Author: lorraine

Salman Rushdie has an op-ed today on the “shame” that is assigned to women who are raped. He’s talking specifically about cases in Pakistan and India, but here in the States, we all know the statistics about the number of rapes that go unreported, and the shame that gets attached to rape here.

I want to try to tease out the source of this shame, and I think the first thing to sort out is the difference between “guilt,” and “shame.” Guilt is the internal barometer that tells us that our individual moral codes have been violated by something we have done. Shame is an external thing–it is given to us by our culture that tells us we should feel badly about something. Often, that manifests itself as guilt, even if we have done nothing wrong, and there, in that intersection, it gets confused. But shame begins as an imposition upon us.

There’s a temptation to go off on a riff about Marx, Levi-Strauss, and Irigaray and the “fetish,” but I want to leave that alone. Going there will take me into my head and away from my heart, and I’m trying to understand, on a visceral level, why men, apparently, feel such deep shame (or is it guilt?) when the women in their community are raped. And how, rather than taking on those feelings themselves, they project them on to the victim.

I’m about to engage in an essentialist argument, I think. I’m not an essentialist, but sometimes, going back to these archetypes helps me to try to understand seemingly unexplainable things. If you’re up for a thought experiment, continue reading.
I have tried to write about this before, but I come back repeatedly to trying to understand what happens when a man has sex with a woman. I know what it feels like as a heterosexual woman to be penetrated, but I’m trying to understand what I would feel if the roles were reversed. If I were the one inserting part of my body into another’s. And not just any part. Not a finger, but a penis.

If a man rapes a woman, he is using his penis as a weapon. But what if he is making love to a woman? Is there surrender there?  
What is it for a man to surrender to a woman? Is it to imagine what it is to be the glove, rather than the hand. To be the sheath. That is what vagina means, you know. Sheath. From the Latin. I find it fascinating that a part of the female body, the canal through which women bring forth new life, the first journey we experience as human beings–sliding through a fleshy tunnel into the light and cold–that the name for that conduit is not related to its function in birth, but rather, bears the name of a holder of a weapon. A scabbard–the covering in which you insert your sword.

Is this what men think of their penises as? Weapons? Swords? But a sheath is where you keep your knife to keep it safe, to keep it when you’re not using it for violence. It’s a place for it to rest until the next time it’s needed. When you place your sword inside its sheath, you’ve put down your weapon, you’ve disarmed yourself, you’ve made yourself vulnerable. You’ve surrendered.

Julia Kristeva has written that the “abject,” literally, the things we “throw away” from ourselves, the things we attach the most disgust to, are the things that show to us that our bodies are not self-contained units. Piss. Shit. Vomit. Tears. The fluid that leaks from our bodies, that reminds us that we are not immortal, solid, that we will eventually dissolve, rot, become one with the earth again.

For women, we are reminded every month that we are fluid. We bleed. When we give birth, we open up, send new life out into the world. We feed children with the fluid from our breasts. When we have sex, we are penetrated. And, we are fluid. When we are fully aroused, we leak copious amounts of fluid; it is the condition that makes a pleasurable penetration possible. When we have sex, we smear our lovers with that fluid; when he is at his most vulnerable, when he climaxes, he leaks fluid, too. Men leave their fluid inside women. What happens if another man has contact with some other man’s fluid?

Fluidity is openness. Fluidity is vulnerability. Fluidity is the abject. Fluidity brings shame.

Here, I’m speaking of heterosexual sex. But I think at the heart of this shame is wrapped up in penetrability and fluid. Thus, male homosexuality is implicated here, too.

The notion that a rape victim is “unclean,” then, is about the possibility that any  man who has sex with her afterwards will be exposed to another man’s fluids. It’s a crude argument, and yet, I think there’s some truth to it. What do you think?

 Cross posted at Culture Kitchen

W.H. Auden
September 1, 1939

An excerpt:

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
‘I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,’
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

My mother flew to England earlier this week to take care of my grandmother. They’re north of Manchester, so this morning, I know they’re safe. Nevertheless, I’m angrier than hell this morning, and I’m trying to sort out my feelings.

