For God, for Country, and for Yale!"
posted by Eve at 11:47 AM

 
JEREMY LOTT, who has an interesting blog, has a surprisingly sympathetic take on the "Christian culture industry" here. I think he's too willing to settle for "people are using this kitsch to build their identities, so hey, not my problem"--surely it's possible to challenge people, without condescending or being an elitist jerk, to build a better identity that is less reliant on schlock. "Every building is an icon"; our things shape our identities as well as expressing them; insert further ramble/rant about "Testamints" etc. here.

Nonetheless, it's a good article and includes a funny anecdote about an inflatable shark. (Oh no, am I going to get disturbing search requests [click at your own risk] involving inflatable sharks now??)
posted by Eve at 11:36 PM

 
Shouting out loud,
A blogwatch, alone...

Ted Barlow: Good roundup post on the wealth/income/race stuff.

The Rat: The Age Gauge (interesting diversion); and she reminds us of this classic Yale Daily News correction. Truly, a winner.

Will Wilkinson: SOTU.
posted by Eve at 6:06 PM

 
THE WAR: Jim Henley posts his basic case against (escalating the) war on Iraq; and Regions of Mind links to this piece arguing that war on Iraq will make Al Qaeda stressed, less-armed, and more-catchable. I note that both arguments predict that if the US continues to press toward war (uber-likely), Al Qaeda's attacks on the US will speed up in the months to come.

What fun.

Off to ride the D.C. Metro....
posted by Eve at 5:28 PM

 
"THE VIRTUE OF HATE": That's the title of an excellent article in the current First Things, by Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik. The article is by far the best thing in the issue, and highly recommended; it's about the difference between Christian and Jewish beliefs about forgiveness and the attitude toward unrepentant sinners. There are a couple things in the article with which I take issue--I think Rabbi Soloveichik is glossing over some relevant similarities between the two religions, sometimes by missing aspects of Christianity and sometimes by neglecting aspects of Judaism (and at one point he does both at once! It's the bit about how the Jews freely accepted the Covenant, which IMO wrongly neglects to discuss either the Mary/Israel parallel or the fact that Jews born after that initial acceptance are born into the Covenant)--but the article is an illuminating, sharp challenge to Christians and a punchy statement of an aspect of the Jewish worldview. I may blog more about this article, the nature of the Covenant, and the differences between Jewish and Christian varieties of alienation next week.
posted by Eve at 4:40 PM

 
IN MY CURRENT QUEST to blog only about stuff no one is talking about (well, it's not so much a quest, more a series of accidents...), I missed the SOTU speech.
posted by Eve at 4:22 PM

 
POETRY WEDNESDAY: From Spenser. "Nicer" means basically "too fastidious."

Which when that Champion heard, with percing point
Of pitty deare his hart was thrilled sore,
And trembling horrour ran through every joynt,
For ruth of gentle knight so fowle forlore:
Which shaking off, he rent that yron dore,
With furious force, and indignation fell;
Where entred in, his foot could find no flore,
But all a deepe descent, as darke as hell,
That breathed ever forth a filthie banefull smell.

But neither darkenesse fowle, nor filthy bands,
Nor noyous smell his purpose could withhold,
(Entire affection hateth nicer hands)
But that with constant zeale, and courage bold,
After long paines and labours manifold,
He found the meanes that Prisoner up to reare;
Whose feeble thighes, unhable to uphold
His pined corse, him scarse to light could beare,
A ruefull spectacle of death and ghastly drere.
--TFQ
posted by Eve at 4:21 PM

 
AMY WELBORN is doing a series on Catholic education--the good, the bad, the ugly. Very much worth your time.
posted by Eve at 5:04 PM

 
IN THE MIRROR OF MAYA DEREN: It was cool to see "In the Mirror of Maya Deren" reviewed on NRO. Deren was an avant-garde filmmaker; I've seen some of her work (can't remember if it was "Meshes of the Afternoon" or just the excerpts of it in the documentary "ITMOMD") and wasn't much of a fan, but her book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti is really excellent. It lays out the basic structure of Vodoun (voodoo), describing the loa (gods, basically), rituals, and overarching worldview. The loa are pretty amazing--I find them more evocative and insight-provoking than the Greek pantheon. That may be in part because of the elements of Catholicism that Vodoun borrowed/misread; or maybe not. Here are descriptions of some loa written several years ago by a friend:

Erzulie is the Loa of Love, the "Lady of Luxury." But she is not corrupt wealth but a rejection of the limits of poverty. She gives her love as freely as the gifts she gives those she favors. It is as limitless as her wealth. There is no end to her kissing and caressing handsome and charming men. Her endless love links her to the virgin Mary although Erzulie is hardly chaste. She wears three wedding bands. One for Damballah, the serpent. One for Agwe, who rules the sea. One for Ogoun, the warrior. She is also wedded to countless serviteurs. Despite this and the attention lavished on her she feels as though she is not loved enough. ...Her rage and despair are as fierce as her love.

Ghede is the embodiment of the inevitable. He is beyond death. After God, we are in the hands of Ghede. He is erotic in the undeniable way everyone is but he differs in that he flaunts it. He is clownish about everything as he is about sex always showing people what they know is true but wanted not to see. Sometimes he is wildly flamboyant, sometimes sly and coy. He can be a tease or he can be unabashedly bawdy. Inhibitions do not stand a chance when faced with this trickster. Once, under the regime of president Borno, a crowd of houngans (priests, sort of) possessed by Ghede marched through the streets dancing and singing. Having attracted a crowd, they all danced up to the presidential palace and, dressed in Ghede's top hat and coattails, demanded money of the president. The president soon surrendered the cash as no one can refuse Ghede; he will not bow to them. They sing this song for him:
Papa Ghede bel garcon
Ghede Nimbo bel garcon
He is dressed all in black
He is going to the palace

Ghede protects children and they are the primary celebrants on his "feast day" which falls on Halloween. He wears tinted glasses with only one lens so he may watch the physical world with one eye and watch the universe with the other.

Damballah is the head loa, the source of power. He is not really father to the other loa but they call him papa. He must be reverently approached even by the loa because he alone can permit them to answer the prayers and sacrifices of servitors. ...The snake is his servant and has a special place on his altar. He is a creator and worship of him is worship of natural beauty. Sacrifice to him is rich and lush.

Ayida Wedo is Damballah's wife. The arch they form over the world is half his snake half her rainbow. They together are creation, sexual totality. The egg is their symbol and an offering to Damballah....

-------------------
back to Eve: The last chapter of DH:TLGOH is the most striking. It's called "The White Darkness," and it describes Deren's own experience of possession by a loa. Deren entered into the worldview of Vodoun so completely--& to her own surprise and dismay--that I was startled to read Potemra's statement, "Some of the most remarkable material covers her visits — totaling about 21 months — to Haiti, where she studied the practice and theology of voodoo; as part of her investigations, she was ordained a priestess herself.

"Lest this suggest that she was reaching the further end of crankery, the film points out that she named her cat after one of the gods of the voodoo pantheon; and — as one of the film's commentators notes — this would have been an unthinkable act of impiety for any literalistic voodoo believer. Deren's was a sophisticated effort at transcendence, of the kind that mythologist Joseph Campbell would later popularize. (Indeed, Campbell was an adviser to Deren on the book she wrote summarizing her Haitian research.)"

Not sure what the deal is there. DH certainly didn't seem to be presenting this distinction between the cool, sophisticated, all-cultures-converge type and the "literalistic voodoo believer"; I thought its point was more an affirmation of both the convergence-of-cultures thing (which I don't buy) and the reality of Vodoun loa and the worth of Vodoun practices (with which I also disagree!).

How do I approach Vodoun as a Christian? Well, I don't "believe in" it, for one thing. I find the loa evocative but I do not think that they are in fact gods; it is wrong to sacrifice to them or entreat them. Vodoun is a striking work of art, but it doesn't really explain the world well. It is like the Greek pantheon (or, for that matter, the Platonic theory of forms), in that philosophical questing would, I think, lead you up and out of it toward the One God. As far as I know there is no real account of wrongdoing, the human tendency toward evil, or how to mediate conflicts between values (like justice/mercy, custom/questioning, pride/love). This is in no way unique to Vodoun; it seems to me to be an inherent tendency or lack in pantheon-based, syncretistic religions. The response to conflict is to borrow, compartmentalize (we conflict because you follow Ogoun and I follow Erzulie), and value multiplicity, rather than seeking reconciliation and harmony. One of the central Christian metaphors is marriage, the kiss that unites two spouses--"righteousness and peace shall kiss each other." The Vodoun metaphor is more like the multiple wedding rings Erzulie wears. And this leads to a deeply anti-philosophical tendency to shrug and say, "You have your way, I have mine." (Good grief, that's an incredibly compressed paragraph.)

What, then, are the loa? I think I have to say that they are some combination of fictional characters/mythic archetypes, and real aspects of the world (personifying and allegorizing beauty, power, and other attributes of God). And possession? I would suggest as one possibility that most cases of Vodoun possession are what you might call a culturally-inflected, self-induced trance. Some cases may also be the work of demons, especially in the areas of Vodoun that exalt cruelty, despair, and pride. (As with many pantheon-based religions, followers/serviteurs of different loa exalt different things, some much closer to God than others.) (Oh, and if you wig out when I talk demons, would you wig when I talk about angels? Why are the nice angels so much more acceptable in our public discourse than the wicked ones? I do not think Catholics can deny that there are indeed "evil spirits that roam through the world seeking the ruin of souls." But I don't think they [demons, not Catholics!] need the romanticized, exoticized trappings of Vodoun to work their ill.)
posted by Eve at 3:57 PM

 
TEENS, HOMESCHOOLING, AND THE LONELY CROWD: My Jewish World Review column.
posted by Eve at 2:06 PM

 
"Faire Lady," then said that victorious knight,
"The things, that grievous were to do, ore beare,
Them to renew, I wote, breeds no delight..."--TFQ
posted by Eve at 12:31 PM

 
BUCK VS. BALKIN: Buck, Buck, Balkin, Buck, Balkin, Buck. (I feel like I'm playing Duck Duck Goose here.) It's about how Roe v. Wade has affected US party politics and whether or how that matters. Interesting stuff, though I have to agree with Buck that it isn't quite as interesting as Balkin tries to make it...!
posted by Eve at 11:43 PM

 
THE GOBLIN QUEEN also has a post about child care, responding to me. She points out that excellent day care can be better than parenting under stress (surely), adds that stay-at-home motherhood is not economically feasible for lots of families (yes, and I should have been clearer that my points were directed at people who are in a position to choose to take a do-able if sacrificial financial hit in order for Mom to mother full-time or more-time), and cites studies that found that government regulation greatly improves non-parental child care (which may be right, but I'd need to know what the standards for safety, personal connection and so on were, what factors were controlled for, and all that fun jazz). There's quite a bit there, all well laid out (OK OK, I'll add you to the blogroll!), so please do click and read if you're interested in this topic.

I have to say that although I may well have misestimated the differences between (say) decent day care and leaving the kids with Grandma, GQ's post (and her comments, in which she noted that parents were likely to think their kids were getting better care than was in fact the case, since the parents weren't there to watch) did not leave me thrilled about non-parental care in general.

The stuff about learning how to mother--for example, "She [GQ's mother] would work with a lot of illiterate parents who were convinced that since they couldn’t help their children read they couldn’t do anything for their education, and when my mom would show them the kinds of learning activities they could do with their kids that didn’t involve any reading, they’d get so excited. It wasn’t that they didn’t care; they just didn’t know."--was totally moving, and in line with what we see at the pregnancy center. As Eloise Anderson said, "This is what families used to do for each other, but now you've got to pay someone to do it."
posted by Eve at 11:28 PM

 
GETTING IN: A while back, the Goblin Queen posted, amid a longer rambly post (not that there's anything wrong with that!) this take on affirmative action in college admissions: "I was thinking that maybe one way for colleges might foster diversity without a strict numerical preference (and which would allow for them to solicit applicants that offered non-racial diversity) would be to have a series of essay questions: 'What challenges have you faced in your educational career? Feel free to discuss social or economic challenges.' (I think UC did use some version of this in the post Regents ban, pre Proposition 209 days.) 'How has some aspect of your identity shaped the way you see the world and your future work [if it were medical school, the practice of medicine]? Feel free to discuss your racial, sexual or socioeconomic identity.' 'How do you think you will contribute to the diversity of identities and views on this campus?' I think this would have several advantages: it would avoid the numerical preference that makes people like me queasy; it would be non-superficial, that is, it would not just use race as a heuristic for identifying people of varying experience, but it would actually seek out those people who could intelligently express their experience; it would allow the colleges all the latitude they wanted in interpretation of the essays and in the kind of diversity they sought; and it would take a lot of the rhetorical ammunition away from AA’s detractors—Bush couldn’t argue that a race isn’t an experience because it would be the experience that was being sought, not the race."

While I shudder to think of the poor admissions officer who has to read high school seniors' meditations on their "sexual identities" (sigh...), I think that's on the right track. It avoids most of the problems with affirmative action that I outlined here. (Except one, of which more in a moment.) Interestingly, Body and Soul and The Agitator (scroll down to point #6) converge on this point as well--both posts are much worth reading, and I think they end up agreeing with one another. Yay! I am irenic!

So let me lay out my areas of agreement and disagreement with the Goblin Queen Plan.

Agreement: As the Agitator says, it really does take character to overcome adversity. Smart college admissions people should recognize that fact and take adversity into account--without assuming too much. A C student at a bad high school might be a Jeanne D'Arc in the making... or she might be just a slacker. But admissions departments should make the extra effort to look for signs of character traits, like persistence, imagination, and training in the school of hard knocks, that might be hidden in the numbers.

And diversity of experience is often beneficial, as this post from IsThatLegal? obliquely points out. I do think that I learned a degree of humility, flexibility, and imaginativeness (is that a word?) from getting to know people from very different backgrounds. (I'll note, though, that by "different backgrounds" I mean not just race, ethnicity, and income level but stuff like whether they were raised by conservative parents, whether they were raised outside the East Coast, and so on. And there's a very specific kind of humility you learn by getting to know people whose backgrounds are somewhat similar to your own--I had to give up some assumptions, for example, about people raised secular-Jewish, stop thinking that I knew that whole story because that was how I had been raised.)

But I'm not convinced that diversity of background in any specific area is something that every college should strive for. Easy, easy examples: Spelman? Howard? I don't know that they suffer from a terrible deficit of diversity of experience because they're mostly black.

No one can get to know people from every background--that would mean, of course, getting to know everybody. So we generally rely on our ability to transfer habits of mind and lessons learned through one kind of encounter to another kind. For example, as I said in one of those vast race posts, "I would guess that it's not at all hard to intuit good responses to (say) your town's only Hispanic family from [kids' books like] Dogsbody or Witch Week." And without some basic degree of imagination and charity, diversity of background will work against learning rather than in its favor: When IsThatLegal's point is taken in the wrong direction, the black students in "a class on the Court's affirmative action cases" are left feeling like they have to Speak For The Race. People are being used as sociopolitical counters in a game designed to be won by the privileged (who are thereby able to attain the privilege of meeting people from Different Perspectives and Disadvantaged Backgrounds). So diversity is neither necessary nor sufficient for cultivating a habit of mind that seeks challenge and refuses to stick with the safely known.

Other disagreements: First, one might ask also about what an applicant gained from her background.

Second, the GQ's questions seem to me to fall into one of the biggest affirmative-action traps: encouraging people to view themselves as the sum total of the oppressions that have been visited upon them (or, at best, the socially-designated identity labels with which they've been tagged). This relates to my problem with "The Pianist"; I think it's something that a literarily-minded person would be more likely to notice, since I'm used to focusing on the ways in which people defy the impressions you'd get from knowing their demographic statistics. Back in college, I wrote, "The great writer is great as an individual, whose merit lies precisely in his break with the collective voice of tradition and his transcendence of that tradition; or he is great because his voice is thoroughly universal; but he cannot be a thoroughly tribal voice and still gain entry into the ranks of the masters. He can speak as Everyman, or he can speak as Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (and he is almost invariably speaking as both), but he cannot speak as The Danes. Thus any attempt to value some collective over the individual will militate against the canonical authors. Within this individual and universal voice, the issue of a man’s relation to his tribe may be addressed...." The "I am my oppressions" view is damaging in a lot of ways, which I tried to discuss in that previous aff. action post; when linked to the "you must speak for your people" view, it's really deadening to individuality and one's ability to "become what one is."

I think this problem with the GQ Plan can be at least in part avoided, though, by tailoring the questions more carefully to match the particular schools. This would also allow schools to give applicants--and thereby themselves--a better sense of a unique mission and focus. This is a really good article decrying Yale's decision to go on the Common Application, and calling for much more diversity (hey, there's that word again!) in schools' sense of their own missions. Here are some of the questions that Lukas suggests Yale might ask:

•Write about a Yale alumnus and explain how this person stands for or against your idea of an educated person.
•Explain what you hope to gain from attending college.
•Write about a book that made you do something, rather than simply think something.
•Name and describe five classes that you would like to see offered at Yale.

So questions like, "When have you overcome an obstacle to achieve [insert school's focus here--academic excellence, leadership, etc.]?" or, "What do you bring to [school] that's unusual? What distinguishes you that we wouldn't know from your transcript?" or, "Tell us about a teacher who inspired you. What made this person different from your other teachers? How has this person's example shaped your goals?" or, "How did you learn the value of an education? What does it mean to be educated? How do you plan to use your education to serve or enrich those around you?" could be used, perhaps (depending on the school's level of difficulty, etc.) in conjunction with some of the really fun, hardcore questions listed in this OpinionJournal column. (I bet Jeanne would have aced those!)

Schools could use the application process to build a stronger sense of their own focus; they should also, meanwhile, explain what they are doing, letting applicants know that they are looking for people who have demonstrated strength of character, not just people who have been trained to recite What I Learned From My Victimization narratives. In that context, I have no problem with the Goblin Queen's suggestion that schools remind applicants, "Feel free to discuss social or economic challenges," since after all those are likely to be relevant and some applicants (probably the better ones...) may feel reticent about bringing them up.

This approach gets away from the false anti-aff. action notion that grades and SAT scores form the sum of "merit." It rightly treats people as individuals-with-histories, neither social statistics nor atomistic individuals. I don't know that every school should adopt some variant of this, but I think it's a much better approach to the real problem of discerning merit in a world of widely varied opportunities than points-system or race-based affirmative action is.
posted by Eve at 11:01 PM

 
IRAQ, FATALISM, LIBERTY: QUESTIONS, NO ANSWERS: Today Fareed Zakaria has a typically sharp piece, basically just a list of potential (likely to somewhat likely) positive outcomes of war in Iraq. It's a counterweight to cautionary pieces like this much-linked-by-me Gene Healy essay. Zakaria closes with, "There are always risks involved when things change. But for the past 40 years the fear of these risks has paralyzed Western policy toward the Middle East. And what has come of this caution? Repression, radical Islam and terror. I’ll take my chances with change."

