Social Justice or the Common Good?

Party in Search of a Notion | The American Prospect

For many years -- during their years of dominance and success, the period of the New Deal up through the first part of the Great Society -- the Democrats practiced a brand of liberalism quite different from today's. Yes, it certainly sought to expand both rights and prosperity. But it did something more: That liberalism was built around the idea -- the philosophical principle -- that citizens should be called upon to look beyond their own self-interest and work for a greater common interest.

This, historically, is the moral basis of liberal governance -- not justice, not equality, not rights, not diversity, not government, and not even prosperity or opportunity. Liberal governance is about demanding of citizens that they balance self-interest with common interest. Any rank-and-file liberal is a liberal because she or he somehow or another, through reading or experience or both, came to believe in this principle. And every leading Democrat became a Democrat because on some level, she or he believes this, too.

Michael Tomasky has been pushing this analysis of what went wrong for the Left in the 1960s for quite some time now and he has it exactly backwards. On his account the New Left transformed the agenda of American liberalism from a communitarianism, aimed at promoting the "common good," to an ideology of individual rights, individual opportunity and social justice.

In fact the New Deal and Great Society, which he applauds as effective, if flawed, programs were devoted to promoting individual rights, individual opportunity and social justice. Roosevelt added "freedom from fear" and "freedom from want" to the traditional four freedoms guaranteed in the constitution. The Civil Rights Movement of the '50s and early '60s, which Tomasky cites as a prime example of Americans pulling for the common good was precisely about individual rights, in particular, the right of individuals to be "treated as individuals" rather than as members of separate estates defined by skin color.

The New Left, by contrast, was deeply communitarian. The New Left merely replaced the the old, conservative commitment to the common good of a national community that excluded racial minorities, stigmatized gay people, and failed the poor, with the communitarian identity politics of restricted communities, defined by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability and the like.

The difference between the Old Left and the New Left was one of objectives and mechanisms for achieving them. Old-style liberalism was narrowly focused and its goals were clear: economic security, material well-being and opportunity. It embodied a vision of the Good Life represented by Norman Rockwell's "Freedom From Want." The Good Life was Levittown--on this traditional liberals and conservatives agreed, even as they disagreed about the means for attaining it.

Old-style New Deal liberals believed that government programs, contrived by technocrats, were the fairest and most effective means for promoting the Good Life. The WPA, CCC and an alphabet soup of New Deal programs would provide jobs. The GI bill would provide education, training and the opportunity for more Americans to move into the middle-class. FHA and VA loans would finance homes in leafy suburbs. All (white male) Americans would have good jobs that paid a "family wage" so that all (white) Americans could be bourgeois. Economic experts in government service would design programs to make that feasible and government bureaucrats would administer them.

The goal of the Civil Rights Movement was to desegregate Levittown--to make the bourgeois life feasible for minorities. The values, means and ends were the same. The Good Life was the life of the white, Anglo middle class and the aim of the Civil Rights Movement was to see to it that members of racial and ethnic minorities could get it too. The means were also the same: government programs and social engineering.

The New Left repudiated the values and goals to which old-style liberals were committed. Children who had grown up in Levittown did not want to move back and were contemptuous of working class strivers who struggled to achieve and maintain a way of life they rejected. In addition the New Left were deeply distrustful of traditional mechanisms for social improvement. They did not merely reject the Establishment as it was--they rejected establishment as such: they distrusted hierarchal institutions, credentialed experts and impersonal mechanisms.

It is easy to see why most Americans found this program repugnant. The institutions that comprised the Establishment--schools and universities, government and the military-industrial complex--provided reasonably fair opportunities for individuals to achieve their goals. The rules and requirements were clear. You got grades and passed tests so that you could go to college. You got more grades and passed more tests to get a credential that guaranteed a good job with a regular paycheck, benefits and a retirement plan. You saved money for the down payment on a house, maintained good credit and got a mortgage. You didn't need to be hooked into a social network or "have contacts"; you didn't need to be socially skilled, lucky or likable. The system was transparent--and it served the interests of "middle American" careerist strivers.