My grandmother was born during World War I, lost her father in the trenches of France when she was a babe, lost her mother when she was a child. She lived through World War II, with its food privations, with the bombings of the industrial North by the Luftwaffe. She lived through the Post-War depression, was left a widow when my grandfather died at the age of 50, leaving her with two children at home. She helped raise me when my parents, who were 17 and 21 when I was born, lived with her while my father went to school to earn his degree and my mother worked. She lived through the Thatcher years, which devastated the North. And now, she’s 89, and Tony Blair, with his ill-considered support of George Bush, has brought the Iraq War home to England’s shores. To the heart of its London Tube system. Bastard.
Yes. I know it was the terrorists who blew up the Tube system. Madrid last year, London today. If it turns out that it was Al Qaeda, then it’s notice to the “coalition” governments that terrorists will punish the citizens of those countries. Of course, ironically, Al Qaeda didn’t give a shit about Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Osama Bin Laden and Hussein were enemies, not friends. But we created a situation where Al Quaeda is now in Iraq, and so we are reaping what men like George Bush and Tony Blair have sown.

What will Blair say to the families of the dead today? “Sorry, my bad?” No. I don’t expect so. I expect it will be some canned speech about “standing firm in the face of terrorism.” It will be the same empty words he offers the families of the soldiers he has sent to their deaths. He will not see his part in what happened today. The terrorists are responsible for the deaths of innocent people today. I am not absolving them in any way of their crimes. I am a pacifist, but today, I am unbelievably angry at the evil behind planting bombs on commuter trains and buses knowing that those bombs would rip bodies apart. But Mr. Blair, you invited those terrorists into your country when you supported George Bush. You could have said, “No.” You had the fucking evidence in the Downing Street Memos that this was a mistake. No. Not a mistake. A lie. A plan by an axis of evil in Washington DC to wage war on a country based on lies. And you did nothing. You said nothing.

There are people dead in London today, Mr. Blair. And what is to be done now?

An initiative will be launched today to nudge policymakers away from seeing successful book lending and the encouragement of reading as the prime goals of Britain’s public library service.

Instead the emphasis should shift to whether libraries help governments promote their wider health, educational and social objectives.

Huh?

When I was a kid, we moved 11 times in 10 years. Each year, we’d land, fresh in some town where I knew nobody, usually in the middle of summer, and those long summer months with nothing to do would stretch before me. Because we moved so often, my mother was the anti-packrat. I mean, she kept nothing if it could be helped. We were not a family that schlepped boxes and boxes of books from state to state.

But, my mother loved to read. So, one of the first things we would do in a new town is find the library. As soon as we had received our first piece of mail (proof of our home address), my brothers, mother, and I would walk (my mother didn’t drive) to the library and sign up for cards. Once I had access to books, I could survive another summer by myself. Curled up on a couch, I would plough through several books a week, lost in worlds of others’ making, and distracted from the distress of knowing that I faced another “first” day of school where I would be the “new kid.”

I understand that libraries are not getting the usage they once did. But the plan in Great Britain to turn libraries into clearinghouses of government information, to turn the libraries themselves into places of indoctrination–well that gives me the creeps.

It’s bad enough here in the U.S., where until recently, library records were the super-secret decoding ring of the Patriot Act. The USA has a proud history of censoring what can and cannot go into a library. From the Comstock Laws, which banned “obscene” material (and by obscene, we mean material that contained information about contraceptives) from the mails and thus, distribution, to the regular outbreaks of community hysteria about debauchery in the stacks, libraries have found themselves the battleground for the suppression of dangerous ideas.

But access to ideas is the first principle of education. Education includes exposure to things outside your ken. And I spent summers reading everything from Roald Dahl novels to biographies of queens to Judy Blume to the history of science and beyond. I didn’t need to spend a lot of time in the real world. By the time I was 12, I had seen more of the United States than most adults. I needed books, not more hours in a moving van.