There's a lot to be said for this attitude. I started to write a post about prospects for liberalization in Iraq, but--violating every tenet of the Blogger Code of Ethics--I decided not to because I don't know enough about it. So instead, I'll offer some Iraq-specific links, some general comments on liberalization, and some questions that attempt to connect the two.

One of the biggest enemies of liberalization in dictatorships is fatalism. A sense that the future has shut down, that anything that will happen will be bad (even if it's better than worst). There are all kinds of fatalism--"there's no point in doing anything, we can't affect events" is different from "there's no need to do anything, the rising tide of history will do all the work for us"--but none of the varieties are conducive to liberalization. They're conducive, instead, to lassitude, resentment, and political irresponsibility. (Re the latter, I'm really not sure what the deal with the Iraqi National Congress is. This is a takedown; I'd be interested in other views, as well as more about the Group of Four participants mentioned in the second-to-last paragraph of that piece.)

Fatalism is based, though, on resignation to the status quo. When the status quo is seriously changed, there's a chance that a critical mass of people will reject fatalism and throw their energies into strengthening the kind of social and political institutions that spur liberalization--opposition parties, rights groups, newspapers, small-business organizations and civic clubs, mutual aid networks, and so on. When you view your life as a pawn in a larger game, you may well react with an admixture of hope and terror when someone threatens to kick over the chessboard.

And when it comes to Iraq, I don't have a big-picture, splashy, inspiring (because splashy) chessboard-kicking maneuver to suggest. I do think free trade is almost always preferable to sanctions, and perhaps lifting the sanctions on Iraq would disrupt the chess game enough to provide the necessary minimum of hope that spurs people to work to improve their lives. (Especially since, as Zakaria notes, "the oil-for-food program has become the oil-for-palaces program" and Saddam's isolation has led to "starving millions of Iraqis.") But mostly what I have instead of suggestions are suspicions--I suspect that you can almost never liberalize from above, rather than from below, for example. I suspect that it's extraordinarily hard to impose sustainable civil society by force. (This is in large part because civil society just is the middle layer between people and government, thus it can't really be produced by or enfolded in government. It's the area of life governed by persuasion and the habits that persuasion fosters, the area of loyalty rather than fear, and responsibility rather than dependence. --If you're hearing major similarities between my domestic and foreign policy views, that's intentional. The constraining circumstances are much different, but the actors are only humans, and thus intelligible to us, I think.)

I wrote here about small ways people can carve out areas of their lives that they control, even under dictatorships, and how such experiences of control are the best preparation for liberty. I don't, though, have a lot of ideas for how to foster those spaces of control in Iraq. I haven't even seen much commentary that focused on this issue. (Feel free to send links and such, people.)

Those areas of personal control are a huge motivating force in rejecting tyranny. This is one of the motors driving "revolutions of rising expectations"--the deal is, many revolutions occur not at the times of greatest oppression, but precisely when the regime has loosened its hold a bit on the reins. Rising expectations both disrupt fatalism and make it easier for people to experience a degree of responsibility and freedom. These revolutions are by no means always a good thing--the Bolshevik Revolution is often cited as a revolution of rising expectations. But in this case, it's hard to make any kind of case against revolution (depending, of course, on who is doing the revolting)....

It seems like the U.S.'s talk of war may have started to shake the chessboard a little. Go here and here for more. (Links via InstaPundit.)

So I want to know what makes Iraqis' expectations rise, and what does not. Are some aspects of our pre- and pro-war rhetoric and strategy working against others? It certainly seems like it from here. (For example, it's hard, I think, to welcome an invasion by a country that says it will do this. Not to mention this.) Are there actions we can take short of war that will foster rising expectations, and how can we respect and meet those expectations rather than betraying them? (We do not have the world's greatest track record on the latter, to put it mildly.) I haven't seen any proposals that look realistic here--I don't count an international criminal trial as especially realistic or even helpful.

So, as Jello Biafra says, "I'm not telling you--I'm asking you."
posted by Eve at 9:34 PM

 
WHAT IS CONTEMPLATIVE PRAYER? Seriously. I know this is a bizarre question, but I don't feel like I have a good handle on it. I do a lot of petitionary prayer, thanksgiving, and praise, but I don't even really know what contemplative prayer is like. Surely it's more than thinking lovingly about God, no? There have definitely been times when I felt really sharply focused on one aspect of God, for example God the Creator, or the Crucifixion--almost always this was in the presence of the Eucharist, often right after receiving Communion. Basically it was like I snapped into a visceral awareness of God, an intense "noticing" of an aspect of God and a sense of how this aspect is directly relevant to my own life. Seeing what is always there, in other words, underneath the inattention and pride and other accumulated grime of the Fall--as if a curtain had moved away from a window, or the sun come out from clouds.

But this was not something that I planned. I always try to be open to this, but I don't think of it as a type of prayer--it's more like something that arrows down at me, sometimes. If contemplative prayer involves practices that can sustain this kind of awareness, and make it more frequent, that would be awesome.

So, thoughts? Reading or practice recommendations?
posted by Eve at 3:50 PM

 
INSIDE THE NORTH KOREAN GULAG. Horrific.
posted by Eve at 3:25 PM

 
They all ran after the farmer's wife,
She blogwatched their tails with a carving knife,
Did you ever see such a thing in your life?

The Agitator: Good post on affirmative action in college admissions. Of which more later today.

Amy Welborn: Bowling alleys in churches; monkey love (with implications for the "office mom" stuff below).

Natalie Solent: "Once the regime of rules becomes sufficiently complicated it collapses under its own weight and becomes a regime of the personal jugement of officials." And: "I am reminded that it was not so many years ago that we did not even have 'Wanted' posters in Britain, for fear that the presumption of innocence might be violated. And now the police ape the tabloids by asking, in effect, for any dirt readers can supply on a named individual. Funny how they don't do this for burglary, isn't it? It's almost as if the political offender has fewer rights than the old sort of criminal we used to bother about."

Noli Irritare Leones went to Mexico. Scroll around.

Regions of Mind: Drought. No, let me rephrase: DROUGHT.

Telford Work: Joseph and his brothers.

State of the Union Address Drinking Game. Via Instapundit of course. And I'm sure you've already seen this.

Cronaca, a history blog, looks supercool. Via Regions of Mind.
posted by Eve at 12:18 PM

 
SURSUM CORDA has a worthwhile series on abortion. His stance is not the same as mine, but he provides a lot of food for thought:

"On a random Saturday morning in the Spring of 1989, you could often find me in front of an abortion clinic. My colleagues and I would get up before sunrise, gather in a parking lot, and wait to receive a call telling us where we would be heading. The word would come, we would load up, drive to the clinic, and fan out to begin our work.

"But I was not there to stop abortions. I was there to prevent others from stopping them....

"Those of you who have been reading along for the past week might be a little surprised by this history. ...

"It was the birth of my son in 1998 that probably pushed me over the edge. It wasn’t the ultrasound, although that was a piece of the puzzle. It was seeing how completely helpless and dependent he was after birth. In many important ways, he was still as much “potential life” as when he was in the womb. If you could justify abortion then, could you justify infanticide now?"...

And much more.
posted by Eve at 10:39 AM

 
And there beside of marble stone was built
An Altare, carved with cunning imagery,
On which true Christians bloud was often spilt,
And holy Martyrs often doen to dye,
With cruell malice and strong tyranny:
Whose blessed sprites from underneath the stone
To God for vengeance cryde continually,
And with great griefe were often heard to grone,
That hardest heart would bleede, to heare their piteous mone.
--TFQ
posted by Eve at 10:35 AM

 
LOTS of very interesting snippets at the Marriage Movement blog about a new Swedish study: "Children growing up in single-parent families are twice as likely as their counterparts in two-parent families to develop serious psychiatric illnesses and addictions later in life, a Swedish study has found."

Scroll around for brief analyses and links, including these bits: "[T]heir findings stood even when they adjusted for socioeconomic status and other confounding factors such as parental addiction or mental illness."

"Some may say that because this research was done in Sweden, it may not apply to families in the United States. Actually, it is almost more striking because it comes from Sweden. Opponents of marriage advocates often argue that the problem is not single-parent families, but the lack of government supports for single mothers. These people inevitably point to Sweden as a country whose policies the U.S. should emulate. While greater supports for single mothers may well improve child well-being, this research indicates that even generous government support can't replace the benefit of having two, married parents."

"[Dr. Stephen Scott] said that in previous studies, once researchers have adjusted their results to eliminate the influence of bad parenting, any increased risk of emotional problems shrinks markedly. This, he said, indicates it is not so much single parenthood but the quality of parenting that is at issue.

'''The kind of people who end up as single parents might not have done well by their kids, even if they hadn't ended up alone. They tend to be more critical in their relationships, more derogatory toward other people,' Scott said, adding that it is also harder to be a warm, non-critical parent when you're bringing up a child alone.

"Who’s stigmatizing single parents now? But look at this logic: It is not so much single parenthood but the quality of parenting that is at issue. But it is also harder to be a warm, non-critical parent when you're bringing up a child alone.

"If being a single parent makes it harder to be warm and supportive, how can single parenthood not be an issue?"

And more.
posted by Eve at 12:52 AM

 
Frankly, Mr. Shankly, I'm a blogwatching wreck--
I've got the 21st century breathing down my neck,
I must move fast,
You understand me,
I want to go down in celluloid history...

Gen X Revert: "South Park" and abortion. There's a lot to say there, and maybe I'll say it soon.

Julian Sanchez: What he hopes will be his last word on Lott.

Light of Reason: Response to me and Julian on free will.

Ted Barlow: Lots of questions for John Lott--go to the main site and scroll around; plus a really interesting post on wealth (not income) differentials between black and white families.

ZPlus: Really cool-looking blog about globalization. Wow. Via Virginia Postrel Magazine.
posted by Eve at 12:48 AM

 
Young knight, what ever that dost armes professe,
And through long labours huntest after fame,
Beware of fraud, beware of ficklenesse,
In choice, and change of thy deare loved Dame,
Least thou of her beleeve too lightly blame,
And rash misweening doe thy hart remove:
For unto knight there is no greater shame,
Then lightnesse and inconstancie in love;
That doth this Redcrosse knights ensample plainly prove.
--TFQ
posted by Eve at 12:36 AM

 
OFFICE MOMS: Last night Shamed, Russo and I went to a roundtable sponsored by the America's Future Foundation, on the topic, "Can women have it all?" (Apparently not, since one of the things I'd like to have is a world without cliched debate topics!) It was basically three women proselytizing for stay-at-home motherhood. I'm very sympathetic to this, as you might expect, but I think the discussion of mothering options tends to get bogged down in myths and stereotypes--on the one side you have figures like the Woman Who's Just Like a Man/the Daddy Who's Just Like a Mommy; on the other, there's the Child Who Spent One Day in Day Care And Is Now Tonight's Episode of "America's Most Wanted." So here are some scattered thoughts that are meant to point out that the range of good options is a lot wider than the somewhat calcified public debate would suggest:

You can work outside the home without putting your kids in day care. I tend to think day care is a pretty bad idea--it's like school without the schooling, and what on earth is the point of that? Better options might include having Grandma or Auntie or Lisa Down the Block (not to be confused with Jenny From Ditto) look after your kid for part of the day. Very young children need much more care; by the time they reach pre-K age, they're generally just not as fragile.

My own situation: My mother has worked outside the home for as long as I can remember, but between school, babysitting, and knowing Mom was on call if I needed her, it never even crossed my mind that she was somehow "choosing her job over me." It was so obvious that I was loved and protected that this thought just didn't arise. So I'm skeptical of overly rigid stances that assume that children are super fragile beings who will be permanently damaged if Mommy works. Piecemeal, patchwork arrangements can be the best thing for an individual family--even if they are hard to justify to strangers since they don't play into the Supermom or Superhomemaker imagery.

Couples should investigate full-time homemaking and patchwork options. A lot of couples just assume that they can't get by on one income, rather than going through it realistically and saying, "OK, if you work full-time we'll need to pay for child care, transportation, work clothes; if you stay home, we lose your salary but save those expenses, plus you get full-time motherhood and the kid gets lots more time with mom. Ultimately this means we [fill in the blank--have to spend longer paying off your student loans, have to seriously slash our entertainment budget, have to save less for the kids' college funds, have to accept greater financial uncertainty if there's an emergency]." The financial sacrifices are often smaller and more worthwhile than we might think.

Also, how about working from home? Is that a way to minimize the financial hit while still maximizing time with the children? Jobs from caring for other families' kids to journalism to Web design can be done at least partially from home; all it takes is initiative and creativity. (Also, saving money requires time. Convenience foods are a great example--it's often cheaper and healthier to cook from scratch but it takes more time. Bargain-hunting, repairing rather than replacing, etc. similarly take time. Domestic economy is a real skill, a real way to "work from home" not by earning money but by saving it.) I get the impression that, because there are "sides" in the "mommy wars," too many people overlook possible ways of combining work and home.

What about the extended family? I don't know, what about it? All I know is that this subject is rarely even touched on when people talk about mothering.

Motherhood focuses the attention homeward. As far as I can tell (never having experienced it), this is just true, and all three of the panelists talked about the way in which their interest in the outside world and their desire to pour their energies into improving that world diminished after their children were born. This sometimes makes it sound like mothers callously turn away from the rest of the world and selfishly say, "You all can go hang--everything for my little Precious!"

Instead, I think it's a matter of emphasis. Easy example: One of the women who volunteer at my pregnancy center herself became pregnant. She stopped volunteering. Score one for Baby, zero for World, right? Well, her baby got older, she worked out a schedule with her husband, and she was able to fit volunteering back into her life without neglecting her own kid.

However, it's true that the world does rely on those who do not have pressing family responsibilities of their own. The center relies on single women like me, and on older women whose children are grown. This is one of the material reasons the world needs nuns outside the contemplative orders--teaching sisters, hospital sisters, Missionaries of Charity and the rest. A society that strongly values motherhood needs to strongly value single and religious men and women as well, since these people provide so much service. Singles vs. Mommies is just another false either/or.

Childrearing is a creative act. We often picture young mothers giving up the life of the mind, their thoughts filled with dity diapers rather than Shakespearean sonnets. There's an element of truth there, of course!--especially when the children are in infancy--but teaching and raising a child well also require great mental flexibility, and kids' antics, oddities, questions and unexpected insights provide fodder for an active mind. Frederica Mathewes-Green has made the excellent point that we always think of women giving up "careers" for their children--we picture (and the questions at the AFF event definitely played on this image) scientists who could have cured cancer if they weren't at home cleaning up baby's messes, or poets who would have given the world the next great epic, and so on--but most women don't have careers. What they have are jobs. And raising kids well both requires and provokes a lot more mental liveliness than most jobs.
posted by Eve at 6:10 PM

 
IRAQ: Here's where my thinking is at now. Unqualified Offerings recently said that he felt like pretty much all the arguments had been hashed and re-hashed, and that probably applies to this post too; I'm posting it as much for myself as for you all, so I can get this all worked out in a relatively coherent sequence. Apologies in advance for the length and lack of certainty.

We've been urged to go to war against Iraq (...more so than we are already) for a number of shifting reasons. There was the claim that Saddam Hussein played a Taliban-like role in maintaining and supporting Al Qaeda, and that he might have aided in the 9/11 attacks. As far as I know, this connection has not been shown in any remotely conclusive way. The closest tie is the alleged meeting in Czechoslovakia between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence. The most recent reports I've found, though, are the ones from May in which both Czech and US intelligence said that the meeting probably didn't happen. Certainly not enough of a clue to go to war against Iraq. (More promising Al Qaeda leads seem to exist in Liberia and Burkina Faso.)

The next explanation is that Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator who has violated UN decrees. This is absolutely, 100% true, and doesn't tell us anything about whether we should go to war.

A related claim is that we have an obligation to bring liberal democracy to Iraq (perhaps in the hopes of spurring liberalization throughout the Middle East). I sympathize with this stance, but I just don't think we're likely to attain this goal via war. Stanley Kurtz makes a good case that liberalization would be extraordinarily difficult in a postwar Iraq. He points out some of the flaws in the often-made comparison between postwar Iraq and post-WWII Japan; I would add that in order to get Japan to knuckle under, we used two atomic bombs--are we prepared to do the same to Baghdad?

The final and most persuasive claim is that Saddam Hussein is seeking to build weapons of mass destruction (this generally means nuclear weapons; people throw in chemical and sometimes germ weaponry, but nukes are the big catch) and we have to stop him. So let's look at that case.

First: I take it as a given that Saddam Hussein is actively seeking to build nuclear bombs. I mean, for Pete's sake, why wouldn't he? So what does he want them for?

a) attack on US soil, pure revenge.
b) threaten us or
c) Israel--he'll nuke one or the other unless he gets various concessions (like the ones Eugene Volokh sketched here, or less Islamist ones)--control of Kuwaiti oil, ending no-fly enforcement, ending sanctions, etc.
d) give nukes to other enemies, e.g. Al Qaeda

Let's deal with d) first. Unqualified Offerings points out how thoroughly the nuclear genie has already escaped from the bottle; he's also hammered on the fact that pressing danger from a common enemy (that's us) is more likely to drive the otherwise quite distinct Saddam and Al Qaeda breeds of hideousness into alliance.

I think it's a given that Saddam would have to be crazy to actually nuke us or Israel. Forget about turning the desert to glass--we'd turn him to glass. He'd be a shadow burnt onto a palace wall. This is why a lot of the pro-war arguments rest on the belief that Saddam Hussein is deranged and/or he is seeking a glorious death. As far as I can tell, there are four kinds of dictator, although the distinctions between these categories are anything but sharp: a) the strongman who uses terror for certain limited political ends, a la Duvalier or Aristide.
b) crazy as a moonbat, behaves self-destructively due to personal derangement--it's not easy to get examples of these guys because they don't tend to last long, but I'll throw out Hitler as one possibility.
c) suppurating font of evil, but not self-destructive and deranged only in a moral sense--Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong Il. In a lot of ways Kim eats crazy for breakfast, he's a freak and a half, but I don't think anyone's suggested that he would do something as fluorescently self-destructive as attacking the US or Israel.
d) evil enough to have intimidated everyone around him into becoming complete yes-men, thus even though he attempts to act in a self-interested manner he can't get good advice.
As far as I can tell from my cordoned-off civilian press box, Saddam Hussein is either c) or d), not b). I mean, you have to be really, really out there to hit b).

Evidence that he'll act in self-destructive ways: 1) invading Kuwait. There are conflicting claims about why Saddam took this risk: Some cite the near-decade of warming relations and uneasy alliances between Washington and Baghdad, which lasted almost until the eve of the Gulf War, thus possibly making Saddam think that Washington would look the other way; Hussein's Deputy Prime Minister now argues that Saddam was convinced that he'd be attacked no matter what, so he hit Kuwait first.
2) the alleged assassination attempt against Bush Sr. If this was him, this is a huge deal. It's a really dumb thing to try, and it constitutes a direct attack against the US. I have to admit that I don't know enough about this to say whether this was Saddam--and yes, that would seriously affect my view of war with Iraq.