Once the New Left became established, the Democratic Party lost its focus on economic issues and "liberal" was redefined. Environmentalism, reproductive rights, peace and other projects that had nothing to do with the defining agenda of the left as it had been became signature issues of the New Left, which dominated Democratic politics. To the extent that Democrats cared about bread-and-butter issues at all their concern was focused primarily on the underclass and in particular on individuals who could not, or more often, would not pay their dues. Democrats became the Mommy Party with a vision of the state as a secular communitarian church devoted to caring for the least of the brethren. It embodied the sentimentalities and romantic fantasies of the elite but had little to offer the great body of working class Americans who did not regard themselves as victims and did not want care or compassion but fairness, opportunity and the guarantee that if they played by the rules their rights would be respected.

So I agree with Tomasky. Democrats need to "kick some old habits." But it's the habit of framing social issues in communitarian terms and describing their agenda in the language of compassion, care and the common good that they need to break if they are to win over most Americans, who want transparency, a level playing field and the assurance that if they pay their dues they can achieve their goals.

Albanian Custom Fades - Woman as Family Man - NYTimes.com

KRUJE, Albania — Pashe Keqi recalled the day nearly 60 years ago when she decided to become a man. She chopped off her long black curls, traded in her dress for her father’s baggy trousers, armed herself with a hunting rifle and vowed to forsake marriage, children and sex. For centuries, in the closed-off and conservative society of rural northern Albania, swapping genders was considered a practical solution for a family with a shortage of men. Her father was killed in a blood feud, and there was no male heir. By custom, Ms. Keqi, now 78, took a vow of lifetime virginity. She lived as a man, the new patriarch, with all the swagger and trappings of male authority — including the obligation to avenge her father’s death.

This sounds like an excellent arrangement. It's got to be better than "sex-reassignment surgery." I wouldn't have my body chopped up and spend the rest of my life shooting up hormones to play the male social role, but think I might be willing to give up sex to get it if I had to.

[Sworn virgins] dressed like men and spent their lives in the company of other men, even though most kept their female given names. They were not ridiculed, but accepted in public life, even adulated.

The Albanians are clearly more enlightened than we are in this matter. We're all snagged up with Freudian notions about sexuality and "authenticity," and don't accept much less adulate individuals who simply want to play opposite sex social roles. They're only accepted if they can "pass." In Albania, everyone knows that sworn virgins were born as women and are biologically female. They pays their money and takes their choice: they give up the perks--sex with men and childbearing--in exchange for getting to be guys and are fully accepted as guys. They aren't in the closet: they keep their names, their identities, and don't have to deny their personal histories.

Taking an oath to become a sworn virgin should not, sociologists say, be equated with homosexuality, long taboo in rural Albania. Nor do the women have sex-change operations.

Very enlightened indeed. For all our talk about the distinction between sex and gender we still believe that they're inextricably linked so that any woman who just wants to be a guy socially is assumed to be either a lesbian or a candidate for sex-reassignment surgery. Take it from me. I've always had the distinct sense that lots of people would feel more comfortable if I were a lesbian. Not that there's anything wrong with homosexuality: I simply resent that pressure to be something other than I am so that others can be more comfortable about sexist assumptions about what "real women" are or should be like.

Known in her household as the “pasha,” Ms. Keqi said she decided to become the man of the house at age 20...Ms. Keqi lorded over her large family in her modest house in Tirana, where her nieces served her brandy while she barked out orders. She said living as a man had allowed her freedom denied other women. She worked construction jobs and prayed at the mosque with men. Even today, her nephews and nieces said, they would not dare marry without their “uncle’s” permission.

Sounds good to me. If I could have worked construction or had any of the other fall-back positions guys had, I wouldn't have been so scared: I would have made different decisions and been bolder. I made dozens of bad major decisions in my life because I was terrified of being stuck with pink-collar jobs that I couldn't handle.