Libraries were my theme parks. And while we obsess that children no longer read because they’re too busy playing video games, truth is, there are a lot of kids–and adults–out there for whom libraries are the Midway the Roller Coaster and the Tunnel of Love all rolled into one.

The answer to rejuvenating libraries is not to turn them into government promotion centers. Libraries will be relevant again when education is allowed to do what it does best. Not to breed career-track automatons, but to awaken the hunger for self. The library fed me. I grew fat on its riches. I would have starved to death in an indoctrination camp.

Cross posted at Menstruating She Devils

Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote the following essay. It’s more of a screed, or a confession, an examination of where my life was two years after my divorce. Some of it is self-indulgent, defensive, but I have chosen not to edit it because it was who I was at the time of the writing.

In part ii, things have changed considerably (and I’ll post that tomorrow). As the United States celebrates its 229th anniversary of its divorce from Britain, I wonder what it would write? I fear it would be more than self-indulgent; it would be dangerously delusional and arrogant. Experience has changed me; I’d like to think it’s made me wiser, more open, more willing to engage others on their terms and not impose my own. Will I live to see a more mature nation on one of its upcoming birthdays?

My Own Worst Nightmare

I am a few days past my 40th birthday, out of work, a writer who can’t seem to get published recently, a mother who doesn’t have custody of her children, a woman who frequently does not eat meals because she is completely out of money. May I mention my two advanced college degrees? May I mention my feminist faith in self-sufficiency? May I mention how difficult it is to maintain my dignity, let alone faith, in the face of failure?
My daughters live with their father. I know that you will ask why. People always do. If they were living with me, the question of why I had custody and he did not would never arise. But their father having them implies something, and so it’s a question I get asked a lot. The answer is complicated, but here’s the gist: When I left their father I knew I was setting out on a hardscrabble path that would introduce chaos into their lives. Their father has a good-paying job and no intention of leaving the small town in upstate New York where we reside. I knew that the one thing they needed during the upheaval was whatever stability I could give them.

My girls know that I love them. I have never said a bad word against their father in front of them. I want them to know that divorce is not the worst thing that can happen to you. I tell myself that the fights they witnessed between their father and me, the long silences, the glares, the angry rebukes, that witnessing a bad marriage was more damaging than watching us learn to live our lives apart. I have asked myself more times than I can count whether they would agree with me. But I keep in mind that I am the grownup.

My timing for leaving could have used some work. I was unemployed at the time, as I had taken time off to write a novel. I have many job skills and good credentials. And to that point, I had never had a problem finding a job. So, when I left my husband, I figured that I would quickly step into a position. But I left him in August of 2001: September 11 had a major impact on the publishing field. I have sent out enough resumes that I owe the forest ten trees.  In the meantime, I scrape by with freelance writing and editing assignments I pick up.

I went hungry for several days a couple of months back. I had enough money to feed the girls during the three days a week they stay with me, but none for myself. So I didn’t eat. I admit it: I was panic-stricken over my hunger, but I took a certain perverse pleasure in the idea that I was sacrificing myself on behalf of my children. It’s what we’re taught, right? That mothers will allow themselves to be killed in defense of their kids. And it’s true: there’s no doubt that I would become Athena in full-battle regalia should we find ourselves in a life-or-death situation. But this was not it. This was me finding a way to punish myself for my choices. I decided that it was okay for me to go to the soup kitchen to eat. I had told myself that I didn’t have the right to eat at the soup kitchen because I wasn’t poor enough, that I would be taking food from the mouth of someone who needed it more than I did. But there’s something about lying awake at night, starving, that led me to the realization that I was poor. And yes, I know the famous distinction between broke and poor-but I’ve been broke for two years now, which I think has put me in a “poor” state of mind.

Going to stand in line to be fed wasn’t a matter of swallowing my pride. Pride, it seems to me, is more of a hindrance than an aid. Pride tells you that you can’t do something because it will make you look bad in others’ eyes. I have seen “pride” destroy people I love, watched them choose to fail because they were too afraid to ask for help. But I’ve realized that it’s more than fear that’s at work. Suffering is its own reward for some people. But not for me.