Evidence that Saddam Hussein isn't self-destructively crazy: the body doubles; the shift in Iraqi propaganda. Plus I do think there should be a benefit-of-the-doubt thing here--Saddam really would have to be insane in the membrane to somehow miss the fact that bombing the US is a sucker's game. It's a lot more obviously stupid than invading Kuwait was.

So: If Saddam Hussein gets nuclear weapons, we're back to MAD, same as with North Korea. (Although like North Korea, Iraq already had various lesser deterrent capabilities; North Korea, for example, could destroy Seoul with purely conventional weapons, and since no one is ready to see that happen Kim had a pre-nuclear means of deterrence.) He waves a nuke menacingly, we reply with, "Whatchu talkin' 'bout Willis? Do you think you'll like being dead?", he backs off, he lurks, he waves a nuke menacingly, etc. This sucks (and it's a most-likely-case scenario, not a worst-case scenario, in which either Saddam doesn't care or he fails to blink in time and gets somehow caught in events, precipitating nuclear war; I imagine this whole process will provoke tons of fun childhood memories for my parents' generation. "In the event of a nuclear attack, children, hide under your desks and fold your hands over your head. It's important to vaporize the hands first...").

Mutually Assured Destruction sucks for a lot of reasons. Both sides have to convince each other that they are willing to use nuclear weapons. It's in Saddam Hussein's rational self-interest, once he has nukes, to convince us that he is orbiting-Pluto crazy and bent on dying gloriously. Otherwise we won't make any concessions. Thus it's pretty hard to assess his state of mind accurately, and it becomes harder to figure his game as he moves closer and closer to nuclear capability and his incentives for looking like a madman/wannabe-martyr rise.

MAD is also really weird from a just-war perspective. It relies on constant talk of how willing we are to use nuclear weapons (a.k.a. targeting civilians), precisely in order to avoid nuclear war. It relies on doubletalk, uncertainty, lies, and keeping your opponent unsure of just how crazy you are.

So, the total World Level of Hellaciousness goes up when Saddam Hussein gets nuclear weapons, just as it went up when North Korea got ditto. But as Gene Healy admirably lays out, the WLH is highly likely to go way, way up in the event of a US invasion of Iraq, as well. Which of these hellacious alternatives is less hellacious?--that seems to me to be one of the central questions here.

(Brief section on pre-emption. I note that even Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for War Against Iraq, disavowed pre-emption, although I didn't really understand Pollack's explanation of how his position was non-pre-emptive. I can see why he'd shy away from the term, though, since pre-emption is a hugely risky doctrine to throw on the table. It provides a major incentive to speed nuclear production, to be Kim and not Saddam. This incentive is almost certainly not offset by pressure not to seek WMDs at all, since very few dictators who would want nukes will settle for no WMDs at all. [I.e. I'm sure Aristide will settle for machetes, but then, he wasn't seeking nuclear technology anyway. By the time you're even considering WMDs, I doubt pre-emption will spur you to ditch your ambitions rather than simply try to get WMDs fast and secretly.] The CalPundit acknowledges the dangers and hopes to avert them by relying on the UN; this seems like a really bad idea to me, as the UN is just a bunch of governments, liable to pressure from all sides, equally liable to suck up to the US or to reflexively attack it. I'm not sure why relying on the UN diminishes the problems with pre-emption at all.

(There are non-pre-emptive ways of presenting war against Iraq: as punishment for the Bush assassination attempt, as merely a heightening of a war that started 12 years ago. These reasons aren't the reasons most often or most persuasively cited as the actual reasons for war, though.)

So. I'm still tentatively anti-war, because I think MAD works, and the World Hideousness Level calculation favors Saddam with nukes over US invasion. (You can assume that my reasons there are largely Healy's.) But I'm not certain of my position enough to, for example, go to last weekend's anti-war rally. I don't like this half-stance at all but it seems to be where I'm stuck right now.

As a postscript, tomorrow I'll post some questions and thoughts about liberalization in Iraq. I think those will be more original and thus perhaps more helpful than this admittedly scattershot and repetitive post. Sigh.
posted by Eve at 3:54 PM

 
"THEY THINK HUMAN RIGHTS BEGIN AT CONCEPTION AND END AT BIRTH": Ampersand has a cartoon and post making basically that claim about pro-lifers. It's based on a study that found that "states with strong antiabortion laws provide less funding per child for foster care, stipends for parents who adopt children with special needs, and payments for poor women with dependent children than do states with strong abortion rights laws." I have a hard time taking this seriously as more than an attempt to score cheap points, for three main reasons:

1) Why is "caring for people" equated with state action? To take a huge, obvious example, there are between three and four thousand crisis pregnancy centers in this country. They generally receive zero government funding. As far as I can tell, the vast majority offer significant services for women raising children. My own center offers: parenting classes, maternity clothes, kids' clothes, childbirth classes, diapers, toys, kids' books, car seats, bassinets, cribs, "shop for free days" (basically like a thrift store where everything's free), formula, and referrals for practically any social service you can think of--employment aid, health care, ex-offender ministries, housing, etc. etc. And that's just the standard-issue stuff; if a client has more intense needs we'll make calls on her behalf (uh, after asking her, of course, in case you're working with stereotypes of the Evil Pregnancy Center) and try to make sure she gets the help she needs. We have contacts who are willing to do all kinds of stuff for women in desperate situations. We also do follow-up counseling and really try to make sure that people don't get left out in the cold once they make the decision for life. I mean, honestly, think about it: Our center gets a lot of its clients through friends' recommendations, and we see a lot of clients more than once. If we jerked people around, they'd stop coming.

Similarly, if you look through any guide to local services for the poor--here's one for DC--you'll find that a big chunk of them are religious groups. Many, many of these groups are staffed by pro-life people. Pro-life people work at homeless shelters, they work with abused children, they work with church soup kitchens, the whole megillah.

**Highly speculative: To look at things from a different angle, this study doesn't even seem to address the question (I could be wrong about this--am going on the excerpt on Ampersand's blog) of whether more funding = better services. For example, New York's abortion laws are very permissive, and I would guess that its foster care system is, at least, not among the lowest-funded; but that system is also somewhat notorious, no? I really don't know enough about the foster systems in different states to make this point especially strong, but I thought I'd throw it out there.**

It is, of course, still possible to argue that more pro-life people should vote to increase state funding for services for the poor. In other words, you might argue that pro-lifers who work in private charities but don't vote for increased state funding are missing out on a good strategy for helping poor children. But to say or imply that pro-lifers don't care about children after they're born is a totally different claim, and one that I really don't see supported by the facts.

2) This is a kind of boring point, but statewide comparisons of this sort are wildly broad. Do we even know what proportion of people who call themselves "pro-life" support increased state poverty programs? Do we know what proportion of people vote based on abortion as vs. on welfare (or foster-care funding)? Do we know how many of the people who vote based on abortion would rather vote for a candidate who supports both abortion and increased state poverty programs, but, in the absence of such a candidate, vote for the pro-life candidate because abortion is objectively a more important issue? (It shouldn't be hard to see why someone would make that choice if she believes that abortion is a mother's decision to take her own child's life.) I've run across people who consider themselves "Democrats for Life" who voted for Bush in 2000--holding their noses--because of his and Gore's positions on abortion. Similarly, I've run across people who argue that the "net gain" in child welfare is greater if you vote Democrat (or Green), so they vote for the abortion-rights candidate--again, holding their noses. So I'm not sure what the heck these numbers are supposed to tell us. Why not ask pro-life people a) what they do for poor women raising children, and b) whether they support increased state poverty programs, and, if so, what they do about it, e.g. do they write to their representatives, do they rally, etc.?

3) Our old friends, correlation and causation. As I understand it--I could be wrong here, I'm working from memory--poorer states spend less on poverty programs and are more pro-life. There are all kinds of possible correlations and interlocking causes here--tradition-minded rural culture, lesser degrees of cosmopolitanism, stronger religious beliefs, states have less cash to spend, you can probably come up with your own. Again, you need a much more targeted investigation in order to answer the question, How much do pro-lifers care about children?, or, Are people pro-life because they hate women?, or whatever.
posted by Eve at 12:24 PM

 
THE MARCH FOR LIFE: I went with the Oligarch and Russo. (I carried a sign with the URL of Pregnancy Centers Online, and later a different sign with the dates of the Dred Scott, Korematsu, and Roe v. Wade decisions and the words, "History Will Remember.") I'd never been to one before. Random impressions: Several hours after we dragged our frozen carcasses to the WARM confines of an Armand's pizzeria, I was still wondering if I'd ever stop shivering. It was amazingly cold. I was bundled up like a little polar bear, but still, oooeeeehhhh. ...I guess that's not the most important observation, but it was certainly the most memorable thing about the march!

There were some fringe characters and assorted weirdnesses, but frankly, there was a lot less of that stuff than at more or less any comparably large march I've attended. That was something of a surprise, just because protesting and marching tend to attract weird. There were lots of contingents of nuns, priests, and brothers, very awesome. Big Capuchins with big beards and big cloaks with big hoods. Lots of flags identifying different regions and churches (e.g. the St. Louis Archdiocese had a big banner). Banners definitely work better than signs on a windy day. Fun with Protestants: We ran into a group from the Oligarch's area of Virginia, and one of the marchers asked us, "And where do you fellowship at?" Slight pause, Oligarch correctly translates this as "What church do you belong to?" and answers, but later notes wryly, "Yeah, I 'fellowship at' [St. X], except I go there alone, and I don't talk to anyone!" Oh well. We also ran into Harvard Students for Life (and saw Princeton's banner), so hey, Yale Pro-Life League, if you're reading this, get off your rears! Do it for Yale!

The atmosphere of the march was quite strange. I mean, it had the camaraderie and enthusiasm you'd find at any vast rally--enhanced by the high spirits and half-giddiness brought on by the freezing weather, a sort of "snow day" atmosphere--but there was also deep sadness of a kind I don't even remember from AIDS marches (which tended to be angrier--vigils are another story of course). You'd be alternately joyful to see so many people standing up for the unborn, and then saddened and depressed when you remembered what it was all about. So if you go next year--and you should, since, unfortunately, I'm sure it will be needed--be prepared for an emotional rollercoaster.

The other thing making the march both fun and weird was the enormous swarms of teens, preteens, and assorted young folk. Honestly, I'd put the average age somewhere in the late twenties--even if you don't count the little 'uns whose parents popped 'em in the koala-bear-shaped Snuggli for the day. Tons and tons and tons of high school girls working out pro-life cheers (to the tune of "We Will Rock You"--could I make that up?) and flirting with high school boys. Lots of Catholic schools let kids off for the day and bus them into DC, and the kids were extremely enthusiastic; at least some of them seemed pretty well-informed about the issues, and all of them had that sweet, optimistic, evangelizing American openness, which can definitely be too much of a muchness but in small doses is a real tonic. There were also big Rock for Life and LifeMatters contingents. I imagine this was a big dating event.

At the end of the march, the Oligarch and I said a quick prayer at the Supreme Court building, and then hightailed it toward warmth.
posted by Eve at 11:21 AM

 
...And in his falsed fancy he her takes
To be the fairest wight, that lived yit;
Which to expresse, he bends his gentle wit
And thinking of those braunches greene to frame
A girlond for her dainty forehead fit,
He pluckt a bough; out of whose rift there came
Small drops of gory bloud, that trickled downe the same.
--TFQ
posted by Eve at 10:59 AM

 
TOMORROW I have lots of work to do, and I'm going to at least stop by the March for Life (why is their web site so LAME???), but I will try very hard to post a long thing on Iraq for which I already have a detailed outline, and I also hope to post very scattered thoughts on affirmative action and Constitutional interpretation (these are separate posts), springing off of some stuff said by The Goblin Queen and Jack Balkin respectively.
posted by Eve at 11:39 PM

 
"ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL": Now that I've finally read that play, I don't think I'll ever be able to use the phrase again. Almost as creepy as "Measure for Measure," a play Harold Bloom rightly labeled "rancid." Oh look! let's do hideously stupid, self-mutilating things for no reason, then get treated horribly by our beloved, then laugh and smile and dance when he takes us back in the final five minutes! [insert Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake noise...]

If you want to sample this putrescent variety of Shakespeare, go for "Measure," which is clearer, better written, and more ferocious.
posted by Eve at 11:17 PM

 
THE GAMBLER: Short, sharp little story from Dostoyevsky. It made me think about the attraction of gambling--the narrator describes the way his heart would start pounding and his thoughts racing when he was still rooms away from the roulette wheels, as soon as he could first hear their clatter. I don't really know what the fun is, since I've never gambled (I've bet on various events, but it's not the same thing). The Gambler made it seem like a big part of the thrill is the knowledge that you're committing an irrevocable act. The very fact that we can commit irrevocable acts is fascinating--it's incredibly frightening, and is one reason Nietzsche hammered so hard on the idea that forgetting is necessary for happiness. To commit an irrevocable and possibly insanely stupid or evil act for no reason is thrilling because of our desires for self-destruction, and because it's an ambiguous act that can be either an attempt to lose the self or an assertion of the self (because you're not risking all this money for anything outside the self, you're risking it just because you "want to"). All of this is rank speculation on my part, and only applicable to the narrator of The Gambler rather than to gamblers in regular reality; I'm trying to tease out the reasons that I identified so strongly with his thrills and compulsions even though, like I said, I don't gamble at all.

For the really committed gambler in Dostoyevsky's book, the risk has to be big--so big that it might change your life--and it has to be undertaken almost at random, at whim. There's an attraction to fatalism, a desire to believe that one is out of control of one's own life, a flight from responsibility and into the realm of destiny and moira.
posted by Eve at 11:13 PM

 
"THE PIANIST": Saw this movie with Russo on Saturday. It's based on the autobiography of a Jewish pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman, who spent WWII in Warsaw. There's a lot to recommend this movie, and if you were considering it, I do think you should go. It is truly affecting, and not just because all Holocaust movies are powerful. There are three things, I think, that differentiated "The Pianist" from other Holocaust movies (and yes, I am treating that as a genre, for a reason I'll talk about in a moment): Roman Polanski's direction; thus, the music and sets (especially the ruins); and the constant emphasis on Szpilman's identity as a pianist. Some of the most powerful scenes show Szpilman either playing the piano, or playing a kind of ghost-piano, his fingers dancing on empty air. That aspect of the movie got at the ways people try to build a sense of self (there's a very subtly handled clash between Szpilman's self-identification as essentially a pianist and the Nazis' identification of him as essentially a Jew); it also underlined how cultured, how soaked in art and music and literature, both the German and Polish people were.

I was somewhat disappointed only because I wanted a deeper sense of Szpilman's character--the movie tries so hard to make "pianist" the center of his identity that when he goes into hiding it's as if he stops being an individual, he stops having an identity, which would be more powerful if we had a sense of what's being erased here--what was he, before the war, underneath his musical talent? The movie is too much about what happens to him and too little about how those events change him or reveal him to himself. I think it is trying to be a movie about Szpilman but ends up being a Holocaust movie, if you see what I mean.
posted by Eve at 10:56 PM

 
CREATED EQUAL: A pro-life blog, just getting started.
posted by Eve at 5:50 PM

 
GOOD, IF FLAWED, book review in the Weekly Standard, looking at three books on abortion. The author, David Tell, has a keen eye for the interesting nuggets that complicate the oversimplified stories preferred by both supporters and opponents of abortion. Flaws: His tone is way too strident for my taste, and in my opinion veers into condescension; and in emphasizing the sharp difference between contraception and abortion (a difference in kind, not in degree*), he glosses over the causal (contraception enables promiscuity which then spurs demand for abortion) and philosophical (pleasure vs. family-making as the goal of sex**) connections between the two. But these flaws should in no way keep you from checking out his piece.

* although some contraceptives can also cause early abortions under some circumstances.
**EDITED TO ADD: By this I mean, "contraception opposes pleasure and family-making," "family-making is thought of as a detriment to pleasure." I don't mean, "contraception is bad because sex shouldn't be pleasurable," or whatever. Sorry if that was unclear.

One of the books reviewed is Back to the Drawing Board, a book of assessments and critiques of the pro-life movement by its participants. Tell is absolutely right that the mere presence of this book is a good sign--a movement needs internal criticism and self-judgment. I only leafed through the book last Sunday at the National Shrine bookshop, but even from a cursory reading I can recommend Nat Hentoff's essay. Hentoff's reasons for becoming pro-life were very similar to my own, and he includes a moving quotation about the Left as defender of the powerless that gets at some of the less philosophical, more emotional reasons I changed my mind.
posted by Eve at 3:05 PM

 
OH WOW. Gaudi at Ground Zero? Via The Corner. I don't really know whether this is the absolute best thing to go on the WTC site, but Gaudi is truly amazing, and this is clearly among the best proposals.
posted by Eve at 12:57 PM

 
MUST-READ POST from Lynxx Pherrett on sex trafficking around the world. Via Unqualified Offerings.
posted by Eve at 12:55 PM

 
JOHN LOTT GETS A BREAK: A respondent to his 1997 defensive gun use survey speaks up.
posted by Eve at 12:53 PM

 
THE RAT'S Desert Island books (and desert island authors!).
posted by Eve at 12:51 PM

 
MEMENTO MORI: Very awesome page with photos of Italian "memento mori" sculptures ("remember that you will die"). Via Dappled Things.
posted by Eve at 12:50 PM

 
Why do you build me up (build me up) Blogwatcher, baby
Just to let me down (let me down) and mess me around...

Body and Soul: Does executing murderers comfort victims' families? I don't know. But I do know that a "therapeutic" understanding of capital punishment is exactly the sort of thing that Avery Cardinal Dulles warned (scroll down to Cardinal Dulles's response) would happen as democratic societies maintained execution without an overarching belief that state justice is ordained by God. Cardinal Dulles argued that democratic societies are liable to make punishment about us, about our needs for comfort and vengeance, and not about restoring justice. I don't find his argument entirely convincing as a case for eliminating the death penalty (here's what I think is my biggest post on the death penalty), nor do I think what you might call the "subjectivist" understanding of the death penalty is peculiar to democratic societies, but I do think his argument may help explain the belief that execution provides "closure."

Kesher Talk: Jewish tribute to Martin Luther King.

The Poor Man: Give a poor man nonfiction reading recommendations! (Link via Barlow.)

Regions of Mind: What could be wrong with an emergency drought relief bill? Honey, never underestimate Congress....
posted by Eve at 12:48 PM

 
THE FAERIE QUEENE: Last night I started re-reading Book One of The Faerie Queene. This time I'm going to try to read more than just the first book! Not sure if I'll tackle the whole thing though--your advice is much requested. Scattered thoughts:

1) Wow, I'd forgotten how much I love the Spenserian stanza. It's very simple, English almost naturally falls into that rhythm anyway, but the extra foot (?) in the last line really adds a kick. Freshman year, I'd sit in the back of Astronomy class sketching out Spenserian stanzas giving my impressions of whatever was going on in my life; I almost failed Astro, but it was worth it. I've gotta start doing them again. They're good warm-up writing exercises: The rhythm is easy, and so your main challenges are making precise word choices (the stanzas are very short, so you need to squeeze maximum impact from minimum length) and seeing if you can milk the poetic form just a little. (You can't get a huge amount of form-follows-function-type joy out of the stanzas, I think--they're too simple.)