Nowadays young women who regard themselves as "Third-Wave Feminists" or even more commonly "Not Feminists But..." complain that we, their mamas, espouse a feminism that restricts choice. They don't want to be told that dressing up "objectifies" them or that staying home to take care of their kids is somehow degrading. They don't believe that they should have to pay, to give up traditionally feminine behavior for equality and basic respect, or for decent jobs. They're right. Albanian women shouldn't have to pledge perpetual virginity to count as persons rather than property; American women shouldn't have to buy into man-hating to count as good feminists or behave like guys to work in management or the professions.

But the current rhetoric fails to recognize the fact that some women want to "swap gender" not because it's a cost we think we need to pay to achieve equality and respect, or to get decent work or because we believe it's part of some ideological commitment to support Sisterhood, but simply because it's what we want, because it's what we need to do to "be ourselves." Feminism is precisely about breaking the link between biological sex and gender as traditionally construed in the interests of giving everyone more choices.

Whining? Whatever...

Peter Schweizer on Liberal Whine on National Review Online

Howdy, boys and girls. Did you know there's a new word that has replaced whatever as an argument-stopper and conversational trump-card--at least for those of you who're of the conservative persuasion? Yes, indeed. The new W-word is whining.

You may wonder how a verb which has fairly stringent criteria for application can take the place of "whatever," a mere flatus vocis suitable for all occasions. But don't worry: the strict-constructionist dictionary definition is passé. Nowadays "whining" covers any dissatisfaction with one's circumstances or critique of the status quo. So, as evidence of liberal whining, National Review pundit Peter Schweitzer notes:

A wide body of research shows that modern liberals are much more likely to complain about things in their lives. Conservatives are more content with their lives. When asked “How satisfied are you with life these days? Sixty-six percent of conservatives said “very satisfied” compared with only 46 percent of liberals. Conservatives are more likely to say they love their jobs (53 percent vs. 41 percent) and even enjoy their hobbies more (63 percent vs. 51 percent). When asked by the Social Capital Survey whether they were satisfied with their income, liberals were more than three times as likely to say “not at all satisfied” — even when they earned the same as conservatives.

I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that conservatives are more satisfied with their lives than liberals. After all, being conservative means wanting to conserve the status quo, so it stands to reason conservatives would be more satisfied with the way things are than others. In fact, you don't need to produce data to show that conservatives are more satisfied with the way things are than non-conservatives: that's true by definition.

I'm not sure why conservatives think that liberals' dissatisfaction reflects adversely on them. After all, dissatisfaction comes from setting high standards. What can be wrong with that? I'm dissatisfied with my weight, with my students' performance in logic and with the rudeness and incompetence of various "customer service representatives" with whom I deal. Would I be a better person if I were satisfied being a fat slob, if I didn't care whether my students could do logic problems or whether people did their jobs properly?

Conservatives however invariably make an intuitive leap from people's expressions of dissatisfaction to the charge that they are representing themselves as "victims," a habit they hold defines liberalism:

Barack Obama understands the language of victimhood and uses it effectively. And victimhood has become a central tenant of modern liberalism. As Kenneth Minogue argues in his classic book The Liberal Mind, modern liberalism is completely wrapped up in “suffering situations.”

Funny I never noticed that. Obama, preaching the audacity of hope, always seemed to me a very optimistic, up-beat guy. In fact the only people I ever hear talking about victimization are conservatives who whine about liberals' supposed proclivity for claiming to be victimized.

I guess what puzzles me, given the new latitudinarian concept of whining, is whether it is possible to express any dissatisfaction with the status quo without counting as a whiner. If not, then the conservatives' complaint that liberals, those of us who are not altogether satisfied with the way things are and work for improvement, is simply the claim that liberals are not conservatives. And being a liberal myself I don't think that's something they have any right to whine about.