I am in the process of learning to love myself. It was something that I could not do within the confines of my marriage. What has been difficult for me to separate out is the idea that the poverty under which I currently labor is the punishment for striking out on my own, the penalty I pay for wanting to put myself first. I have trouble writing that line without immediately qualifying it-of course I put my children first, but as the mother of two girls, I found myself increasingly tormented by the idea that I was teaching them that a woman’s life is not about herself. It’s about her children, her husband, her career. Never her. And so, paradoxically, I removed myself from a situation that ultimately I felt would hurt them, even if it was possible that keeping the family intact was a temporarily good thing. The Scylla and Charibdes. How does one negotiate that narrow space between them?

I have bad days where I beat myself down, convinced that I’m nothing but a selfish woman looking for any rationalization to explain away her bad behavior. When I’m feeling especially cynical, I comfort myself with the thought that it’s all winter: life really is a bitch, and then you get to die. But resorting to such banalities is my way of sloughing off the stuff that matters-if I accept that life sucks and that it never gets better, then I can’t allow that little drop of hope to seep through the crack. And the painful thing about finding one’s voice, the thing that no one ever tells you, is that in order to love yourself in the ways that are real, you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable, to tear down the dyke and swim in the ensuing flood. Choosing to leave has made me vulnerable to tidal waves of troubles, and yet, each time I get knocked off my feet, I find out that I can swim.

I’ve had to rethink my vision of myself as Athena, too. The goddess of wisdom is represented in Greek myth as heavily armed and protected by the Aegis, her impenetrable breastplate. The armor of my intellect was supposed to save me-or at least get me a job. It has turned out that my intellect has been mostly useless in dealing with the brute matter of life. Sometimes, the proper response is to sit and cry, not sit and think your way out of it. And sometimes, the proper response is to laugh uproariously because it’s all so bloody absurd. It’s significant, I think, that Athena was never a mother. I see my willingness to be vulnerable with myself as something that has been gleaned from my years of raising children. In responding to the instinct to protect them, I’m learning that baring my breast, rather than girding my loins, is what life calls for.

Cross-posted at CultureKitchen

Media Girl commented on macho and conservatives the other day; she has since added to that discussion, and has been joined by the great folks over at Pandagon. I have
commented a number of times as to my observations/fears that the evidence of creeping fascism in this country is evidenced in the general crisis of masculinity at work in the U.S.

I’m a fan of  Klaus Theweleit’s two-volume study: Male Fantasies. Theweleit builds an argument that links fascism with a hatred of the body, its desires, and its weaknesses.

Fascism, then, waged its battle against human desires by encoding them with a particular set of attributes: with effeminacy, unhealthiness, criminality, Jewishness–all of which existed together under the umbrella of “Bolshevism.”

If I re-write that particular sentence the following way:
Christo-Fascism, then, waged its battle against human desires by encoding them with a particular set of attributes: with effeminacy [as in lesbians/gays/feminists], unhealthiness [bogus claims about abortion causing breast cancer or condoms not preventing HIV or all STDs], criminality {street crime], Jewishness [I think Muslim is the new Jew for the time being]–all of which existed together under the umbrella of “Liberalism.”

It’s working for me. Does this analogy work for you?

Of course, not all women are evil: Christian women, who are subservient to their husbands, or else lunatics like Malkin or Coulter (doesn’t that look like Annie on the back of that rocket?)–they’re okay. But the rest of us are just fucked. So to speak.
More from Theweleit: all quotations from Vol II

Clearly, then, what the fascist understands by the term “unity” is a state in which oppressor and oppressed are violently combined to form a structure of domination. For him, unity denotes a relationship not of equality, but of domination. Equality is considered synonymous with multiplicity, mass–it thus the precise opposite of “unity,” since “unity” rigidly fuses these baser elements with what is “above them,” “interior” to “exterior,” and so on. Unity allows the soldier male access to pleasure; it protects him from the death of splitting or decomposition. What seems to hold the masculine-soldierly body together is his compulsion to oppress the body of another (or bodies, or the body in his own body). His relation to the bodies he subordinates is one of violence and, in extreme cases, of murder.