2) Yes, Elizabeth I as Gloriana is still creepy, oh well....

3) In some sense, Spenser can share the blame for my entrance into the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. I very much shared TFQ Bk I's obsession with "seeming," hypocrisy, deception and doubletalk when I read it as a freshman, back when I was first coming into contact with these bizarre beasties who called themselves conservatives. I really, really wanted to know whether these people, who seemed honorable and deeply personally invested in the search for and love of truth, were as duplicitous as my teen cynicism, relativism, and left-wingery led me to suspect. Of course, a couple of them were less honest than I'd hoped (though still generally more honest than I'd feared). But most turned out to be what they seemed. Which was pretty amazing. Still is, really.
posted by Eve at 11:34 AM

 
A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine...
--The Faerie Queene, bk I, canto I
posted by Eve at 11:06 AM

 
Hey folks. Sorry for hiatus--unusually poor time-management on my part, plus, uh, laziness re blogging--I have a lot of fun stuff for you though. Tonight I want to finish Dostoyevsky's Gambler; tomorrow I'll return to blogdom. Likely topics: review of "The Pianist"; All's Well That Ends Well; Iraqmania; more on affirmative action; Constitutional interpretation; and whatever else sails across the plate.
posted by Eve at 7:56 PM

 
HOW TO GET OFF A DESERT ISLAND: The Rat is revisiting an old question of ours--which ten books you'd take to a desert island--and asked me if I had any thoughts on my own list. Here's my gut reaction. (We'd already set the rules of the game such that they allowed the Riverside Shakespeare and any translation of the Bible to count as one book each.) I'm only allowing myself to list books I've actually read, thus no listing Flannery O'Connor because on a desert island I'd finally get a chance to read her.

1) New Revised Standard Version Catholic Bible. Uh, feel free to yell at me about the NRSV, but it's what I've got.

2) The Riverside Shakespeare. (If I had to pick three plays: Hamlet, Lear, Love's Labour's Lost.)

3) The Brothers Karamazov.

4) Emily Dickinson's complete poems.

5) Paradise Lost.

6) Any edition of Plato that included The Symposium and Parmenides.

7) You know, it's been forever since I read it, but I'm tempted to list Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand here. I need to reread that.

8) Ulysses. Or Thus Spake Zarathustra--they're kind of about the same things, what does it mean to say "Yes" to life, is the love or the beloved more important to the lover, that sort of thing. Right now I lean toward TSZ over Ulysses, but that tends to change more or less at random.

9) Any edition of Eliot that had the standard poems plus "Sweeney Agonistes." Or maybe The Liar, because even on a desert island you've gotta laugh at something.

10) Philip Larkin, Collected Poems. To teach me how to write.

I wouldn't take The Last Unicorn because I practically have it memorized.
posted by Eve at 1:32 AM

 
A blogwatch hand on my shoulder
And then it's over
Alabaster crashes down, six months is a long time
To try to live in the blogwatch
Instead of a jail...

Yeah, a lot of watching lately, not so much blogging. I know. You'll thank me, though, because these links are good stuff.

Dear Raed: Watching Iraqi propaganda: "At one point 'the doubter' asks 'the wise one' about war, the answer is evasive. He says it doesn't matter whether matters 'get hotter or cool down' we should not listen to hostile reporting and believe it. Well, I guess this means I am removing the NY Times from my bookmarks then. I am a good citizen you know.
"You can't believe how excited I am about these five or six minutes. They have acknowledged a crisis situation, they have never done that before. And it is not done with speeches directed to politicians abroad but to the people, in a simple story-like way. It's a first."

And: "The party's name in Arabic is Hizb al-Baa[here you make a sound as if you were choking]th al-Arabi..."

E-Pression: Excellent point, originally by Mark Shea. "Thus an occasional will to stupidity."

The Old Oligarch: A good, basic letter calling us to penance on the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade.

Unqualified Offerings: March with the anti-socialist contingent at this Saturday's antiwar demo.

...but before I began--I was bored before I even began...
posted by Eve at 12:43 AM

 
AHA: I didn't realize that the Sanchez post I talk about below is responding to this post from Gene Healy and thus ultimately this one from Will Wilkinson. I strongly encourage you to read both those extra links. Wilkinson offers a confessional view from inside the meat-machine, somewhere between irony and pure existential need I think, a materialist atheist in church. Healy (who is not the Gene I talked about in my post) and Sanchez hit more the argument and reasoning side than the personal experience side, but all are worth your time, and be sure to check the comments at Healy's site.
posted by Eve at 7:06 PM

 
TWELFTH-NIGHT OR, WHAT YOU WILL: Sanchez also blogs about free will. This is one of those subjects I don't feel especially confident discussing, but here are a couple thoughts tentatively advanced. Pardon the egregious ramblyness. I fully admit that I'm coming at these questions from a decidedly slant angle which may not address what Julian had in mind.

First, a recent conversation with my friend Gene underlined for me the ways in which the question of freedom of the will is linked to the question of personal identity. Free will requires that there be a "me" who chooses, rather than simply a pushing and pulling jostle of neural impulses and affects.

You can see this by investigating your own decision-making experiences, as Sanchez is (sort of) doing, or you can see it by investigating the ways you might seek to influence others' decisions: That's what A Clockwork Orange is about. (Burgess called it "a kind of allegory of Christian free will.") What makes it right to talk at someone in order to cause his neurons to fire in ways leading him to act peaceably or kindly, but wrong to cause the same results by brainwashing him or rejiggering his chemical balance to medicate away his criminal desires? What makes persuasion superior to brainwashing, propaganda, or medically routing someone toward proper actions and thoughts?

There are a lot of components to the answer--we can look at the effect of medicating away bad choices on the doctors who dole out the drugs, we can look at the dangers of medicating away thoughts that ultimately would be really helpful to us--but I think one other necessary component is the belief that there is value in Alex choosing freely, which means choosing for himself. "Freely" doesn't mean "unaffected by others," "unshaped by his peers, his impulses, and the state of his stomach"; such "free" choosing is impossible for us and it's not clear that it would be desirable. But it does mean that underneath or despite all those influences and attractions and impulses, there is nonetheless an "Alex" who can choose; there is a self that is greater than the bundle of impulses and affects. We either have to say, "What happens to Alex is only wrong because of its possible misapplications and its presumed ill effects on the enforcers and the larger society," or we have to say that there is something great or worth preserving about Alex that is damaged by removing his ability to decide what he will do. I'm not sure what that "something great or worth preserving" could be except the self which can make its own choices--choices which are neither determined nor random, but rather, directed.

And the second thought is that it's not a coincidence that I've relied on a novel here to get my point across. (To the extent that it did get across--like I said, I find this a very difficult and tangled subject.) I tend to believe that free will is one of the philosophical questions that is far better handled in poetry and fiction than in philosophy, in part because it is such a bedrock, foundational issue. (This is one of the things I loved about Thomas Harris's Red Dragon--it depicted so sharply both "There, but for the grace of God, go I" and the belief that the subjunctive tense exists--it was possible for us to choose something other than what we do choose, we're not determinalistically forced into our actions.)

This is one reason I disagree with Sanchez that "There's no non-circular way to justify our most ground-level epistemic principles, but neither do we have any coherent way of rejecting them." Actually, I understand what he means and agree with the point he's making--there's no non-circular way to justify our most ground-level epistemic principles within philosophy, since philosophy relies on those principles to get started. The principles tell us what philosophy is, how and why to do it, and so on.

But I do think it's possible to justify ground-level principles non-philosophically, via art and introspection. In many ways ground-level principles are like definitions: If I want to tell you what a cat is, I can bubbitz about its genus and species and whatnot, but really I should just grab a cat off the street and show it to you, and then you'll know. If I want to know what love is (and let's assume I don't want you to show me...), it's probably best to read poetry or some such until I find something that makes me say, Yes--that's what I've felt--that's it. Nietzsche used the image of "philosophizing with a hammer"--a tuning hammer. You strike against the heart with the tuning hammer until you find the right place and angle, and the heart resonates and understands. Similarly if I want to justify a ground-level principle, my approach will differ depending on what the question is (e.g. is it "what is logic?" or "why should I use logic?"), but I will generally engage in showing rather than in ratiocination. For yet another image, I'll try to hold your hands under the spigot until you realize that this is what water is.

And art is good at "philosophizing with a hammer." I don't think it's circular, really, to rely on showing rather than on ratiocination as a bedrock for philosophy. To say that the bedrock questions are circular implies that we're trapped in our own little logical hamster wheels, unable to convince one another because our premises can never communicate. I think that would be true if philosophy were all we had, and if philosophy could never colonize slabs of poetry and music and such. But through pointing at works of art, and saying, "If you want to understand [what free will is, say], look there," I think we can communicate and convince.

For my final little squib here, I'll enlist David Lodge, whom Charles Murtaugh has finally convinced me (there's that word again) to add to my reading list. In the title essay of his newest essay collection, Consciousness and the Novel, Lodge argues, "Lyric poetry is arguably man's most successful effort to describe qualia." I think that's absolutely right, and I wonder if Julian will find that (or any of this) illuminating or helpful.

If not, I suppose I will have to strike the hammer somewhere else...
posted by Eve at 6:52 PM

 
TALL LOTT-E: (Sorry, I'm running out of puns.) Julian Sanchez has a post on the John Lott survey stuff--corroboration that Lott's hard drive crashed catastrophically, losing lots of his data.
posted by Eve at 6:07 PM

 
My only weakness is a listed crime
But last night the plans for a future war
Were all I saw on Channel Four
Blogwatchers of the world, unite and take over...

Ted Barlow: I think this is the funniest lightbulb joke yet--although the Ari Fleischer ones are pretty key.

Am adding Balkinization and Camassia to the blogroll.

Plus Julian Sanchez has some stuff I want to address separately.

Hand it over!
posted by Eve at 6:05 PM

 
TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION NEWS: Shamed sent me this, with the note, "This has your blog written all over it."

OVAL OFFICE ALLY

Is President Bush more sympathetic than his predecessors on the issue of voting rights for D.C. residents?

It was 202 years ago, where Rhodes Tavern once stood, that this city's residents first protested the denial of full democracy and voting rights in Congress. Residents had enjoyed these rights until 1801, when the final transfer of authority over the District was made to Congress.

Joe Grano, longtime president of the Rhodes Tavern-D.C. Heritage Society, tells this column that he's received a personal letter from Mr. Bush, in which the president acknowledges receipt of voting-rights petitions being circulated around Washington.

"He not only acknowledges receipt of the petition, he wrote a brief letter -- it was not a form letter," says Grano. "So somebody at the White House is taking this petition seriously. I think in the post-Trent Lott world, Republicans want to pay some attention to cities." [sighhhh...I think there are more important things to do w/r/t cities, my obsessive friend...--Ed.]

"By the way," adds Grano, "the president has been the only public official that ever wrote to me concerning the petition, the only one who bothered to take the time, and I think that should be noticed. (D.C. Delegate (and voting-rights activist)) Eleanor Homes Norton didn't write me, (Washington) Mayor Anthony Williams didn't write me, only the president of the United States."

[My take on D.C., voting, taxation, statehood (ha), etc., can be found here. Sorry for the length.--Ed.]
posted by Eve at 5:44 PM

 
Also, yes, soon I will be thinking again, maybe tomorrow. Coming attractions include more on Iraq/North Korea/my constant hovering and dithering; mail about race, maybe with replies, maybe not; a report from a panel discussion on the pro-life movement at 30; and a book review. More of a book alert really--there's this awesome book that you should run out and get RIGHT NOW, except you can't, because I won't tell you what it is until Friday. (moohoohahahaha!) And maybe final thoughts on All's Well That Ends Well and the crop of Shakespeare I've been grazing on lately.
posted by Eve at 10:30 PM

 
IAIN MURRAY FIRED FOR BLOGGING??? This is really, really, super-lame. I hope somebody out there can lend him a hand getting a new, destupidized job.

posted by Eve at 10:30 PM

 
POETRY WEDNESDAY: From Opus. Sort of. I'm in a weird mood today.

How I love to watch the morn,
With golden sun that shines,
Up above to nicely warm
These frosty toes of mine.

The wind doth taste of bittersweet,
Like jasper wine and sugar.
I bet it's blown through others' feet
Like those of ...Caspar Weinberger.
posted by Eve at 5:25 PM

 
ENTREPRENEURIAL IMAGINATION MAIL: Responses to my column for Jewish World Review.

Nancy Lebovitz makes an excellent point: I've long thought that the schools are designed to produce employees, and wondered how the structure and practice would be different if the intent was to produce entrepreneurs.

P.S. It's not just my opinion that schools are designed to produce employees--I've read (in John Gatto's books) that the standard school structure was developed in Prussia to get people used to being factory workers.

I have no clue about the history of the standard school structure; and of course there's nothing wrong with being an employee rather than an entrepreneur; but I do think fostering an entrepreneurial imagination should be a priority for schools. And as I said in the JWR piece, that imagination can also translate into confidence and career planning for people in non-entrepreneurial positions and in the nonprofit world.

And Jim Corbett writes, along the same lines: In Sacramento we have built a mentoring system around our universities and community entrepreneurs and professionals who work with them. It has been real joy to see our young people grow and prosper in the world of entrepreneurship.

The concept for the Sacramento Entrepreneurship Academy came from William L. Haeberle D.B.A., a professor from Indiana University. He was my professor 30 years ago in the MBA program. A truly unique man.....

View our website at sealink.org.
posted by Eve at 5:16 PM

 
BIG POST BY SALAM PAX ON IRAQ, WAR, AND AFTERWARDS.
posted by Eve at 12:26 PM

 
"YOU COULD HEAR SCREAMING FROM EVERY CLASSROOM."
posted by Eve at 5:35 PM

 
PROVING MY POINT that even the gun-clueless can safely handle shootin'-sticks, the Oligarch notes that I was actually not shooting a .22 as I'd misremembered. He adds another good point about types of people who generally don't handle guns well.
posted by Eve at 3:54 PM

 
AS LONG AS I'M JUST LINKIN', NOT THINKIN'... might as well pass on this back-and-forth between Colby Cosh and Kathy "Relapsed Catholic" Shaidle about over- and underrated movies. I seem to be much more in the Shaidle camp, interestingly. More of me on movies here (ten favorites) and here (cultural history of horror).
posted by Eve at 3:03 PM

 
LOTT LOTT MORE: Julian Sanchez posts a follow-up re John Lott.
posted by Eve at 1:15 PM

 
JACK BALKIN BLOGS. I expect this to be fascinating. Right now he's started with a series on Roe vs. Wade; in the first post he announces a Yale Law conference on "What Roe Should Have Said," which I hope to attend, and here he compares Roe and Brown v. Board of Education.
posted by Eve at 12:02 PM

 
JOHN LOTT RESPONDS to concerns about his work.
posted by Eve at 11:03 PM

 
PHILOSOPHICAL DRAG QUEEN CONTEST RESULTS!!!!: Your task: to come up with a nom de drag for a philosopher or theologian of note. EDITED TO ADD: Brad Gittern wants to know what the prizes are.

Close your eyes.

You're lookin' at 'em.

OK, eyes open, back to the contest. I will contribute three:
Ella Mental, a pre-Socratic.
Gloria Monday, a follower of the "indifference to this world" stance described here; as in, Sic transit Gloria Monday.
Genessee Quoi, a negative theologian. (OK, so I stole that one from the people here.)

Your contributions (and I really liked a lot of the honorable mentions, by the way): Third place: Fata Amore, a Nietzschean (Ray Eckhart)

Second place: Annette Hedonia, an ascetic (Although probably, he don't! *ba-dum-bump!*) (Dave Tepper)

First place: Miss So There, an existentialist (M Bat)

Honorable mentions: Closeted Nietzschean, a Straussian; Murray Antoinette, a Burkean (Justin Zaremby)

Pam Opticon, a Foucauldian (Richmond Eustis)

Rhea Xiun, another Burkean (John Povejsil)

Zara Thustra, a Nietzschean; Rue St. Paul, an Augustinian (The Talking Dog)

Martine Boobaire, a fan of I and Thou ; Blaze Pascal (seven alarms!); and Emmanuelle Kant (Oh, Yes She Kan!) (Tenelux, who also notes that a drag philosopher of history might well be... a Vico in a tutu. Hmmmmm.)

Object D’Sartre; Spinoza Bottle (Brad Gittern)

Arthur Silber contributes dueling, good vs. evil queens, from an Objectivist perspective of course: Egoisma vs. Altrueval

Disputations weighs in, with a disclaimer: "First, we must insist on the fact that a Thomist drag queen is an oxymoron. A man is unfit matter for women's clothing, to say nothing of the importance St. Thomas placed on signifying the truth.

"That said, a drag queen named Grace Purrfex (accent on the second syllable) might well be suspected of some training in, or at least acquaintance with, Scholastic thought."

Dave Tepper offers Tommy Swerve, an Epicurean drag king. "(Referring to the "atomic swerve" that Epi believed was the basis of indeterminism and free will.)" Points for suggesting a drag king, points off for needing a footnote...

And a Special Achievement award goes to AgendaBender, of course, for this stellar post on Ayn Rand and drag aesthetic. I thought about handing the top prize to What is Objectivism?, but that seemed a little too... a little too Genessee Quoi, shall we say.

Many thanks to all who contributed!
posted by Eve at 4:33 PM

 
WHAT IS THE RAT AFRAID OF?
posted by Eve at 3:10 PM

 
Sheila, watch a, Sheila watch a blog...

Living Room: A list of bloggers in the Southern hemisphere.

Medpundit: What condoms do, and don't do, and what the Bush administration is saying about ditto. Via Charles Murtaugh.

Rosary Blog: Neat blog devoted to quotations from Church Fathers and other saints. Good stuff.

Unqualified Offerings: Begins a series of replies to critics. The first installment defends his claim that US foreign policy should not/can't rely on nuclear nonproliferation.

La la la la la la la la...
posted by Eve at 2:38 PM

 
LAFEW. ...but my good lord, 'tis thus:
Will you be cured of your infirmity?
KING. No.
--All's Well That Ends Well
posted by Eve at 2:32 PM

 
You just haven't earned it yet, blogwatch...

Marriage Movement: Intriguing study on the "second shift"--how much work do married vs. unmarried men and women do? The answer may surprise you...

Relapsed Catholic: Which critically-acclaimed movies will gain in stature and which will ultimately be considered overrated? My view: She's wrong about Psycho vs. Vertigo, but right about Shadow of a Doubt vs. North by Northwest; so very, very right about 2001; absolutely right to except Grosse Pointe Blank from her slam on the hitman genre; and wrong, but understandably wrong, about Seven and Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Sed Contra: Letter to a woman trying to figure out how to respond to her gay son.

Amy Welborn: How many priests have been accused of sexual misconduct with minors? When were they ordained? Are we talking about teens here, or little kids? Boys or girls? All this and more, in a sad but very important piece from the New York Times.