Why Pro-Choice Shouldn't Be a Feminist Issue

Sex-segregation in the labor market is important issue for women; pro-choice is not.

(1) It's easy to avoid having a baby; it's difficult to avoid getting stuck doing pink-collar shit work.

To avoid having a baby all you have to do is use effective birth control. It's affordable, readily available, and the odds of contraceptive failure are minimal. It's much more difficult and expensive to avoid pink-collar shit work. You have to get at least a BA, which is time-consuming and very expensive, and even then there's still a significant risk that you could end up as a secretary or teacher. To get the level of protection against pink-collar shit work comparable to the level of protection contraceptives provide against having a baby you either have to get that BA in engineering or a hard science or else get a post-graduate professional degree, which is even more difficult and more expensive than getting a generic BA.

(2) You can easily avoid raising a baby; you can't easily avoid pink-collar shit work.

If you have an unplanned baby, you can easily get rid of it. You can leave it at the hospital, at a police station or firehouse or at a church--no questions asked. Or you can sell it. Or, best of all, you can dump the kid on the father. First stop on the way home from the hospital--the baby-daddy: "Here's your kid: take care of it. Maybe I'll pop by from time to time to see how it's doing and, if I feel like it, send you some money. Bye." Even if you give birth to an unplanned child, raising it is a free choice--you can easily avoid it. By contrast, you cannot easily avoid pink-collar shit-work. You cannot choose to get a job--getting a job depends on whether a potential employer will hire you. If you don't have one of those expensive degrees and can't get a guy job then your only option is pink-collar shit-work.

The suggestion that abortion is an important feminist issue assumes that it is not feasible for women who have unwanted children to avoid raising them. And the assumption behind this is that women "bond" with their babies and that giving a baby up to be raised by someone else is just too, too, traumatic. That's plain old sexism. Men regularly abandon their children. There's no reason why women shouldn't do that too. Raising a baby is a choice; doing pink-collar shit-work isn't a choice. Women are forced to do that work because they can't get male-identified jobs. The aim of feminism is to see to it that women have a wider range of options--not to see to it that they aren't penalized for making "feminine" choices.

"Why can't a woman be more like a man?" Henry Higgins asked. Because women aren't treated like men, because they don't have the same options and, in particular, because they can't get the same jobs. Women don't do blue-collar jobs because they can't get them, don't apply for these jobs because they know they'll feel like fools for applying and not get them anyway, and don't train for skilled blue-collar jobs because they know that they won't be hired and so their time and money will be wasted. De facto, most women have no choice when it comes to jobs and the aim of feminism should be to fix that. They do have a choice when it comes to raising children and if they choose not to behave like men in this regard they don't deserve any sympathy.

Feminist "Intersectionality"

Looking to the Future, Feminism Has to Focus - washingtonpost.com

[F]aced with criticism that the movement was too white and middle-class, many influential feminist thinkers conceded that issues affecting mostly white middle-class women -- such as the corporate glass ceiling or the high cost of day care -- should not significantly concern the feminist movement. Particularly in academic circles, only issues that invoked the "intersectionality" of many overlapping oppressions were deemed worthy. Moreover, that concern must include the whole weight of those oppressions. In other words, since racism hurts black women, feminists must fight not only racist misogyny but racism in any form; not only rape as an instrument of war, but war itself. The National Organization for Women (NOW) eventually amended its mission statement to include interrelated oppressions.

Although other organizations work on women's issues when appropriate, none of the other social movements were much interested in making intersectionality their mission. The nation's oldest civil rights organization, the NAACP, which co-sponsored the 2004 march in alliance with women's groups, says nothing about feminism or homophobia or intersectionality in its mission statement. The largest Hispanic rights organization, National Council of La Raza, unembarrassedly proclaims that it "works to improve opportunities for Hispanic Americans."