The concept of nation can be seen, then, as the most explicit foundation of male demands for domination…Nation is the opposite of mass, femininity, equality, sensuous pleasure, desire, and revolution.

The Bible shows on a consistent basis the impact that having a body has. And the Old Testament, with its God who does not even allow representations of him to exist (Thou Shalt not Make Any Graven Images…), emphasizes that NOT having a body is the way to power. The body is the key to destruction. The doorway to death. And we all know who opened that fucking door.

So, if you’re still following me on my meandering path here, we live in a nation whose President wants us to unite behind him while we defeat the evils of terrorism, Fundamentalist Christians who want us to give up all worldly pleasure unless it serves a heterosexual marriage-covenant to produce offspring, and a certain contingent in our country who still wants to kick someone’s ass for 9/11.

The president does not want a unity that comes from equality and civil rights; he wants a unity that comes from everyone subjugating themselves to the state, to our leaders, who know how to “stay the course,” and know what’s best for us. Only the troublemakers, sinners, and perverse don’t want to be part of this great unity. And, because pleasure leads us away from this subjugation–personal pleasure is selfish–we’ve got a “state” religion that emphasizes mortification of the flesh. And, as has been pointed out in a number of posts above, macho rhetoric is running crazy.

After listening to the Blow-Roviator the other day, my paranoia about being a mouthy woman in this country gets a little less tinfoil hat-based, and a hell of a lot more based on my understanding of history.

I’m waiting for the moment that Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld feels compelled to whip out his member in public. But Jesus, is this getting tiresome.

Cross-posted at CultureKitchen

This is Robert Raymond. He died in 1916, in the trenches of France. He was my great-grandfather. His daughter, Hilda, will be 89 this year. She was born after he died. My great-grandmother, Edith, Hilda’s mother, died at the age of 37, leaving my grandmother an orphan.

I have this photo of Robert, and I stare at it, trying to imagine what his life was like. I can’t ask my grandmother; she never met him. And I try to picture the day that Edith received the news that the man whose child she was carrying had died in the war.

World War I was a colossal waste of life. It was a war that had no purpose, no planning, no meaning. It was The Great War. It cost Europe a generation of young men.

As far as I know, Robert Raymond’s story has not been told. He has vanished; I’m not even sure where he is buried. Three generations later, all I have is this tiny photograph. I search his face for clues. What made him laugh? Cry? What were his dreams? What was his childhood like? When he was in the trenches, did he have a chance to reflect on what he was doing, why he was there; did he know he’d never get home to England again?

I wish that someone would sit down with George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and make them look at the photographs of the 1700+ American dead in this war. I’d like them to have to talk to someone who loved each of those men and women, hear a story from his or her childhood, or what he or she liked to do, what he or she wanted to be, what made him or her laugh. I think the price for being Commander-in-Chief is to be haunted by the people you have sent to their deaths. I think the fact that you told lies in order to start this war should be the kind of black spot on your soul that all the invocation of God and country and Jesus cannot erase. I think you should have to wear a letter “M” for murderer, that in your wallet, when people ask to see photographs of your children, you should be forced to bring out a picture or two of soldiers you sent to their deaths. You should have to tell their stories.

“These are my children,” you should have to say. “These are my kids, and I am responsible for their deaths.”

Update [2005-6-27 9:53:15 by lorraine]: I am shaking. Musings85 sent me an e-mail, telling me that he had found Robert’s grave. Here’s the information:
Robert Raymond.
My grandmother has never known where her father was buried. Michael has now made it possible for her to know, and for me to take my children to lay flowers. I’m unbelievably touched by this act of kindness on his behalf.
And, the amazing part is to realize I’ve never known the whole story. You see, he died when my grandmother, born in November of 1916, was an infant. Not when her mother was pregnant. So now the question is, did he ever get to see his baby girl? I’m overcome with emotion right now.