Telford Work: His inner Abraham and his inner Lot; and: "Some time ago I stopped trying to convince myself either that God is really there or that God really isn't. I decided that God can jolly well show himself. Now this doesn't mean I just sit back and wait for it to happen; I go to church and read Holy Scripture and pray. I go to where God promises to be. But I don't view these things as exercises in conjuring up an imaginative deity, and don't intend them to become so. I view them as appointments God promises to keep. If God is real, God is going to have to show up and meet me there. ...I am not really interested in propping up students' flagging faith if they are secretly more interested in sabotaging it. Nor am I interested in challenging their complacent 'faith' if they are secretly more interested in dismissing the challenges. Both are really 'standing God up' rather than honoring the appointment. ...Jesus was enormously patient with those who really struggled with his message. But Jesus was not overly patient with people who didn't interact with him in good faith, who weren't really interested in determining who he was and treating him accordingly."
posted by Eve at 12:19 AM

 
LOTT MORE: InstaPundit and Clayton Cramer on John Lott; the Cramer link is especially helpful for anyone who's been following this.
posted by Eve at 1:50 PM

 
READING, WRITING, AND REDEMPTION: Last month, Unqualified Offerings posted about whether/how the world of The Lord of the Rings is and isn't Christian. There are many interesting things in his post, but I just want to riff about one of them, which he quoted from Diana Moon: "But in Christianity there is always the flickering possibility of redemption through belief in Christ. In this film, I don't see such possibilities. And I'm not sure whether this is a perversion of Tolkien's message or an accurate representation of it."

In a classic example of bait-and-switch, I'm not going to talk Tolkien at all! (Sorry, Jim.) I do want to think out loud, though, about the difficulties I have as a writer in representing the more luminous and joyous aspects of my worldview. I realized, chewing over UO's post, that I never (I had "pretty much never," but actually I've given up on the one short story that would justify the "pretty much") write about redemption in my fiction. And I'm not sure how I would. And I can't think of many other authors I love who do it either.

What I do instead, is walk people up to the edge of redemption. I'll show what may or may not be the beginnings of conversion. I'll show a slight, seeping apprehension of the insufficiency of this life. (One of the current projects has the working title "Apprehension" partly for this reason. It's about a man's attempt to grasp some basic truths, both factual--where is his fiancee? why did she leave him?--and ethical--what should he do about it? And it's about the huge swathes of sin and ignorance and mischance that shadow even our best attempts at truth and right action. We can't fully attain truth or right action, but we can apprehend what they should be, and thus get a kind of prefiguration or analogical sense of what they will be when we see not through a glass darkly, but face to face.)

So I write about what comes before redemption, and when I write about happiness I tend to focus on and emphasize its shadow rather than its light. I don't think I'm unusual in finding it difficult to concoct characters, situations, and plots that would tend toward explorations of happiness, or redemption. (Different but related categories, I know.) Here are some scattered thoughts on why so many writers, like me, find it easier to limn unhappiness than happiness, easier to write fictional treatments of what Mikhail Bulgakov called "the seventh proof of God" (the existence of the Devil) than more direct approaches to God.

First, we haven't experienced the fullness of redemption. It's hard to write a believable happy ending in literature because there are no fully happy endings in this life. Heaven is much beyond our ability to understand; we can say many things about it, but we're always only talking around the subject, never giving really robust descriptions. Here's Father Tucker of Dappled Things on what Heaven is like, and here's me. Even the best description I can recall of an unFallen world--C.S. Lewis's Perelandra--is mostly notable for its poignant contrast between the Fallen protagonist and the innocent woman of Perelandra. (There's a terrific scene in which the protagonist realizes why he feels so uncomfortable and dissatisfied on Perelandra: He is more comfortable in the loneliness of sin.)

"Good people" are alien to our experience; even the best people we know tend to judge themselves very harshly, to feel deeply the suffering of others, and to view this life with rue or unslaked passion or some similarly darkened attitude. And so when one writes a basically good character, if there's no sense of a deep darkness or lack then the character just comes off as Pollyannaish and obnoxious. (This is one of my several beefs with Ayn Rand's description of John Galt [or is it Roark?] as having "a face that had never known pain or fear or guilt.")

Also, there's the question of what prompts people to write novels and to read them. Walker Percy, in his awesome book Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, which you should read pronto, talks about the ways in which both audience and even more so author use literature as a means of escape from the self. We tend to associate "escapism" with unrealistically sunny portrayals of life, but in this case, I wonder if the acknowledged or half-acknowledged desire for escape prompts some novels' darkness. If you write partially to escape the self, you probably don't have a very sunshiney notion of what that self is like. Thus the selves of your characters, if you are trying to depict the world as you see it, are also unlikely to be sunshiney. Similarly, if you read to escape the self, but you are seeking the particular frisson that comes from finding a novel that captures your own sense of the world (and I think this combination escape/mirror is what many readers are seeking, including, generally, me), you will likely be drawn to authors who reflect your less-than-sweet vision of the self. Such readers will also find it hard to credit depictions of characters whose selves are so good that one wouldn't feel a need to escape them.

Genre novels can probably overcome some of these hurdles, since readers and authors are less likely to be seeking accurate representations of the world and more likely to be seeking "pure" escapism. The Rat pointed out, when she was first getting me hooked on Agatha Christie, that one of Christie's appeals is that she often presents a world in which wrong is punished and right rewarded. (Classic example: Christie's short story, "Where There's a Will." I really disliked this story for pretty much exactly this reason--its justice was dealt out too easily.) However, even with Christie what I really love about her is her recognition of the reality of evil and the impossibility of complete justice in this life; many of her books have a sense of lack and failure that gives believability and heft to her otherwise somewhat caricatured protagonists. (Examples include The Hollow [it's titled that for a reason...], Death on the Nile, Murder in Retrospect a.k.a. The Five Little Pigs, The Mirror Crack'd, and Curtain.)

So I think those are some of the reasons it's so hard to write about happiness or redemption. Any emails are more than welcome, since I'm still wrestling with this topic...
posted by Eve at 5:40 PM

 
INSTAPUNDIT AND HIS READERS on the ways immigration has shaped the American character. One reader: "But I also suspect that the factors that have made America great--lots of hard-headed, independent, courageous, determined, borderline anti-social people from all over the world--may also be among the reasons that it's a pretty violent place. I guess it's true that you've got to take the bad with the good." Here are my thoughts on the same question.
posted by Eve at 3:35 PM

 
JOHN LOTT'S WORK MAY HAVE MAJOR PROBLEMS: Posts on one unsettling problem, which casts doubt on Lott's integrity and therefore on his other work, here, here, and here. Everyone notes that it is still possible for Lott to give a satisfactory explanation--but I have to say, this sounds mucho sketchy. All three posts and comments worth reading even though they are working with the same basic data.
posted by Eve at 3:26 PM

 
HELP THE AGITATOR FIND AN APARTMENT...
posted by Eve at 6:34 PM

 
THE BOOK OF ACTS (AND ACTORS!): Got this press release from Barbara Nicolosi, the very cool director of ActOne, a training program for Christians seeking work in the movie industry:

01/10/03 - Hollywood, CA: ACT ONE: WRITING FOR HOLLYWOOD, an interdenominational training program for writers from the Christian community, is now accepting applications for its four-week summer program. The ACT ONE curriculum provides an overview of both film and TV writing, with an emphasis on writing for film. We also offer a specialized TV track for those writers seriously considering a career in television.

ACT ONE Director Barbara Nicolosi notes that the goal of ACT ONE is not to produce "religious" scripts, but rather scripts that reflect a Christian worldview. "A great movie is a harmony - images, performance, music and sounds, all coming together in a miraculous unity," says Nicolosi, "A beautiful movie not only harmonizes all these elements, but does so around a story that is True, a theme that is Universal. ACT ONE equips writers to bring together mastery of craft and depth of content for movies and television. In embracing their vocation to beauty, these artists will also be Christian apostles of love and grace in the heart of the entertainment industry."

A comprehensive training program for scriptwriters with a concern for content, ACT ONE covers everything a writer needs to know to competitively enter the film and television industry. Emphasizing professionalism, artistry, prayer and excellence, our impressive faculty is made up of over fifty working writers and producers who serve as instructors and mentors, including Angelo Pizzo (Rudy, Hoosiers), Ralph Winter (X-men, Planet of the Apes), Barbara Hall (Judging Amy), David McFadzean (Home Improvement), Lee & Janet Batchler (Batman Forever), and most recently, Academy Award nominee Randall Wallace (Braveheart, We Were Soldiers).

In only four years, ACT ONE students are finding success in many levels of the entertainment industry's creative community, landing writing and producing jobs at DreamWorks, CBS, HBO, PAX, MS-NBC, and FOX, among others. Alumnus David Hansen claims "the amount of scholarship, the degree of professionalism and the keen wisdom of the ACT ONE program is simply an unparalleled gift to burgeoning script writers. I can hardly believe it exists." Featured by CNN, CBS, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, and The Chicago Tribune, ACT ONE has been hailed by industry veteran Ron Austin (Mission Impossible) as playing "an indispensable roll in bringing young Christians into the mainstream of Hollywood."

ACT ONE can only accept thirty students into its summer program. The application process is very competitive, so interested writers are encouraged to begin the process as early as possible. Notes screenwriter and faculty member Janet Batchler, "ACT ONE is by far the most thorough, most inspiring, intensive screenwriting program I've seen anywhere. You can waste years of time tiptoeing around the edges of the entertainment industry, or you can come to ACT ONE and learn what you need to know in four weeks."

For more information about ACT ONE, check out our website at www.ActoneProgram.com, or contact Zena Dell Schroeder, Associate Director, at 323-462-1348. Applications will be accepted from all Christians who are serious about a career in script writing.
posted by Eve at 6:31 PM

 
GUNS IS FUNS. My hands and arms hurt because yesterday I went to the small arms range with the Old Oligarch. It was only the second time I'd been shooting, and the first time was with a rifle; the pistol was much easier and more rewarding. My aim improved rapidly, whereas aiming the rifle was just a crapshoot given my limited upper-body strength and hand-eye coordination. However, I did learn that I have pretty much no strength in my arms and hands, hence today's pain. Russo lent me one of those executive squeezy balls that you use to strengthen your hands, and I hope to be much faster and better next time. Anyway, it was a total blast.

And the Oligarch pointed out that learning to shoot can dissipate the air of taboo that hangs around guns for people like me, who were not raised with 'em--he's totally right that there's this fear that guns, all by themselves, just randomly go off, that if you pick up a gun you're quite likely to shoot your foot or something, whereas in fact even someone with my build and sensible-but-somewhat-clueless level of inexperience can handle a gun safely. The recoil, for example, was negligible, and the gun was certainly not on a hair-trigger. (I was using a Glock .22, I think--is that the smallest?)

Guns are weapons and need to be treated as such: The O.O. gave the standard rules, including, "Assume all guns are loaded unless you can clearly see that it's empty, you've emptied it yourself or you've seen it emptied, and it hasn't left your sight since," "Never point a gun at anything you don't want to hit," and, "Always look behind your target." (Here's an illustrative story from Jane Galt on what not to do.) But guns aren't wild animals just playing 'possum until they can lash out at their owners.

...More relevantly for my range experience, as I noted at the top of this post, guns is funs. Many thanks to the O.O. for his patient instruction!
posted by Eve at 6:18 PM

 
MORE on the Texas foundry I blogged about yesterday: "Indeed, under federal law, causing the death of a worker by willfully violating safety rules — a misdemeanor with a six-month maximum prison term — is a less serious crime than harassing a wild burro on federal lands, which is punishable by a year in prison."
posted by Eve at 6:08 PM

 
REGISTER ON BEING A GOOD GODPARENT.
posted by Eve at 6:07 PM

 
Lip service is all you'll ever get from me
But if you change your mind, you can send a little blogwatch to me...

The Agitator: Globalization, protectionism, and layoffs--good basic explanations, here and then here.

Light of Reason: Is back! and apparently will be blogging intermittently.

Marriage Movement: Tom Sylvester says something somewhat similar to what I said about connections between fatherlessness and social responses to homosexuality.

The Rat: The Rat is on fire. GO THERE NOW! She has a big list of things about the U.S. that she did and didn't miss while in Paris, plus lots of stuff about James Wood, and the usual harsh/funny quotes and snippets from the ratly life. Seriously, go check her out.

Tenebrae et Lux: Terrific post on saints and sainthood and such. Brief and with a real sting in the tail.
posted by Eve at 6:06 PM

 
THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IMAGINATION: My Jewish World Review column for this week. Its basic argument, and a good chunk of its phrasing, will be familiar to readers of this post; but there are some new things there, I promise!
posted by Eve at 4:02 PM

 
GINGER STAMPLEY on the race/names/callbacks study.
posted by Eve at 10:17 PM

 
"AT A TEXAS FOUNDRY, AN INDIFFERENCE TO LIFE." A horrific story. I can't bring myself to quote the most gruesome details, but this will give you the flavor; everything that follows is from the NYT:

On June 29, 2000, in his second month on the job, Mr. Hoskin descended into a deep pit under a huge molding machine and set to work on an aging, balky conveyor belt that carried sand. Federal rules require safety guards on conveyor belts to prevent workers from getting caught and crushed. They also require belts to be shut down when maintenance is done on them.

But this belt was not shut down, federal records show. Nor was it protected by metal safety guards. That very night, Mr. Hoskin had been trained to adjust the belt while it was still running. Less downtime that way, the men said. Now it was about 4 a.m., and Mr. Hoskin was alone in the cramped, dark pit. The din was deafening, the footing treacherous under heavy drifts of black sand.

He was found on his knees....

It was not just a conveyor belt that claimed Mr. Hoskin's life that warm summer night. He also fell victim to a way of doing business that has produced vast profits and, as the plant's owners have admitted in federal court, deliberate indifference to the safety of workers at Tyler Pipe.

Mr. Hoskin worked for McWane Inc., a privately held company based in Birmingham, Ala., that owns Tyler Pipe and is one of the world's largest manufacturers of cast-iron sewer and water pipe. It is also one of the most dangerous employers in America, according to a nine-month examination by The New York Times, the PBS television program "Frontline" and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Since 1995, at least 4,600 injuries have been recorded in McWane foundries, many hundreds of them serious ones, company documents show. Nine workers, including Mr. Hoskin, have been killed. McWane plants, which employ about 5,000 workers, have been cited for more than 400 federal health and safety violations, far more than their six major competitors combined.

...The company would not let a reporter tour the plant. But employees describe simply stepping inside as an overwhelming experience. First is the heat, wave upon wave of it, sometimes in excess of 130 degrees. Then there is the noise — of pipe slamming into pipe, of pneumatic tools that grind and cut, of massive machines that shudder and shake, of honking forklifts and roaring exhaust systems. Dust and fumes choke the lungs and coat the lights, leaving the plant floor a spectral labyrinth of glowing pipes and blackened machinery.

In the early 90's, Tyler Pipe employed about 2,800 people and did about $200 million in business a year. It was modestly profitable, and the owners, the Tyler Corporation, were conventionally paternalistic. They distributed turkeys at Christmas and door prizes at the annual employee barbecue. Regulators said the plant, while far from perfect, made an effort to comply with safety and environmental rules.

In late 1995, the Tyler Corporation sold the foundry to McWane. In one stroke, McWane had bought one of its main rivals and acquired its largest plant.

Within weeks, senior executives flew in from Birmingham and set about executing a plan of stunning audacity: Over the next two years, they cut nearly two-thirds of the employees, yet insisted that production continue apace. They eliminated quality control inspectors and safety inspectors, pollution control personnel and relief workers, cleaning crews and maintenance workers.

...To keep up production, McWane eliminated one of three shifts; instead of three shifts of eight hours, there were two 12-hour shifts. At the end of a shift, supervisors often marched through yelling, "Four more hours!" So employees worked 16-hour days, sometimes seven days a week.

Men who operated one machine were ordered to operate three. Breaks were allowed only if a relief worker was available, but McWane had reduced the number of relief workers and forbade supervisors to fill in for hourly workers. The policy hit hardest near iron-pouring stations, where workers had to drink plenty of fluids to withstand the heat. The humiliating result, six workers said in separate interviews, was that men were sometimes forced to urinate in their pants or risk heat exhaustion.

Even the most basic amenities did not survive. The barbecues and 401(k) plan were easy enough targets. But items like soap, medicated skin cream and hand towels were eliminated from the plant stockroom as unnecessary "luxuries," company records show. If they were available at all, they had to be specially ordered with approval from top managers.

Several workers said they were told by their bosses to bring their own toilet tissue. Near the cupola, managers rationed crushed ice for the workers' drinks, company records show. Out by the loading docks, they eliminated portable heaters used by forklift drivers to warm up in winter. "We do not provide comfort heat for individual employees," Dick Stoker, the works manager, explained in a memorandum.

Restrictions were placed on safety equipment. Protective aprons, safety boots and face shields were no longer stocked and readily available. Heavy, heat-resistant $17 gloves were replaced by $2 cloth ones. As a result, workers wrapped their hands in duct tape to protect from burns.

The union was helpless to resist, past and current leaders agree. Organized labor had never been a potent force at Tyler Pipe, and the layoffs devastated the union's membership. The contract barred strikes, permitted 16-hour days and let breaks be canceled.

"My hands was tied," said Bobby Hopson, former president of Local 1157 of the United Steelworkers of America.

Morale plummeted, but profits soared. Senior managers say they were told that Tyler Pipe earned more than $50 million in 1996 — double the reported profits for the five-year period before McWane arrived.

Four years after the takeover, inspectors from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration spent several days taking the measure of the new regime. They found more than 150 safety hazards. They found poorly maintained equipment. They found a work force that was poorly trained, ill equipped, overworked.

...Any foundry is filled with dangers seen and unseen. For three of the last four years, the cast-iron foundry industry has recorded the nation's highest injury rates. But the inspectors said they were drawn to Tyler Pipe because its rate was so much higher than the industry average, records show. Even with far fewer workers at Tyler in 1996 than in 1995, more workdays were lost because of injuries, records show.

...Ultimately, the inspectors wrote, it came down to incentives: "They have never developed a mechanism to hold supervisors accountable for safety while, on the other hand, they have mastered a system for holding supervisors accountable for production downtime."

...According to interviews and company documents, turnover at times approached 100 percent. Many rookie employees got hurt and left. It was a vicious cycle: injuries fueled turnover; turnover fueled injuries.

The plant was filled with workers who barely knew their way around, let alone grasped the dangers they faced. In April 1996, a crew of outside contract workers was sent up onto the roof to clean gutters. One worker, Juan Jimenez, stepped through a skylight and plunged 55 feet to his death. Mr. Page said that Tyler Pipe's safety director had pointed out the skylight to Mr. Jimenez, but OSHA inspectors said the death "could have been avoided" if the skylight had safety rails as required under OSHA rules.

...By 2000, according to OSHA, 60 percent of the north plant's 70 maintenance workers had been hurt.

Senior managers knew all this, OSHA records show. They knew that guards were frequently left off for weeks at a time. They knew that maintenance mechanics were working on running conveyor belts, entering treacherous machine pits alone.