Why did feminists get caught up in "intersectionality"? I suspect was a consequence of the ingrained idea that women have a special obligation to be altruistic, to "do for" others, which historically lumbered activist women with a broad "maternalist" agenda. From the Temperance Movement to Moms for Peace, women acting in the public sphere played the "civilizing" role that they were supposed to play in the home. This was justification for leaving the home to engage in political action. "See, we're not neglecting our domestic responsibilities--we're doing our womanly duty on a grand scale. We're not just taking care of our own children--we're working to take care of all children and, by extension, the poor, the oppressed and all people who can't take care of themselves. We're not just concerned with harmony in the home: we're concerned with peace in the world and with the creation of a kinder, gentler society."

When women campaigned for women's rights as such they were slapped down. In 1964, when Ruby Doris Smith Robinson presented an indignant assault on the treatment of women civil rights workers in a paper entitled "The Position of Women in SNCC," to a SNCC staff meeting. Stokely Carmichael reputedly responded, "The only position for women in SNCC is prone."

Things improved over the years but there was still sense that feminists who focused exclusively on issues that benefited women were frivolous and selfish: frivolous because white, middle class women, the chief beneficiaries of feminist activism, weren't as badly off as racial minorities, the poor or other disadvantaged groups and selfish because women were not supposed to focus on their own problems--they were supposed to do for others. Women who suggested that they were unfairly disadvantaged and that this should be fixed were cast as whiners and complainers, or embittered man-haters--unless of course they could show that their feminism was "really" a larger agenda that promoted peace in the world and solidarity with all the oppressed.

Unlike the NAACP and other civil rights organizations that promoted the interests of ethnic minorities, NOW and other feminist organizations were pressed to prove their legitimacy by making the case their mission was to combat all "interrelated oppressions." No one chided civil rights activists for being "selfish" if they concerned themselves with advancing the interests of ethnic minorities: the NAACP was, after all, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. That was the job they did. And that certainly wasn't to say that they wouldn't cooperate with other organizations in mutually beneficial projects or that members weren't concerned with other social problems. No one suggested that with the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s and the progress black Americans made since then the civil rights movement was passé or that the NAACP should concern itself with the plight of starving people around the world who were much worse off. The NAACP was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People--it was not a foreign aid organization.

Feminists by contrast were pressed to prove that they weren't fighting some battle of the sexes for their own selfish ends (women were not supposed to be selfish) and once "intersectionality" became the official theology it was futile to kick against the goads. As the author notes, this was certainly true in "academic circles." I've been there. And it is very difficult to have a discussion of the disadvantages women still face or how to fix things without having it veer off into a discussion of various other social injustices and a rousing call for the Solidarity of the Oppressed.

1968 Again

White voters and the Democratic primary | Salon News

Teixeira: [T]he Democratic Party has a sort of image in certain areas of the country among certain voters, particularly downscale voters, that's somewhat unfavorable. There's a certain cultural distance there, a sense of an elitism in the national party that Obama probably connects to in their minds...

Wilentz: And it also goes back to the split in the Democratic Party. Which is also historical, it goes back 40 years. And we all know about this. It goes back to '68 in some ways, and it's been aggravated ever since. It's the old division between the "new politics" wing of the party and the "traditional working class" base of the party. We see that every four years and I think we may be seeing that again. But that's not strictly correlated to race by any means.

Schaller: [E]very four years, the candidate who is the new politics, new left darling, whether it's Howard Dean or whether it's Bill Bradley or whether it's Gene McCarthy, has historically fallen on the shoals of the white working-class vote because that candidate had, to put it as bluntly as possible, people like me, college-educated white people who live in urban areas with Ph.Ds, right. I'm sort of your quintessential -- and probably other people on the call, I don't want to speak for them, are quintessential Deaniac or Clean for Gene kind of voters...Of course, the media is drawn from this community.

I'm just perverse. I suspect that for several weeks if not longer the whole primary campaign has been staged, like pro-wrestling, to get publicity and get Democrats registered to vote. Now as the last act opens it will be interesting to see what Clinton's play will be.