Every soldier’s death diminishes me. Every time a roadside bomb goes off, somewhere in America, parents, brothers, sisters, children, neighbors, classmates feel the sudden sting of death. We have now sent over 1700 families over the abyss into the grief of losing young people in their prime.

So, the news that the latest bomb attack killed a number of female soldiers is as tragic as every other bombing. But apparently, for certain members of our culture, woman’s symbolic value makes this loss all the more tragic.

“Fierce debate” will greet the news that women were killed.

The role of women soldiers in Iraq has set off a fierce debate in Washington. Conservatives have charged that the military exposes female soldiers to excessive danger by assigning them to support units that commonly operate alongside male combat troops. They believe the Pentagon is violating the spirit of the law that prohibits women from serving in infantry, artillery, or armor units.

The Center for Military Readiness has made one of its prime missions to exempt women from combat. Fair enough. Personally, I don’t want anyone in combat. Women. Men. Children. I don’t want us involved in this war that the President started.

Women soldiers dying in combat is a horror. But so is the horror of our sons dying there, too. So, before this debate even starts, can we stop? Please? Because quite frankly, as a woman, I find it incredibly offensive that conservatives can shed crocodile tears over women soldiers, but won’t give civilian women the time of day. They seem to have no problem denying us birth control so that some of us will die in childbirth. They seem to have no problem with the millions of women infected with the AIDS virus. They have no problem throwing women off the Welfare rolls. They have no problem denying women the rights and benefits that men enjoy.

I’m sick and tired of my symbolic value being more than my real value. I am a person. A whole person. I’m not your Barbie Doll, your Virgin Mary, your Holy Mother. My life is not of worth only when I am reproducing the next generation or serving the brethren by making men’s lives easier. And I’ll be goddamned if you get to make political hay out of the fact that soldiers died in Iraq. When those bombs went off, they were not men or women, they were scared kids who were about to be blown off the face of the earth, leaving behind holes the size of the universe in their loved ones’ lives.

Cross-posted at CultureKitchen

My energy is flagging. (Oh crap. I just noticed the pun. I’ll let it fly.) The flag amendment, the Durbin apology, the general level of bullshit, deceit, and apathy that is in the atmosphere and which I’m picking up as if I was a tuning fork, is exhausting me. Add to it the general stresses of everyday life, including some extraordinary things that are going on in my world, and I’m feeling a bit burnt.

Being part of this community helps. When my energy is low, I read your diaries, what you are doing, your declarations of faith and outrage, and I tap into that.

I don’t have anything profound to say. I’m very tired. I went looking for something to pick me up this morning, and lo and behold, wound up back on Emma Goldman‘s doorstep. She was commissioned to write the following piece, and the piece was killed when the newspaper in question decided that it was too radical for its readers. But she published it anyway.

So, here it is. “A New Declaration of Independence,” written in 1909. Emma rocks.
 A New Declaration of Independence
by Emma Goldman
[Published in Mother Earth, Vol. IV, no. 5, July 1909.]

When, in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob, and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions.

The mere fact that these forces–inimical to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–are legalized by statute laws, sanctified by divine rights, and enforced by political power, in no way justifies their continued existence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all human beings, irrespective of race, color, or sex, are born with the equal right to share at the table of life; that to secure this right, there must be established among men economic, social, and political freedom; we hold further that government exists but to maintain special privilege and property rights; that it coerces man into submission and therefore robs him of dignity, self-respect, and life.