...McWane's senior executives, including C. Phillip McWane, the chairman and chief executive, received regular reports from all their plants. The reports measured seemingly everything — injuries, lost work hours, dismissals, operating margins. By 2000, it was clear that Tyler Pipe had become an exceedingly profitable enterprise.

It was also clear that something was very wrong. Red flags were everywhere.

There had been three deaths since the takeover. The injury rate was climbing, the company's own reports showed. "Safety is without a doubt one of our worst areas," Mr. Stoker wrote in a confidential memorandum to top supervisors. "I have failed in this area, but I can promise you that we will not fail to improve in this area come 2001."

...Texas workers' compensation laws give McWane broad immunity from negligence lawsuits. But they also required it to pay medical bills and lost wages for injured workers. Company executives complained that they were "hemorrhaging" money on workers' compensation — many millions of dollars a year and rising.

Once again, the company chose a minimalist approach, according to company and OSHA records and former safety and health employees. It devised a system of "workers' compensation cost control techniques" that shifted responsibility for safety problems onto the workers themselves.

It was a system that assumed widespread fraud and often subjected workers reporting injuries to disciplinary action, and sometimes firing, for violating safety rules.

"Whether the employee is 100 percent or 5 percent at fault is irrelevant," wrote Stephen A. Smith, then president of the McWane subsidiary that owns Tyler Pipe.

In 2000 and 2001, company records show, more than 350 workers were subjected to disciplinary actions — known as D.A.'s — after reporting injuries. "All disciplines short of termination is administered with the intent and purpose to teach," the plant's employee handbook explained.

But OSHA inspectors concluded that the system was used not to teach but to punish. Disciplinary action was meted out if it was the fault of the employee or not, they said.

"The true significance of a D.A. is that they move an employee along a track for termination," the inspectors wrote. Even longtime employees with exemplary work records could be fired for a single D.A. Employees say they learned to keep injuries a secret whenever possible.

In his response, the McWane president, Mr. Page, said no Tyler Pipe worker had been fired in retaliation for reporting an injury. He said managers were encouraged to enforce safety rules "so that there would be no doubt about management's commitment to the safety program." He added, "No judge or jury has ever concluded that Tyler Pipe acted improperly."

As many companies do, McWane insists that injured workers return to work as soon as possible on "modified duty." Mr. Page described modified duty as a beneficial program that speeded recovery. At Tyler Pipe, though, records and interviews show that modified duty often meant humiliating and punitive jobs like cleaning toilets.

John T. Combs was the senior manager who oversaw modified duty. In an internal company e-mail message, he extolled the benefits of assigning injured workers to toilet duty and described how he assigned "an aggressive, physically imposing supervisor" to oversee them. "This accomplished one of two things," he wrote. "1) the employees would return to work because cleaning toilets is not fun and it paid less than their regular job or 2) they would quit."

Mr. Combs did not respond to telephone messages.

...Ms. Sankowsky said she suggested a variety of low-cost ideas to reduce rampant ergonomic complaints. She proposed conducting warm-up exercises and wrapping brush handles in foam. "Not cost effective," she says she was told.

In Texas, injured workers have the right to choose their own doctors. At Tyler Pipe, this right came with an important qualification. "We require every employee injured at work to see the company-approved physician if a doctor is necessary," the employee handbook says. "NO EXCEPTIONS!" The labor contract said the same. In a memorandum to all workers, Mr. Collier said he wanted injured workers to see the company doctor first to "ensure the very best care in Smith County for our employees."

...Had he been sent to a hospital, had an X-ray been done, it would have been clear that Mr. Lopez had suffered a terrible injury, a severe compression fracture in his spine.

But he was not sent to a hospital. ...

..."Why do you not tell this gentleman that he's got a compression fracture of the spine?" she said she asked an Occu-Safe manager. "And he said to me, `Well, then he'd know how hurt he was.' "

...Last year, Tyler Pipe came under intense scrutiny from federal investigators.

In the summer, the company pleaded guilty in federal court to deliberately ignoring safety rules that could have saved Mr. Hoskin's life. In the fall, McWane reached a settlement with OSHA, admitting that it had willfully violated safety rules a dozen times.

Tyler Pipe began publishing a safety newsletter, As the Pipe Turns. The newsletter said many new safety guards had been installed and hundreds of potential hazards eliminated. Under a new incentive program, workers get gifts if they do not "have an OSHA recordable accident that results in discipline." One recent gift, a lunch cooler, was branded with this slogan: "Safety Without Compromise."

But Tyler Pipe remains a dangerous place to work, company records show. A recently completed internal safety audit found 1,219 hazards.
posted by Eve at 8:49 PM

 
MORE MLK/AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: In comments here. I got no comment (as it were). The comments there are sputtering in and out of existence, so if you don't see 'em when you click the link, try again in an hour or so.
posted by Eve at 8:26 PM

 
MORE NUNS: Excellent post from Amy Welborn, reflecting on a book she's just read about the Sisters of Mercy.
posted by Eve at 6:39 PM

 
NUN SURVEY: You may have seen this story, "Nuns as sexual victims get little notice."

Yesterday Amy Welborn linked to a letter to the editor pointing out some of the survey's flaws:

"The data from which Smith draws his conclusions are based on a select group. Less than one-quarter of the orders (123 out of 538) agreed to participate in the survey, and of those that did agree, less than half of their members (1,164 out of 2,500) responded to the survey. Without additional information about those who refused to participate in the study, it is simply impossible to estimate the level of victimization.

"This leads one to wonder why the Post-Dispatch reported the results of a non-representative survey on the front-page of the Sunday paper. A look at some of the sub-headings of the story is revealing.

"The front page subheading states 'An estimated 40 pct. were victimized, some by priests, other nuns, survey found.' However, nowhere in the article is there evidence for this 40 percent estimate. According to the tables in the article, 18.6 percent of the nuns who responded to the survey reported that they were sexually abused as children, and the majority of these incidents were at the hands of family members. The percentage reporting any instances of sexual exploitation or harassment during their religious life is lower (12.5 percent and 9.3 percent). Thus, the 40 percent claim and its association with 'priests and other nuns' appears to be deliberately misleading.

"Another subheading alleges that the study has been 'kept quiet,' when in fact, the results had been previously reported in two religious research journals. To attribute one's own lack of awareness to an alleged conspiracy when the research has appeared in print twice is both bizarre and suggestive of serious bias."

There's also lots of discussion of the survey, its methodology, and its implications in comments at her site here and here. FWIW, I'm unsurprised that nuns get harassed and abused--there's a lot of lousiness in the world. But this particular survey seems very sketch, esp. due to its low response rate.
posted by Eve at 11:05 AM

 
TOP TEN OVERLOOKED CATHOLIC NEWS STORIES OF 2002. Fascinating stuff. It's from the Nat. Cath. Reporter, so I grumbled a bit at the slant of the story, but this is well worth your time. Via Dappled Things, I think; link will decay--so click today!
posted by Eve at 10:54 AM

 
THE BLOG ROLLS EVER ON AND ON... I've freshened the blogroll a bit.
posted by Eve at 10:28 AM

 
CASSIUS: Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?
BRUTUS: No, Cassius, for the eye sees not itself
But by reflection, by some other things.
--Julius Caesar, I.ii.51-3. (That is a real quotation from Julius Caesar. Here, a quotation from Julius Caesar has been replaced by dark, sparkling Folger's crystals. Can you tell the difference? --What is the sound of one ax grinding?--Ed.)
posted by Eve at 9:53 AM

 
BOOKSTORES--INDEPENDENT AND CHAIN--FASCINATING STUFF. The comments here are super-engaging. (Oh, and the post ain't bad!)
posted by Eve at 10:37 PM

 
SANTA: THE FINAL CONFLICT. I've gotten a surprising amount of mail on this. Let me first state the position I've come to so far, and then I'll print some mail, and conclude with an email from Lynn Gazis-Sax with which I basically agree.

First, parenting is in large part a matter of intuition--an art, not a science. Since Santa Claus is the kind of practice that can be performed and read in lots of different ways, some good, some bad, I see no point in laying down a hard-and-fast rule, such as, "No Santa depictions!" or "No pretending presents came from Santa!" (Or the converse, "Come on, nobody misreads Santa.")

Second, there are a lot of instances of fantasy, fiction, masquerade, and "let's pretend" in childhood, often with parents' enthusiastic consent. Halloween is only the most obvious example. Since I don't take an "all art is lies!" stance, I have no problem with this stuff. Put a tooth under the pillow for the Tooth Fairy. Dress up in costumes on Halloween. Pretend Mommy is an alligator or Daddy is a horsie. This is all to the good, and children generally are comfortable with the ways in which storytelling and costumery are different from lying. (But see point one: If your kid has a hard time with the story/lie distinction, you should be crystal-clear in how you present costumery and fantasy fun.) In many families, this is how Santa Claus works, and I have no problem with that. Like I said before, I love 'Twas the Night Before Christmas and that sort of thing.

But Santa poses some unique problems for Christian families. First, our culture has inflated his role considerably, and we treat him differently, so that lots of children place him on the wrong side of the story/lie dichotomy. They cry when they learn that Santa "isn't real." They experience disillusion and anger at either their deceptive parents, or their disillusioning friends/siblings. These are not the emotions we associate with storytelling or Halloweenery. I think Zorak put this point best, from her own experience, so go there if you don't believe me. This is pretty clearly a sign that something is out of whack in the importance and "real"-ness we give Santa Claus.

Second, Santa Claus is often used as a public substitute for the more "sectarian" Christ Child. Santa's role as gift-giver is inflated and the role of God, giving us the gift of His Son, is correspondingly reduced. Christmas becomes Santa's holiday. The Old Oligarch and I were talking about this, and he mentioned the "meta-Santas" that have arisen in response to this trend--for example, you can buy a "kneeling Santa," Santa kneeling with jolly red cap in hand, ready to be placed before the creche. Now obviously Santa doesn't fit in a traditional manger scene. Kneeling Santa is a way to incorporate Santa, subordinate him to Christ, and comment on mainstream society's elevation of Santa over Christ. (The Oligarch joked that the next step would be a militant Christ with a foot on Santa's neck!)

Third, Santa is based on St. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, a real guy and a real saint. To the extent that he's blurred into generic chubby gift-lugger, we lose a saint's example, a saint's distinctiveness, and a saint's ability to inspire our kids. Oh--and a saint's reality, too.

And finally, the Catholic faith offers lots of other ways to engage in almost liturgical "re-enactments," plays, and costumery for Christmas: Las Posadas, Advent calendars, creches, caroling. If you want to bring Santa in too, okay, although he might be kind of distracting (where does he fit? He's an outlier). But why not seek out more direct, equally exciting and childlike ways of expressing faith?

So those are reasons that I prefer to keep Santa as a character in a poem.

Now, the mail:

Polly Edington: Read your comments on Santa and just thought I'd tell you my experience--when my husband and I were first married we decided Christmas was too commercial and not Jesus' real birth date and seeing we hadn't had any kids yet, we would have a "Christmas free environment" at home. For a while we kept Christmas with our relatives...then I chose a religion that also didn't celebrate Christmas and we moved to MN from MI and didn't do Christmas at all. When our girls were young we explained Santa was make believe but warned them not to tell the kids at school...told them the same about sex...didn't have any parents calling us but they admitted years later they told their friends about how babies were really made--probably the kids never told their parents and maybe it was the same with Santa...Anyway, when the girls got older they told me they were glad they knew the truth, but got picked on for not getting "Christmas" presents...

Well, I'm very very pro-Christmas, pro-Christmas presents and celebration and holly and tree and such. I don't think a Santa-free or Santa-light Christmas is less Christmassy; in fact, I think it can be much more Christmassy.

Josiah Neely: My parents never lied to me about Santa Claus, and I thank them for it. They told me that he was like Superman; he wasn't real, but that it was fun to pretend like he was. I don't think my Christmas experience was lessened as a result.

They also told me not to tell other kids that Santa wasn't real. I disobeyed, and told one of my classmates. And you know what happened? She didn't believe me. In fact, she told the teacher, who sided with her w/r/t the whole Santa existence question, and I ended up getting in trouble. So I doubt very much that individual parents letting their children in on the truth will ruin the lie for everyone else.

Honestly, I can't fathom why parents are so insistent on the whole charade. Christmas is a magical time for a child, but it would be so anyway, and it seems to me that a lie, to be justified, needs something more than that.

Justin Katz: I just had to pipe up with a question about, given the thorough coverage you're giving to the question of the benefit of lying about Santa on the open Web, how long the issue will even be valid. As a computer
teacher, I know that the kids can get around on the Internet. It's only a matter of time until they begin researching once the first whispers about Santa's non-existence slither through the school.

Personally, my largest objection is, to consolidate, to the sentiment offered in some Santa films that sometimes we just have to take things on faith. Regarding Kairos's justification of explaining complex theological issues through the Claus, this particular lesson seems to me more detrimental. Santa is demonstrably false, and continuing to believe in him would be foolish; God is not demonstrably false, and it would be a mistake to extrapolate the Santa lesson to Him.

And like I said, I think this email from Lynn Gazis-Sax hits the nail on the head: I have mixed feelings about the whole Santa myth debate. You see, my parents brought me up with Santa, but I can never remember actually believing that he was a real person; I always remember knowing that he (and the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, who also both visited our house) were stories, a kind of pretend in which my parents and I collaborated. I suppose I probably did actually believe in Santa at some age (the earliest I clearly remember my thoughts about him was when I was maybe six or seven, and I know that four-year-olds have a magical enough view of the world that Santa would likely seem real, even if not actually being presented by adults as literal fact).

But -- and this is important to my view of Santa -- my parents *never*, ever lied to me about him, never told me that he was real if asked whether he was or not, never tried to preserve my belief in Santa as if it were some great loss for children to reach the age of losing belief in him. And I kept getting presents "from Santa" regardless of whether I expressed any belief in him or not (my mother even got a present "from Santa" one year).

Now, occasionally, on the net, I've run into really vehement anti-Santa sentiment -- more strongly expressed than your or Cacciaguida's posts -- and some of that strikes me as humorless, and overly serious. By which I mean that it sounds as if everything I tell a child has to be literally true, as if games and pretend and fairy tales are not OK -- sort of a Gradgrind approach to life. I think Santa as fiction, and even Santa as pretend, are fine, and I've done Santa pretend (as I see it) with one of my nieces when she was young ("What's that? I think I hear the sound of reindeer.").

But I draw the line at actually trying to convince children that Santa is real, treating belief in him as something to be preserved as long as possible, not giving children a truthful answer about Santa when they ask. And it bothers me that some adults are so very serious about wanting to preserve the illusion of Santa.
posted by Eve at 3:34 PM

 
Sales men
Conventioneers
Some rock stars
With tambourines
Short skirts
And skinny legs
Selling blogwatch
And real estate...

Amptoons: Points out that MLK supported affirmative action. There's a bit of back and forth between us in his comments box, but on the historical question he's right. I think there are ways of understanding affirmative action that are consistent with King's famous "content of our character" phrasing, as I said here, but there's also an obvious (SEE BELOW...) reading in which affirmative action judges us on the content of our character eventually--but not now--and thus is inconsistent with King's speech. So although it's definitely super-lame to pretend that King didn't hold the views he held, it's also OK, in my view, to cite and praise his formulation of the colorblind ideal while thinking affirmative action is inconsistent with that formulation and that ideal. --Oh, and as I told Ampersand over email, I apologize for the somewhat curt/snappish tone in my comment at his site.

UPDATE: He's responded, and points out that the King speech in question emphasizes that people will only be judged by the content of their character in the future, i.e. "eventually." Since the speech is basically attacking the racism of King's day, I'm not sure that that gets anyone anywhere--obviously King has to frame any description of the colorblind ideal in the future tense, since he's expressing a hope for what hasn't yet happened. However, Ampersand is right that his parsing of the speech as consistent with affirmative action works. (I think we'd have to take into account the context of the speech, the way it was likely received by listeners, and such stuff before we could necessarily say which interpretation, if either, is "obvious.") Anyway, my more substantive, less MLK-interpretation-y post on affirmative action is here.

Catholic Light has been ordered to active duty January 10; prayers requested for his family. (Via Relapsed Catholic.)

Marriage Movement: Criticism of Bush's economic proposals as they directly affect family structure and child care.

P.L.A.: Heroism. (Via Ted Barlow.)

William Gibson blogs. (Of course, if you care, you probably already know this.)

They call for Mr. Jones
They put him in charge
Mr. Jones will help us out
He's a lucky guy...
posted by Eve at 2:59 PM

 
I would post a quote from my current reading here, but it's Timon of Athens, which--despite some interesting Hamlet-like obsessions with honesty/feigning/women's chastity--is basically an excuse for Shakespeare to write pages and pages and pages of insults. So, here's a Shakespearean insult generator. ...Ooh, here's one with a different shtik--words from Shakespeare rather than entire insults. Still tons of fun.
posted by Eve at 11:47 AM

 
"WHAT SEEMS LIKE AN INTERLUDE NOW/COULD BE THE BEGINNING OF LOVE": On Christmas, I was speaking with someone who described a certain Christian response to the world as "indifference." This distance from the events of the "stirring world" shows itself most clearly in law and politics: If they outlaw our practices in Pennsylvania, (shrug) no matter, we can move, or we can operate underground, it's been done before. I asked whether this perspective took the attitude, "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church"--which I think is true, but not necessarily a good guide for political action!--and he replied, no, even that approach places a greater weight on the events of this world than the approach he was describing. He suggested this approach might spring from the Mennonite tradition; I hardly know, since I know virtually nothing about that tradition. But I was struck by how alien this approach seemed to me--it was a totally different way of looking at this world.

I can see how it would be a startling witness to Christ: God is so great that this world becomes irrelevant in comparison. But it seems to me like there's more than a hint of Stoicism in this attitude--don't look and it won't hurt. (Can such a radical rejection of this life coexist with marriage? How would someone who has cultivated indifference to this life mourn the death of a spouse, or comfort those who mourn? It is an eschatological witness beyond even the poverty, celibacy, and obedience required of monks.) And there are other, and in my view better, ways of understanding how Christians should view the City of Man.

The God Who so surpasses this world's glory has, after all, created this world, and plunged us into it. We have to figure out why. Is the world solely a negative sign, a cosmic "what not to do"? Or is there beauty and goodness in all that is, and our job to figure out how to discern and honor that beauty? There's a hint of Stoicism in "Christian indifference," and, I think, perhaps also a hint of Gnosticism: The divine spark within us is trapped in the flesh and rush and traditions and language of a God-forsaken world. There is something divine in us, the imago Dei, but the world is utterly alien to that divine thing. In the Catholic view, the world has been wrecked by sin, but as with all ruins, the original beauty still persists. God still shapes human language and tradition so that we might be able to apprehend Him.