If my hypothesis is correct, she will not concede outright but make some gracious gesture, affirm her commitment to do anything it takes to beat McCain in November, and ask for time to reflect. An immediate concession wouldn't be plausible, and wouldn't give supporters a chance to wind down emotionally--she'd lose them. And the Democratic Party might lose them too. It has to be carefully orchestrated and timed.

I'm also perverse because I'm one of those "college-educated white people who live in urban areas with Ph.Ds"--though I don't think my urban area has a Ph.D.--but just can't stand Obama or his supporters. I couldn't stand Gene McCarthy either. And I must be really perverse. I didn't much like Hillary at first--I'd still rather have Edwards. It was her street-fighting and dirty politics that really won me over. I don't trust the "new politics"--the idiot idealism of a privileged class who never really felt the shoe pinch, the prissiness of an elite who can afford to be virtuous, who can afford to worry about "process," who can afford to see visions and dream dreams.

What happened in 1968? For the first time, colleges were flooded with large groups of students who shouldn't have been there. They had no academic interests or professional ambitions and should have been doing honest manual labor. They were dissatisfied because they didn't belong in college but interpreted their malaise as the insight that times were out of joint. They had no ambition and regarded that as a virtuous rejection of the Establishment. They marched in the streets because they had nothing better to do.

The Hillary Lesson

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/magazine/18wwln-lede-t.html?ex=1368676800&en=b068283139ec9de1&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

One recent morning, as my 4-year-old daughter and I strolled to our favorite diner, she pointed to a bumper sticker plastered on a mailbox. A yellow, viraginous caricature of Hillary Clinton leered out from a black background. Big block letters proclaimed, “The wicked witch of the East is alive and living in New York"...Look, Mama,” she said. “That’s Hillary. What does it say?”...I wondered what to tell her — not only at this moment, but in years to come...Voting against Clinton does not make a person sexist — there are other reasons to reject her. But contemplating the “Life’s a Bitch, Don’t Vote for One” T-shirts, the stainless-steel-thighed Hillary nutcrackers, the comparison to the bunny-boiling Alex Forrest of “Fatal Attraction,” I struggle over how, when — even whether — to talk to girls truthfully about women and power.

...Right now, my daughter doesn’t know about the obstacles she may face someday, and I’m not sure of the wisdom of girding her in advance...The same quandary crops up with older girls. They are sports stars, yearbook editors, valedictorians. We have assured them the world is theirs, and they have no reason to disbelieve us. Like Clinton, our daughters are no victims. And yet, all is not quite well...Not when a woman who runs for office is accused of harboring a “testicle lockbox.” Clinton, whatever else she may be, has become a reflection, a freeze frame of the complications and contradictions of female success. Her bid for the White House has embodied both the possibilities we never imagined for our daughters — shattering not just the glass ceiling but the glass stratosphere — and the vitriol that attaining them can provoke. Both are real; so Godspeed, girls.

My daughter is older, in fact in college. I'm no fanatic (I hope): I got her Barbies, but looking through discarded junk in the attic realized that I'd given her pastel-colored, fully-fitted girls' toolboxes at least two Christmases running. She didn't care for the tools--or the Barbies.

My daughter and her friends are smart girls, ambitious girls who loaded their resumes with 4.0+ high school GPAs and extra-curricular activities, and who brought hoards of AP credits to college. I have students like that too. They'll all do well, I think: things have changed dramatically since I was their age. I'm not all that worried about the figures cited in this article about the dearth of women at the very top either:

[W]hile women make up 48 percent of new lawyers (and have hovered in that range for around a decade), the percentage of women who are law partners at major firms remains stuck at a pitiful 18.

I never wanted that kind of job. If I were a lawyer I'd want to be something more along the lines of Peter Kingdom operating a cozy little practice in a small town. I have a suspicion that most men who are partners in major law firms don't particularly want the job either, or rather that they're driven by the stick rather than the carrot. For men in management and the professions there's more pressure to get on the fast track and keep running, fewer opportunities to have a balanced life and more social opprobrium for what the world sees as a stalled career.