The history of the American kings of capital and authority is the history of repeated crimes, injustice, oppression, outrage, and abuse, all aiming at the suppression of individual liberties and the exploitation of the people. A vast country, rich enough to supply all her children with all possible comforts, and insure well-being to all, is in the hands of a few, while the nameless millions are at the mercy of ruthless wealth gatherers, unscrupulous lawmakers, and corrupt politicians. Sturdy sons of America are forced to tramp the country in a fruitless search for bread, and many of her daughters are driven into the street, while thousands of tender children are daily sacrificed on the altar of Mammon. The reign of these kings is holding mankind in slavery, perpetuating poverty and disease, maintaining crime and corruption; it is fettering the spirit of liberty, throttling the voice of justice, and degrading and oppressing humanity. It is engaged in continual war and slaughter, devastating the country and destroying the best and finest qualities of man; it nurtures superstition and ignorance, sows prejudice and strife, and turns the human family into a camp of Ishmaelites.

We, therefore, the liberty-loving men and women, realizing the great injustice and brutality of this state of affairs, earnestly and boldly do hereby declare, That each and every individual is and ought to be free to own himself and to enjoy the full fruit of his labor; that man is absolved from all allegiance to the kings of authority and capital; that he has, by the very fact of his being, free access to the land and all means of production, and entire liberty of disposing of the fruits of his efforts; that each and every individual has the unquestionable and unabridgeable right of free and voluntary association with other equally sovereign individuals for economic, political, social, and all other purposes, and that to achieve this end man must emancipate himself from the sacredness of property, the respect for man-made law, the fear of the Church, the cowardice of public opinion, the stupid arrogance of national, racial, religious, and sex superiority, and from the narrow puritanical conception of human life. And for the support of this Declaration, and with a firm reliance on the harmonious blending of man’s social and individual tendencies, the lovers of liberty joyfully consecrate their uncompromising devotion, their energy and intelligence, their solidarity and their lives.

This `Declaration’ was written at the request of a certain newspaper, which subsequently refused to publish it, though the article was already in composition.

In Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning wrote of everyday German citizens, members of a police unit in Berlin, who were sent to Poland and there, practiced the messy slaughter of whole villages of Jewish children, women, and men. There are no all-encompassing explanations of anti-Semitism that Browning uses to distinguish these men from you and me: the commanders of the group found a way to tap into the basest of human emotions to make these men forget they were basic human beings. And so they killed.

Today, I read two articles back-to-back, and I was struck by the juxtaposition of ideas in them. I want to play with the arguments being presented, although ultimately, this thought experiment may be a failure.

In this morning’s NYT,
Anthony Lewis makes a point that is blindingly obvious to those of us who think about these things, but for which apparently, far too many Americans, including the squawkboxes on the Right, are oblivious. Namely, that people who live in glass houses don’t get to throw stones. (Or as their favourite moral exemplar said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”)

Since the widespread outrage over the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Americans have seemingly ceased to care. It was reported yesterday that Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former American commander in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib scandal, is being considered for promotion. Many people would say the mistreatment of Mohamed al-Kahtani, or of suspects who might well be innocent, is justified in a war with terrorists. Morality is outweighed by necessity.

The moral cost is not so easily put aside. We Americans have a sense of ourselves as a moral people. We have led the way in the fight for human rights in the world. Mistreating prisoners makes the world see our moral claims as hypocrisy.

Beyond morality, there is the essential role of law in a democracy, especially in American democracy. This country has no ancient mythology to hold it together, no kings or queens. We have had the law to revere. No government, we tell ourselves, is above the law.

Over many years the United States has worked to persuade and compel governments around the world to abide by the rules. By spurning our own rules, we put that effort at risk. What Justice Louis Brandeis said about law at home applies internationally as well: “If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law.”

I intend no disrespect to Mr. Lewis, but my first reaction to reading this was a resounding “duh.” American foreign policy has never been one of consistency. Reagan’s lecturing the Soviets about their human rights violations in the 1980’s while financing death squads in Central America was the example I remember plainly from my college years, and even now, the sight of Elliot Abrams causes hideous gastric reflux. In those days, I took to the streets, attended demonstrations, wrote letters, picketed outside various defense facilities: in essence, spit into the wind.  
Those of us now who are so horrified by what we are doing at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and in the streets of Iraq, are no longer spitting into the wind. We feel as if we’re pissing into a hurricane. The administration and the media have done such a bang-up job of convincing us that those people, who are not really human, those people were responsible for 9/11, and therefore deserve everything they have coming to them. Because, we are told, if we don’t nip this problem in the bud, we will experience a thousand-fold 9/11s. And thus, even treating prisoners like dogs, literally, is the right thing to do. Justice be damned.