Catholicism is famously an "incarnational" religion, a way of honoring "God with us," God as He operates in the world. Hence all the candles and incense and statues and color and music. This life is not opposed to the next life; this interlude is, if we accept Christ, the beginning of endless love. I think this recognition of the insufficiency and importance of this life--its suffering and its struggles as much as its beauty--is why so many artists and writers are drawn to Catholicism. Art is no substitute for religion, but it is something, something real. This life is neither sufficient nor irrelevant. The same understanding of the importance of this life in light of the greater glory of the next produces the passion of Christian charity I talked about in "Religion Is the Amphetamine of the People."
posted by Eve at 4:03 PM

 
SECOND SERVINGMAN: Why, then we shall have a stirring world again. This peace is nothing but to rust iron, increase tailors, and breed ballad-makers.
FIRST SERVINGMAN: Let us have war, say I. It exceeds peace as far as day does night. It's sprightly, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men.
SECOND: 'Tis so; and as war, in some sort, may be said to be a ravisher, so it cannot be denied but peace is a great maker of cuckolds.
FIRST: Ay, and it makes men hate one another.
THIRD SERVINGMAN: Reason: because they then less need one another. The wars for my money.
--Coriolanus IV:v:221-234
posted by Eve at 3:35 PM

 
HILARIOUS. "The Two Towers: Condensed Version." I forget where I got this.

GANDALF: Hey, kids. Miss me?

ARAGORN: Gandalf! You're alive!

LEGOLAS: I almost had a facial expression from the joy of it!

...LEGOLAS: This is going to be most unpleasant. Hundreds of people will die.

ARAGORN: Thank you, Captain Obvious.
posted by Eve at 3:11 AM

 
THE RACE SERIES IS NOW COMPLETE. Please exit slowly through the door at your right. It's bedtime for Bonzo over here. Meanwhile, in other parts of the forest...

Gene Healy's anti-war case is the one to beat. Crisp and clear. Worth your time. Some comments are here.

Junius adds his two cents to the race stuff--start here and scroll down a bit for more.

Amy Welborn tells a story from the past to explain her approach to the abuser-priest scandals.

Unqualified Offerings: Peacekeeping and sex slavery. ("The pinup remains ever after, immortal as all around dies...")

And a very creepy game. Via Making Light. Still not as creepy as the game from The Idiot--"let's all go around the room and tell the worst thing we've done!"
posted by Eve at 3:08 AM

 
RACE IX: THE RECOVERY OF FIRE. So in that big anti-affirmative action post, I concluded by noting that contemporary defenses of affirmative action totally lack the sense of hope and vigor that imbues descriptions of the King era. And I said that we could get that fire back, but that we'd have to redirect our thinking about race. Here's my disorganized game plan for that redirection. It's in several parts--you'll know when you hit the end because you'll be back in Race VIIIa.

First: Racism is not the problem. This is important because racism is EVEN HARDER to address directly than the VERY difficult things that really are the problem. Why do I say racism is not the problem? Well, first, because it's really hard to tease out the effects of racism from the effects of stuff like general lack of concern for what happens to poor people, unrealistic beliefs about crime, and hopelessness or wrong choices on the part of poor people. Better to address the specific problems than to fight over whether those problems are caused by callousness, ignorance, greed, sloth, or reasonable disagreements about policies.

Second, focusing on specific problems, rather than assuming that racism is the diffuse underlying cause common to all, allows us to stop psychoanalyzing one another and stop hurling charges of racism at people; those charges long ago became all-purpose accusations.

And finally, like I said, racism is a complicated beastie, with all kinds of variants and manifestations, some subtle, some blatant--there's the racism of condescension ("the soft bigotry of low expectations," to coin a phrase), there's racial profiling without racism (as in Jesse Jackson's sad confession that when he heard footsteps behind him at night, he was relieved if he saw it was a white person), there's all kinds of emotional and highly-charged judgments and guesses. There's black racism against Asians, against Jews, against whites, all of which favors are of course returned. There's Chinese hatred of the Japanese. (Wonder why?) You want to address that first? Even fixing the schools is easier!

Second, attend to the individuals, not the symbols. The attempt to turn black people into symbolic noble victims is totally creepy, and keeps us stuck in the past. I've talked quite a bit about this already, so I won't say much more, except to point out that making black people symbols rather than people kills honesty and humor. Case in point: the self-parodic accusations that "Barbershop" was bad for black people because it dissed black heroes. Hello? It is possible to laugh at oneself, you know... even in public.

(Another case in point: Black People Love Us. Sharp little satire. Probably prompts some of the misunderstandings it skewers, but that's comedy, folks. I don't imagine Moms Mabley was considered a suitably symbolic black hero either.)
posted by Eve at 1:45 AM

 
We need to do two things at once: a) Get beyond the black/white "American dilemma." That's probably been my biggest failing so far with this series--there's no real sense of the whole "Mississippi Masala" shtik here, the wild efflorescence of American cultures and racial categories and category-breakers. We're addicted to black and white.

Possibly that's because we don't quite know how to talk about the deep links, similarities, and persistent differences between native-born black and white communities? I mean, we kind of have a vocabulary for talking about immigrants and their children. We can joke about our differences, because they're obvious and expected. The fact that on "King of the Hill" Hank's accent is different from his neighbor Khan's isn't threatening, it isn't a sign that the American dream has failed, it isn't this huge deal. It's just that Khan is Laotian, they talk different there, big whoop. We know how to avoid taking ethnicity too seriously--Apu "Do not offer my god a peanut!" Nahasapeemapetilon, Groundskeeper Willie--but we don't know what to do with race. The black characters on not-specifically-black sitcoms tend to be kind of like black Barbies--exactly like white Barbie, only brown. Moesha gets to have an Unusual Name, but if she were on "The Simpsons," you know she'd be named Karen. This is silly. Black Americans rarely have family histories, ingrained likes and dislikes, snap judgments and assumptions, and traditions that are exactly like white Americans'. Everything from comfort foods to styles of worship are generally different. There are some issues that black people are a lot more likely to deal with than white people (like being treated as a symbol, for instance!). There's a rich field for humor here, if we allow ourselves to laugh. Black and white cultures are tightly interwoven, with tons of borrowing and mixing, but they're not identical.

(As long as we're talking sitcoms, Shamed and I watched "Andy Richter Controls the Universe" recently, and although I'd expected to hate it, its "diversity training" episode was actually unexpectedly funny--it starts as a gentle satire about/against affirmative action, then turns into a culture-clash comedy when the black guy Andy recruits for the company turns out to be very sensitive about his Irish heritage. This could have been a total disaster, but in fact, the light tone worked, and really exemplified some of the stuff I'm talking about here--the show poked fun at the mindset that We're All The Same And Let's Celebrate Our Differences! In the end, Andy dates the black/Irish guy's sister and they discover their shared hatred for "Riverdance." The general tone: "bemused." So look, it can be done, black/white culture stuff is funny.)

Of course, we're also addicted to black and white because that helps us find our place in an uncertain political universe. We don't have to deal with complexities if we just jam any anomalies into our conventional slots. Hence the pressures to be more "black" described by the South American immigrants here; hence also the discussion forum at Yale on the pressing question, "Are Asians black or white?" (Could I make that up? The meaning, of course, was Are Asians treated like Honorary White People or like Dangerous Yellow Minorities?, but the answer, "It depends, not necessarily either, that's not a super-useful dichotomy," was apparently too complex. Welcome to the Ivy League.)

Anyway, now that I've acknowledged that I really didn't get beyond the black/white dichotomy in this series, I can even admit that I've spent most of this section talking about black/white stuff, still. Sigh. Do as I say, not as I do.
posted by Eve at 1:44 AM

 
b) Having noted that there are all kinds of funky colors and cultures in this country, it's also necessary to acknowledge that black Americans are, statistically speaking, losing out.

Then, we can talk about why so many black children are growing up fatherless, black men are filling prisons, and black students are dropping out of college. What we need to do to address problems that stunt many black lives are things we need to do anyway, things we would need to do if everyone in America were green with purple spots. There aren't "necessary evils" here.

So, stuff that needs a fixin': Education. This is where the CalPundit and I agree, as I said. We probably disagree on how to do this. I've given my various pitches for vouchers many a time, though I don't think that they're magic bullets. I could talk more about this--there's all kinds of fun stuff going on in educational technology, for instance, potentially super-exciting stuff--but I'm tired and you probably already have your own pet plan to fix the schools. I do think competition is key; public school choice is one option, not a stellar one but better than nothing. I've heard very mixed things about charter schools; I tend to be skeptical of them because it seems like charter school plans are attempts to build a whole new school system from scratch very fast, rather than integrating students into existing and slowly-growing private schools a la vouchers. Public report cards for schools are something I'm hopeful about--adding transparency and accountability to the system. I hope all of us can agree that the Children's Scholarship Fund is a pretty basic, immediate way to help, regardless of policy differences.

Marriage. This is hard, obviously--for everybody, of every race. There are ways to do good at many levels: Get out the word, culturally, that marriage is the best way to raise a kid; that the best way to care for your kids is to love their mother; that sex can wait. Women need to know that they can require more from a man before they sleep with him; men need to know that they can live up to a higher standard. With the women I counsel, generally, the woman wants to get married eventually or is at least willing to consider it, but she isn't making the kinds of choices that will prepare her for a good marriage decision. Often, as Jennifer Hamer discussed in her study of black non-custodial fathers, men want to meet a higher standard for love and fatherhood. They want to be heroes, just as women want to make good marriages. But there's generally not a lot of realistic sense of how one can get from point A ("I'm in high school and there's this awesome, funny guy I met at Union Station, he's six years older than me..."/"I'm taking care of my baby and my baby's mama but I'm with this other girl now...") to point B (married, kids, basically happy). Higher standards on both ends of the gender game are key.

On a personal level, mentoring is also key; it's kind of shocking the way some of the women I've counseled have no one to encourage or guide them as they seek to live godly lives and/or make good decisions about men. So, if you want to do something about this, seek out ways (church groups, youth centers, Big Brothers/Sisters, pregnancy center parenting classes, Mentor Moms programs) you can be a guide.

Finally, on the "macro" level, we can have all kinds of arguments about the ways in which the structure of welfare benefits do or don't affect family structure; I think welfare makes possible a kids-no-husband lifestyle that's very obviously attractive in the short run but damaging in the long run, but for the moment my view isn't important. What's important is that we agree to analyze welfare, employment, job-training, and inner-city economic development policies with an understanding that these policies' effects on marriage are crucially important.

End the Drug War. Man, I could write a book about this item, but for the moment I'll just say: Prisons make jobs in rural districts and empty cities of fathers and workers. There's an incentive structure in which the people benefiting economically from prison expansion are culturally very different and geographically often distant from the people being imprisoned. This fairly obviously reduces the incentives to figure out whether our drug policies are insanely stringent and whether we're doing harm to prisoners and their communities by locking up nonviolent drug offenders. William Raspberry has pointed out that the Drug War has created neighborhoods where going to prison is common--almost a rite of passage--rather than unusual and stigmatized. Prohibition breeds thugs and thug culture; it wrecks offenders' employability; it likely leads to increased drug potency; it seriously messes up the economic incentives for poor people. Here, why don't I just give you this Reason piece on "Battlefield Conversions" and you can see for yourself? Oh, and did I mention, the people adversely affected by the Drug War, whether because they're nonviolent drug criminals or because they live in the neighborhoods devastated by the black market, are disproportionately likely to be black.

Entrepreneurship--more on this below.

And finally, we need to seek out and laud the people who are doing things right. Praise families who stick together despite tough times. Honor people who create new businesses, devote themselves to teaching sixth-graders, even--hey, it couldn't hurt--become National Security Advisors and Supreme Court justices. (Kind of obviously, you don't have to agree with Rice or Thomas to respect their achievements.) Praise people who overcome the odds, teach us what's possible, and thereby expand our imaginations.
posted by Eve at 1:43 AM

 
Because imagination is key, as Shelby Steele said. Here are two areas where we can and must address contemporary failures of imagination:

1) Steele was talking about white people's ability or inability to imagine ourselves as members of another race--the inability, for example, to hear how Trent Lott's birthday buffoonery might sound to us if we were black. This is tricky, of course, because to some extent it violates the "focus on individuals, not symbols" rule. But in fact we violate this rule all the time, and we have to in order to respect others as individuals. This is because we have to make guesses, judgments, and assumptions about who other people are and what they want. Manners, for example, do not require us to guess that Aunt Philippa will pitch a hissy fit if you admire her new baby (she thinks it only encourages him). Manners instead require us to keep in mind what new parents usually need and want--"Oh, what a lovely child!" for a plump li'l dumpling, "She's so active!" for a screamer, and "What a sweet little dear" for a completely zonked-out, nondescript sleeping kid. If those innocuous phrases make Aunt Philippa hit the roof, we're not to blame, even though we have, objectively, failed to imagine ourselves in her (probably pinching) shoes. To bring this back to race, it's not treating black people as "numinous Negroes" to say that Lott's words sounded much more egregious to black listeners than they did to many well-meaning but excuse-minded whites, and that it's worthwhile to ask why that discrepancy emerged. Our job is not to cultivate "sensitivity" but to cultivate manners, charity, and imagination.

One of the most important ways to enhance white people's "racial imaginations"--and note that this too is something we should do anyway!--is to fully incorporate black history into American history. I wrote here about the extraordinary impact America's black minority has had; and here I wrote about the ways in which Afrocentric lessons of black heroism can teach lessons that transcend color lines. Teaching American history without stirring accounts of non-white heroes and cultures is irresponsible as well as divisive. It's just bad history. But similarly, overemphasizing small-time players in the American drama simply because they were members of an "underrepresented" race is misleading and will bore children, who can generally tell when they're being asked to eat their brussels sprouts and when they're being taught something inspiring. Learning that Rosa Marquez battled against the odds to form Local 122 of the Wig and Mustache Manufacturers' Union is unlikely to capture kids' imaginations; and, because elementary school is (thank God) finite, Marquez may squeeze out larger issues like the complex betrayals and imprudences and hopes of Reconstruction. (Here's a great essay from Christopher Hitchens on teaching American history, which touches tangentially on these issues.)

"Affirmative action" history doesn't work. It's annoying in math texts, where every single woman who ever discovered anything about math gets her own little shrine. But it's worst of all in literature. After all, Rosa Marquez probably did a lot of genuinely interesting things, even if they're not the most necessary things for kids to learn. But when bad books are shoved on kids because they feature Diverse protagonists, imaginations are shuttered, not opened. This is important because literature is at least equal to history in importance when it comes to helping us imagine one another and respond to one another with charity. I'm not pushing a Richard Rorty-like line, "reading makes you nice!"--I'm saying that if we already want to respond charitably to one another, it is useful to get a sense of how people very different from us think, and literature is one of the best ways of doing this. (Argh, I hate talking about art in this utilitarian fashion; I do think what I'm saying is true, and it's important, but it still feels unnatural to talk about the Uses of Enchantment.)

Using literature to fuel kids' charity and imagination doesn't even require books with racially-diverse "casts"--I would guess that it's not at all hard to intuit good responses to (say) your town's only Hispanic family from Dogsbody or Witch Week. But since there already are wonderful books by and about people of all different races, the "lessons" can be learned silently and with pleasure, rather than explicitly in some hideously painful school diversity day. A white girl who grew up on Honey, I Love, "Best Friends," and Walter Dean Myers is more likely to be able to treat black people as individuals rather than as symbols. The more different images and stories she sees, the more likely that is. I tend to be very against explicit attempts to inculcate "sensitivity" because they do emphasize the symbolic and "numinous" over the personal, individual, actual, vivid, unaccountable, unavoidable, honest, and funny.
posted by Eve at 1:43 AM

 
2) But let's not pretend that only white people have imaginations! Everyone needs a greater sense of what's possible. This came up in the stuff above about marriage; now let's apply it to entrepreneurship. This is why stories like the Pizza-Ria! kids ("It's fresh! It's good! It's from the 'hood") are so important--they spark the imagination. While we're on the subject of kids' books, can I recommend The Toothpaste Millionaire? TTM tells the story of two friends who realize that they can make a better and cheaper toothpaste. It's such a fun book, light and adventurous--and it'll even teach you how many are in a gross!

The lesson? Entrepreneurship is in large part an act of imagination.

It's a journalistic kind of imagination: Just as journalists seek the unexplored angle on a story, so entrepreneurs seek the unfilled niche in an economy. But if people believe that there are no unfilled niches, if they don't believe they have the resources to fill them, if they're not connected to other people who have taken the leap of imagination in the past, if they're ridiculed for even trying to find the entrepreneurial angle... then imagination, and the economy of their community, is stifled.

(Keep in mind that "entrepreneurship," here, is not just about opening businesses. It's about finding jobs in already-existing businesses, finding innovative ways to use one's skills, figuring out where you want to be in five years and how to get there. And this kind of imagination operates in the non-profit sector, too: I think some of the stuff I'm trying to do now at the pregnancy center is the result of looking through an entrepreneurial lens, seeing the places where the center could be filling some niches but currently doesn't--for example, we don't really have a lot to offer women with negative pregnancy tests who nonetheless need mentoring and support. I'm trying to start a program--more on this later, if it gets off the ground--to fill that niche.)

How to foster this kind of imagination? I can think of a couple of things off the bat: Have business owners come to schools, speak with kids, mentor kids. If you're a teacher: Are there any students who have business leanings or skills? Do they want to start a club? A friend from college spent some time homeless, went to community college (I think--hope I'm remembering the trajectory right here), spent time poor, ultimately transferred to and graduated from Yale. He was on fire with belief that people could do more than we think we can. He spoke with local high-school students, showed them how to budget, how many things they could do even with a very low cash flow.

Obviously not every school will be able to find a guy like him. But schools can be places where students are able to find--if they're willing--inspiration, practical advice, and, crucially, networking. Community centers are the other obvious place to do this--start a group of business leaders, place ads in the neighborhood papers, connect people with ideas to people with experience.

Then there's money. Elmseed, a product of my own alma mater, is working to make microlending successful in the US. Of course, licensing and other regulations make opening a small business prohibitively expensive or difficult for a lot of people. Large businesses don't care so much about regulation--medium-large ones can eat the cost, supersized ones can finagle the regs so that the rules actually favor them--but small-timers have neither money nor pull. So cutting red tape, making it easier and cheaper to start a business, should be a major priority for city governments--instead of trying to lure big outside investors with huge tax incentives.

And, obviously, to return to race-specific matters, the black entrepreneurial imagination is up against pressures not to "act white." This is the element of the problem that gets the most discussion, although (because?) it's the aspect that outsiders can affect the least. There have been heartbreaking reports from John McWhorter (scroll down) and many others about the damage done by peer pressure to stupidize oneself. There's not a lot I can do about pressure not to "act white"--who would listen to me? Nobody outside thug culture, or oppositional culture, can effectively criticize it: All condemnation, even from black adults, just reinforces the cool of the pose.

Thus the only strategy that I can see directly attacking pressure not to "act white" is the "hard facts" approach: Look, you can do whatever you want with your life, but realize that you're playing right into the hands of the people who want you to fail. If you're OK with that, then sure, don't learn to speak standard English. Wear gang clothes. Get bad grades. But know that you're doing just what They want you to do.

In other words, point out that the seemingly oppositional stance is just a kind of reverse flattery. It still takes its cues from the mainstream white world, it still emphasizes conformity over individuality, it's just that it's a photo-negative of the mainstream's values. (Those who have done their time in the punk scene will readily see that this is not a phenomenon unique to black city kids.)