I was driven more by the stick than by the carrot myself. I wasn't one of those smart, ambitious high school girls cranking GPA and extra-curricular activities. I wasn't even planning to go to college until, after high school and a spell of clerical work, I realized what the alternatives were for women. It was fear, screaming terror of being stuck in a boring women's job, a job that was physically confining or involved endless repetition or contact with the public, that drove me through college, through grad school, to the PhD and tenure.

I was scared out of my wits, and that was probably a good thing. If I were a boy, given my miserable academic performance I would have been shunted onto the "vocational" track. After high school I would have gotten a tolerable blue-collar job and stuck with it. I don't mind physical work or getting dirty, and I love doing anything mechanical. I would have stuck with it and been reasonably happy, though not nearly as happy as I am in my profession, a career I pursued largely because I was scared out of my wits, scared of getting stuck doing a repetitious, sedentary job where there was nothing to show at the end of the day, where every day was like a long plane trip.

I still worry about those counterfactuals, possibly because of my interest in modal logic and sympathy for David Lewis' views about possible worlds. I stew about the dearth of tolerable fallback positions for women who don't manage to catch the brass ring, to get into management or the professions, and the fact that women by and large still can't get tolerable "bad" jobs--as mobile carpet-cleaners, gardeners, housepainters or tow-truck drivers--or skilled blue-collar jobs as mechanics, plumbers or carpenters. I get no sympathy from male colleagues--these are the jobs that they went to school to avoid.

No one, for that matter, including my fellow-feminists take me seriously: they can imagine wanting to make partner in major law firms but can't imagine being reasonably happy as plumbers and, in any case, don't seem to understand that all "bad" jobs are not the same. There's some interest in getting better wages for pink-collar workers but little or no interest ending sex-segregation at the lower end of the labor market. They take it as a given that working class women's concentration in "caring, catering, cashiering and clerical work" is a matter of choice.

And it is. But it's not always, or I suspect even usually, a reflection of ceteris paribus preferences. Women know, without even formulating that knowledge to themselves, that there is a wide range of jobs for which you just don't apply. You'll feel funny applying, the guy (or woman!) who takes your application will think you made a mistake, that you're trying to make some feminist statement or that you're just weird, and you won't get the job anyway. And if women consider the possibility they know that even if they get "non-traditional" jobs, they're not going to have the easy camaraderie with mates that guys can take for granted, which they would have working at conventional women's jobs.

But maybe feminism (at least as I understand it) will trickle down. Here I think Hillary may even have made a difference. After all the slicing and dicing of the electorate that showed her appeal was disproportionately to older, less educated, white voters it was working class women who were her base. In West Virginia she won the majority of men but the overwhelming majority of women. Young professional women, don't see themselves as having problems. The girls who got those 4.0+ high school GPAs, went to college and then got law degrees or MBAs know that they can get the same kinds of jobs as their male counterparts, and that if they don't make partner or get into the upper echelons of management, it will be by choice. Working class women know that they can't get the same jobs as their male counterparts, that not everyone can get a law degree or an MBA, and that their daughters will certainly have to spend most of their adult lives in the labor force.

It's too early now to look at the sexism that Hillary's campaign flushed out because the campaign is ongoing, and there's enormous anger and resentment--not primarily misogynistic either: people are sick of the Clintons' dirty tricks. But when this is over and Obama is safely installed in the White House, we will look back and reflect on what this whole business has brought to light. That, in any case, is my next book.

Church Times - Never lonelier, never more blessed

Who's Minding the Store?

Church Times - Never lonelier, never more blessed

Why is sexuality such a big issue?

First of all, I think it shouldn’t be such a big issue. For all kinds of complicated reasons, it has been raised to a level higher than it deserves. We should be talking about the gospel, feeding the poor, caring for the HIV-infected, solving the ecological crisis.