And why not? We are, after all, the world’s superpower. And we know what justice is, really. Thucydides told us a long time ago, in The History of the Peloponnesian War.

For we both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice enters only where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.

I want to believe that the vast majority of the American people are as horrified by what is happening as I am. And here’s where the second thing I read this morning comes into play.

Bill Moyers has a lovely
piece at TomPaine today on the threat to PBS. I have not always been the biggest fan of PBS, especially when I saw evidence that they, too, were falling into the MSM, and not presenting an alternative view. But Moyers steps back from the news aspect of PBS to look at the larger picture.

He talks about the impact that being exposed to larger ideas has on the moral sensibilities of a people. Now, there’s no chance that I’m crawling into bed with Allan Bloom and E.D. Hirsch, but I did like what Earl Shorris had to say a few years back in an article he wrote for Harper’s about the effects of teaching philosophy to people who had previously had issues with working stuff out with their neighbors. And Shorris found that reading the liberal arts helped people to think differently about conflict.  

Moyers has this to say:

Americans are assaulted on every front today by what the scholar Cleanth Brooks called “the bastard muses”:

    *
      propaganda, which pleads, sometimes unscrupulously, for a special cause at the expense of the total truth
    *
      entimentaliy, which works up emotional responses unwarranted by and in excess of the occasion
    *
      pornography, which focuses on one powerful drive at the expense of the total human personality.

About that time, Newsweek  reported on “the appalling accretion” of violent entertainment that “permeates Americans’ life–an unprecedented flood of mass-produced and mass-consumed carnage masquerading as amusement and threatening to erode the psychological and moral boundary between real life and make-believe.”

How do we counter it?  Not with censorship, which is always counterproductive in a democracy, but with an alternative strategy of affirmation.  Public broadcasting is part of that strategy.  We are free to regard human beings as more than mere appetites and America as more than an economic machine.  Leo Strauss once wrote, “Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity.” He reminded us that the Greek word for vulgarity is apeirokalia , the lack of experience in things beautiful. A liberal education supplies us with that experience and nurtures the moral imagination. I believe a liberal education is what we’re about.  Performing arts, good conversation, history, travel, nature, critical documentaries, public affairs, children’s programs–at their best, they open us to other lives and other realms of knowing.

The ancient Israelites had a word for it: hochma , the science of the heart. Intelligence, feeling and perception combine to inform your own story, to draw others into a shared narrative, and to make of our experience here together a victory of the deepest moral feeling of sympathy, understanding and affection. This is the moral imagination that opens us to the reality of other people’s lives. When Lear cried out on the heath to Gloucester, “You see how this world goes,” Gloucester, who was blind, answered, “I see it feelingly.”  When we succeed at this kind of programming, the public square is a little less polluted, a little less vulgar and our common habitat a little more hospitable. That is why we must keep trying our best. There are people waiting to give us an hour of their life –time they never get  back–provided we give them something of value in return. This makes of our mission  a moral transaction.  Henry Thoreau got it right: “To affect the quality of the day, is the highest of the arts.”

I have frequently said to anyone willing to listen to me, that I think the cutting of educational funding since the 1980’s is deliberate. An uneducated public is a docile public. A public that runs on video games, t.v., and celebrity magazines is not likely to consider the ramifications of torture.

Why are vast portions of the public discussing missing teens in Aruba and Tom Cruise’s latest love interest? Why are we not having public discussions about torture, foreign policy, and what the hell is happening here at home?

Cutting PBS and making prisoners piss in their pants are related phenomena.

Cross-posted at CultureKitchen