D-Squared Digest argues that pressure not to "act white" occurs "Because culture is history, and the history of black people in America is one which has given them no reason at all to trust white people." Maybe--but you know, it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is how to get rid of the stifling pressure. The biggest thing people who neither attend nor work in elementary and secondary schools can do is provide hope that there's a point to all the hard work it takes to do what's right. Make it easier for kids to realistically imagine success--not wild financial success, which is okay but whatever, but the success of building a good life, providing for a family, making a good marriage. (I think this can be done without demonizing people who don't make it.)

Did I mention that this is something we should do anyway?

So that's my plan. That's where I place my hopes.
posted by Eve at 1:42 AM

 
RACE VIIIa: JANE GALT STEPS INTO THE RING: More on the employment study.
posted by Eve at 5:24 PM

 
RACE VIII: (MORE) CRITICISM OF THAT EMPLOYMENT STUDY: I gave a long, rambly description of a recent study attempting to measure anti-black discrimination in employment, here. Reader John Brewer thinks I was way too easy on the study; he makes a lot of good points. Everything that follows is by him.

It is difficult to take this study seriously, even by the standards of what passes for publishable social-science research. (There is also an interesting-at-least-to-me lurking question about the morality of systematically lying to people who do not know that they are being used as unpaid subjects for a social-science experiment. What did they say to the employers who invited someone in for an interview? "Sorry, I'm not real, I'm just an invention of some academics who were hoping to catch you being racist"?)

Using people with exotic-sounding names as a proxy for the entire universe of black potential job applicants is both bizarre and, I would think, potentially somewhat insulting to the non-exotically-named majority of the black population. What would you think of someone who ran a study using live "tester" applicants with purportedly identical credentials, 10 blacks and 10 whites, but then made sure that all of the black applicants had dreadlocks (or wore dashikis, or something equivalently "ethnic," to their interviews) but that all of the white applicants had
"normal" hairstyles and/or clothing? Would you think it plausible to attribute any statistical difference in the results of the interviews to "racism" in the first instance? (Alternatively, what if they classified any applicant wearing a suit as "white" even if he was, in fact, black, and somehow structured the interviews so that the interviewer could see the clothes but not the skin? Their study treats, e.g., the late Jam Master Jay as having a stereotypically "white" name, which seems implausible. With Jam Master Brendan, maybe they'd have a point.)

[He later added (sorry for caps, I don't have time to retype this):] THE QUESTION IS WHETHER THEIR "WHITE" NAMES ARE ACTUALLY "PERCEIVED" AS BEING WHITE, OR WHETHER IT'S AN INTERESTING STATISTICAL FACT THAT DOES NOT ACTUALLY AFFECT THE PERCEPTIONS OF THE RESUME-REVIEWER. NOTE THAT THEY STRUCK CERTAIN NAMES THAT WERE STATISTICALLY LIKELY TO BE BLACK (JEROME AND MAURICE, E.G.) BECAUSE THEY THOUGHT THEY WOULDN'T BE PERCEIVED AS SUCH BY THOSE EVALUATING THE RESUMES. THE SAME PROBLEM SHOULD HAVE, I THINK, LED THEM TO STRIKE VIRTUALLY THEIR ENTIRE LIST OF "WHITE" NAMES. WITH THE EXCEPTION OF BRENDAN AND MAYBE GEOFFREY (SPELLED THAT WAY VS. JEFFREY) NONE OF THEIR WHITE NAMES STRUCK ME AS "PERCEPTUALLY" WHITE, IN THE SENSE THAT IT WOULD SEEM ODD, NOTEWORTHY OR COMICAL TO COME ACROSS A BLACK PERSON BEARING THEM, WHILE IT WOULD BE ODD ETC. TO RUN INTO A WHITE (BUT NON-ARAB) AISHA. I THINK THE ONLY WAY YOU COULD EFFECTIVELY COME UP WITH "PERCEPTUALLY WHITE" NAMES WOULD BE TO USE OVERTLY ETHNIC NAMES (LUDMILLA, SVEN, ETC.). I THINK BRENDAN (AS OPPOSED TO THE YUPPIE FAVORITE BRANDON) IS STILL LARGELY AN ETHNIC NAME (I.E. I CANNOT OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD THINK OF A NON-IRISH BRENDAN WHEREAS I CAN IMMEDIATELY THINK OF A BLACK TODD).

THUS, I APPRECIATE WHAT THEY WERE TRYING TO DO IN TERMS OF TRYING TO GENERATE NAMES THAT WOULD CONNOTE RACE, I JUST DON'T THINK THEY DID IT VERY WELL AND IT MAY BE IMPOSSIBLE TO DO (UNLESS YOU WANT TO COMPARE "ETHNIC" WHITES TO BLACKS RATHER THAN "REGULAR" WHITES TO BLACKS). THAT IS, I WOULD SAY, A FEATURE RATHER THAN A BUG. ON THE WHOLE (AND WITH NO DISRESPECT TO THE LAKISHAS AMONG US) THE FACT THAT MOST AMERICAN BLACKS (AND AN EVEN GREATER MAJORITY OF THOSE BORN PRIOR TO THE LAST FEW
DECADES) HAVE NAMES WHICH COULD BE BORNE BY "REGULAR" AMERICAN WHITES WITHOUT IT SEEMING WEIRD IS A HELPFUL REMINDER THAT WE AND THEY HAVE A COMMON CULTURE AND A COMMON HISTORY WHICH CANNOT BE REDUCED SIMPLY TO AN IMPOSITION BY US ON THEM (WHICH WOULD DENY WHAT WE HAVE RECEIVED IN RETURN). WHITES AS WELL AS BLACKS CAN GIVE THEIR KIDS THE CHRISTIAN NAMES BORNE BY BENJAMIN BANNEKER, HARRIET TUBMAN, ETC. ETC. IF YOU WOULD PREFER HOLLYWOOD CELEBRITIES TO HISTORICAL ACHIEVERS, YOU COULD E.G. NAME YOUR SON AFTER WESLEY SNIPES (WHO COMPLETES THE BLACK SHOWBIZ PROTESTANT BOYS' NAME TRIFECTA WITH CALVIN BROADUS AND LUTHER VANDROSS).

THE QUESTION IS WHETHER THE SIGNIFICANT NUMBER OF BLACKS WITH SUCH [distinctively black] NAMES ARE A RANDOM SAMPLE / FAIR CROSS-SECTION OF THE BLACK COMMUNITY OR WHETHER, ON AVERAGE WITH LOTS OF INDIVIDUAL COUNTEREXAMPLES, THEY HAVE A DIFFERENT PROFILE (EITHER IN REALITY OR IN PERCEPTION). IF THE LATTER, THE REST OF THE POPULATION WOULD BE JUSTIFIED IN BEING ANNOYED THAT STATEMENTS ABOUT THAT SUBGROUP AND HOW SOCIETY DEALT WITH THAT SUBGROUP WERE BEING ATTRIBUTED TO THE REST OF THEM. I WOULD BE ANNOYED IF SOMEONE DID A SURVEY OF FANS AT A NASCAR RACE AND REPRESENTED IT AS INDICATIVE OF THE BELIEFS OR EXPERIENCES OF "WHITE MALE REPUBLICAN CHRISTIANS" EVEN THOUGH (AS A NON-NASCAR-RACE-ATTENDING WMRC) I DON'T THINK IT'S "BAD" TO BE A NASCAR FAN. THE MOST INTERESTING QUESTION, I SUPPOSE, IS WHETHER THE BLACK PARENTS WHO GIVE THEIR KIDS THESE KIND OF NAMES SYSTEMATICALLY DIFFER FROM BLACK PARENTS WHO GIVE THEIR KIDS "REGULAR" NAMES IN WAYS THAT ARE NOT AS EASY TO MEASURE AS INCOME, EDUCATION LEVEL, AND MARITAL STATUS -- IN PARTICULAR, IN ATTITUDES TOWARD ASSIMILATION/INTEGRATION VERSUS SEPARATISM/NATIONALISM. FOLLOWUP QUESTION IS WHETHER ANY SUCH DIFFERENT ATTITUDES LEAD TO MEASURABLE DIFFERENCES IN HOW THE KIDS ARE LIVING THEIR LIVES TWO OR THREE DECADES DOWN THE ROAD.

To make an even more basic criticism, it is not clear to me that the results show any sort of discrimination (even what I might call normal-versus-weird discrimination rather than white-versus-black discrimination). Table 3 categorizes 87.37% of the employers as showing "equal treatment" with 8.87% "favoring" whites and 3.76% "favoring" blacks. One would need to know more about statistics than I do to know how likely the gap between the latter two numbers is meaningful rather than noise. One can also report the same results in different fashions: An alternative headline could be: "Study shows that 57% of all employers who extended callback invitations to any applicants included at least one black applicant in the group of applicants extended such invitations."

[later:] I'M NOT SURE THE 57% STAT IS MEANINGFUL. BUT I'M NOT SURE IF ANY OF THEIR STATS ARE MEANINGFUL. IF YOU HAD AN APPLICANT POOL THAT WAS 30% BLACK AND BLACKS AND WHITES WERE EQUALLY QUALIFIED, LACK OF ANY BLACKS IN THE LAST 100 HIRES IS PLAUSIBLE STATISTICAL EVIDENCE OF DISCRIMINATION. HIRING 28 OR 29 RATHER THAN EXACTLY 30 IS NOT. WHERE IN BETWEEN ZERO AND 28 THE RESULT BECOMES SUFFICIENTLY STATISTICALLY UNLIKELY AS THE RESULT OF RANDOM SELECTION TO SUPPORT A REASONABLE INFERENCE THAT SOMETHING ELSE IS GOING ON, I DON'T KNOW, BUT THERE ARE MATHEMATICAL WAYS OF APPROACHING THAT QUESTION WITH SOME DEGREE OF RIGOR. I LIKEWISE DON'T KNOW WHAT THE EQUIVALENT DEGREE OF DEVIATION FROM PERFECT EQUALITY THAT SUGGESTS SOMETHING OTHER THAN RANDOMNESS WOULD BE IN THEIR EXPERIMENT. I WOULD FEEL BETTER IF THEY HAD A FOOTNOTE WITH SOME INCOMPREHENSIBLE FORMULA IN IT THAT ADDRESSED THIS ISSUE.

I am struck by the fact that the gaps across the "races" seem to be significantly smaller than some of the gaps within the groups. E.g. Brads got more than twice as many callbacks as Neils. I presume that either sheer randomness or some explanation other than systematic anti-Neil (and/or pro-Brad) discrimination likely accounts for this. I therefore see no immediate reason to presume that racism is the most likely explanation for the smaller gaps between the "races." Note also that, e.g., while Emily does better than Lakisha she does worse than Latoya and Latonya. The title of the study raises the first comparison but not the second and third.

Even assuming the differences they show are statistically meaningful evidence of some kind of discrimination, I think one would want to seriously consider normal-name-versus-weird-name bias as an equally plausible
hypothesis. Perhaps there is no prior research or scholarly literature on the subject, but it would seem pretty easy to construct similar experiments without a racial subtext. For example, one could compare Bretts, Todds etc. with weird-but-presumptively-white names (Percy, Thurston, Winifred, Cletus, Jethro, Merle, Adrian, Iain, & Nigel -- to pick three names each that are exotic in three different ways). One could also test a different hypothesis in other ethnic contexts by testing contrasting pairs of what might be called assimilation-oriented versus non-assimilation-oriented names (I think this is a reasonably polite way to phrase the "ghetto culture" point): Jason Goldstein v. Shlomo Goldstein; Brandon Lopez v. Raul Lopez; Joseph Martino v. Giuseppe Martino. Finally, one could test a generational-novelty hypothesis by seeing how Ashleys, Brittanies & Kylas do when compared to similarly-qualified peers who have more traditional names. (The key to the hypothesis here is
that the hiring decisionmaker may be a decade or two older than the applicants and discriminate at the margin, perhaps subconsciously, against names that were not extant in his/her own cohort. Most of the "black" names they used only came into use for kids born in the 70's -- as can be confirmed both by the babyname statistics on the social security administration's website and a look at the black kids in my high school yearbook, who were born circa '65.).

I would not be surprised if any of the studies I have just suggested detected a small but perceptible bias -- certainly a bias of the same statistical magnitude as that ascribed to "white" versus "black" names -- in favor of "normal" versus "weird" names in resume evaluation. Unless such studies were conducted and affirmatively demonstrated the absence of any such effect, I would not take this study seriously as a demonstration of racism rather than a bias in favor of normality.

One can, I suppose, argue that discrimination against dreadlock and dashiki-wearers (and thus a fortiorari discrimination against the Afrocentrically-named) is just as immoral as discrimination against black skin -- this is the shift from the rhetoric of colorblindness to the rhetoric of multiculturalism. Saying that a non-celebrity Calvin Broadus would be marginally more likely to get an entry-level job at a convenience store by submitting a resume with that name rather than a resume with his assumed name (Snoop Dogg) would, on this account, be an indictment of a racist society in which blacks can succeed only by denying or disguising their essential Kwanzaaness and adopting the outward forms of the oppressors' society. Whether or not one agrees with this, the problem of discrimination against black skin per se has been bad enough in the past that it would be helpful to have non-bogus and non-loaded data on the extent to which it has or has not been surpassed. This study is
not, in that regard, helpful.
posted by Eve at 5:02 PM

 
HAVE YOU LIVED? It's been a rough week: First, I fail a Turing test, and now the Washington Post tells me I haven't lived. They're running a series, "You Haven't Lived Unless...", spotlighting various DC-area hidden treasures. I've only done seven or maybe eight of the things (National Aquarium--I think? Maybe I'm confusing it with the more famous Baltimore Aquarium?, watched the Supreme Court, Mall at night--this one really is an excellent choice, cherry blossoms, National Cathedral, horses in Rock Creek Park, Sugarloaf Mountain, and I can't remember if I've actually ridden the carousel at Glen Echo or just heard about it), thus I haven't lived. The series has the expected Post skew toward suburban and fairly standard-issue delights, but it should still be a source of interesting ideas for getaways and fun weekend detours. My own best-of-the-city list is here.

(Post link via E-Pression.)
posted by Eve at 1:15 PM

 
O TEMPORA, ETC. This post about blogging seems distinctly dated, as if June were a long time ago. Faster, pussycat, etc.

"Due primarily to cultural reasons, but partly to technological innovations, blogs tend to be less 'team-player'ish, less willing to bury inconvenient stories or interpretations, than the major media. I stress that this is only a tendency, not a certainty. ...Partly, this greater tendency to acknowledge what 'the other guys' get right occurs simply because blogs have less credibility than mainstream media. The New York Times, rightly or wrongly, enjoys a presumption that it will not bury the facts or report only half the story. A blogger has to earn his readers' trust, and one major way of doing that is by refusing to play partisan games. As some blogs become more popular, and attain that presumption of credibility, I expect some of the more popular ones will stop bothering to respond fairly and accurately to the opposition; to some extent that's already happening."

I was also wrong about comments boxes as anti-partisan-polarization devices. Very, very wrong. That's one reason I never bothered trying to tack comments onto this site, actually--most people's comments boxes seem to become fight pits.

Anyway, despite my sunshiney tone in the June post, I think I was right about what blogging is when it's at its best.
posted by Eve at 1:51 AM

 
TEN BEST BOOKS I READ IN 2002: Sabbath's Theater; Confessions (Augustine); Notes from Underground; Sweet Smell of Success; Death in Midsummer; Real Choices: Listening to Women, Finding Alternatives to Abortion; Love in the Western World; The Counterlife; The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror; Republics Ancient and Modern, vol. III: Inventions of Prudence: Constituting the American Regime

Runner-Up: Miss Manners' Basic Training: The Right Thing to Say

FIVE BEST MOVIES I SAW IN 2002: The Bat Whispers; On the Waterfront; Network; High Noon; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

You'll notice that I really, really, really don't read or watch new stuff. Mainly this is because there is so much terrific old stuff to catch up on; but I do feel the lack. I wish there were authors or moviemakers who made me so excited that I eagerly scanned the publishing/entertainment news hoping to find that they were coming out with a new work. On the other hand, the last two authors I did that for were Thomas Harris and Donna Tartt, and what I got in return for my anticipation was the execrable Hannibal and the I-haven't-read-it-because-it-looks-very-lame Little Friend. Meh.
posted by Eve at 1:45 AM

 
If I had another penny
I would buy another gill
I would make the piper play
"The Bonny Lads of Blogwatch Hill"...

Camassia asks the old question: "Oh, Loving Madman! was it not enough for Thee to become Incarnate, that Thou must also die?"

Answers are requested.

On a rather different level, the Cranky Professor has some suggestions for people buying gifts for children.

In Lame Watch news, Arthur Silber is furling his blog-flag, at least temporarily. Boo, hiss. However, the financial pressures he faces are ones that have weighed heavily over at this little nook of blogtopia as well, so I can't hardly blame him really. At some point I will give him my case against "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" though. Maybe it will bait him back to blogging.

And in the Dept. of Hail and Farewell, Ginger Stampley's back--it's two, two, two blogs in one!

...Geordie Johnson he had a pig
He hit with a shovel and it danced a jig
All the way to Walker Shore
To the tune of "Elsie Marley"....
posted by Eve at 1:11 AM

 
POETRY WEDNESDAY-ISH: Via Tenelux, W.H. Auden's "O Tell Me the Truth About Love":

Some say that love's a little boy,
And some say it's a bird,
Some say it makes the world go round,
And some say that's absurd,
And when I asked the man next-door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn't do.

Does it look like a pair of pajamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does it's odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.

Our history books refer to it
In cryptic little notes,
It's quite a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats;
I've found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides,
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway-guides.

Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian,
Or boom like a military band?
Could one give a first-rate imitation
On a saw or a Steinway Grand?
Is its singing at parties a riot?
Does it only like Classical stuff?
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?
O tell me the truth about love.

I looked inside the summer-house;
it wasn't ever there:
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead,
And Brighton's bracing air.
I don't know what the blackbird sang,
Or what the tulip said;
But it wasn't in the chicken-run,
Or underneath the bed.

Can it pull extraordinary faces?
Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all its time at the races,
Or fiddling with pieces of string?
Has it views of its own about money?
Does it think Patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my shoes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.
posted by Eve at 8:25 PM

 
SLEEPY. Also dopey, but not especially grumpy. The main thing I had to do today took MUCH longer than I'd thought it would, plus I woke up early, went back to sleep, and promptly overslept, so basically today slipped completely out of my hands. New Year's was fun (Shamed taught me and Russo to play stud poker; we watched William Shatner host a "One-Hit Wonders" countdown, super fun; we ate cookies, drank champagne, argued about war, generally kicked up a fuss). Tomorrow I'll complete the Race Series, plus, if I have time, I'll post some of the many other things that are backed up in the queue: Santa--The Final Conflict; this life vs. the next; good charities; Tolkien and happy endings; and DRAG QUEEN CONTEST RESULTS!!!

For now, Noli Irritare Leones has a good post on cloning.
posted by Eve at 8:22 PM