The Church most certainly should not be talking about feeding the poor, caring for the HIV-infected, solving the ecological crisis--or about sexuality. It should be talking about the doctrine of the Trinity, the Real Presence doctrine and post-mortem survival, about liturgy and sacred music, about how to drum up business for the church, maintain buildings and keep services going. Politicians and NGO-administrators should be talking about feeding the poor; doctors, nurses and epidemologists should be talking about caring for the HIV-infected; scientists should be talking about the ecological crisis.

The whole business of the Church is doing church. Once the clergy were virtually co-extensive with the educated professional class. Now they are not. There are secular experts who have taken over all the secular tasks that once fell to clergy by default, including professional ethicists who do ethics. But still these priests have the arrogance to imagine that they are qualified to talk about everyone else's business and the vanity to imagine that people will take them seriously. The Church is no more qualified to contribute to a solution to the ecological crisis than it is to do dentistry or plumbing.

Meanwhile, as these priests spend their time in bull sessions discussing all the world's problems, church buildings are being sold off, becoming derelict and being demolished, and in the US, the last bastion of religiousity in the First World, secularism is proceeding apace: the fastest growing "religious group" in the US is the unchurched. No one's minding the store. And the problem, as the old poster had it, is obvious: the priests who run the Church don't believe in God, or think that religion is either important or interesting. Or maybe more aptly, they think they're too important to do religion.

I went on a field trip to a Hindu temple in Los Angeles a few years ago for a course I was taking in Asian Spirituality. The president of the temple was a layman, predictably an engineer with a dozen or two pens in his shirt pocket. He showed us around and introduced us to the priests, whose job I gathered was strictly liturgical and janitorial: they maintained the facility, washed and dressed the idols, and did pujas. There was a menu of pujas on the wall, with prices: you paid your money and got your puja. As far as I could see these priests didn't think they had anything to say about solving the ecological crisis or imagine that anyone cared about their views on much of anything. Their job was menial: they were servants.

Christian clergy claim to regard themselves as servants too: they make a fuss about washing people's feet on Maundy Thursday. Of course, they don't believe it. They regard themselves as professionals, entitled to "professional-level" salaries, qualified to exercise leadership, to teach and to set us straight about everything from global warming to sexuality. So the outcome should hardly be a surprise: the Church flourishes, for the time being, in circumstances comparable to the Dark Ages, where the clergy are a relatively educated semi-elite amongst clueless peasants--in the Third World and in the American working class. Educated people drop out, not because Christianity is intellectually bankrupt but because they do not see any reason why they should look to the Church for wisdom or guidance.

I don't mind it so much that they're arrogant jackasses: who has ever listened to them? What I mind is that they're not minding the store, that they are not committed to maintaining the buildings and doing the pujas to suit us.

Charlie Brooker on existential angst | Comment is free | The Guardian

Where have all the mystics gone?

Charlie Brooker on existential angst | Comment is free | The Guardian: "Occasionally, late at night, while trying to sleep and failing...I'm aware of my entire body, the entire world, and the whole of reality itself. It's like waking from a dream, or a light going on, or a giant 'YOU ARE HERE' sign appearing in the sky. The mere fact that I'm actually real and actually breathing suddenly hits me in the head with a thwack. It leaves me giddy. It causes a brief surge of clammy, bubbling anxiety, like the opening stages of a panic attack. The moment soon passes, but while it lasts it's strangely terrifying. I asked around and discovered to my that relief I'm not the only one. Many of my friends have experienced something similar and have been equally spooked."

So far there are 166 comments on this piece, many by people describing various sorts of extraordinary experiences. Most don't have the language to describe their experiences and can't make sense of them. A few talk about existential angst. Not a one even suggests that these are the sorts of experiences which religious believers understand in religious terms.

Habitues on the Guardian's Comment is Free board have certainly heard of religion. Most are agin' it and threads on a number of topics are full of witticisms about flying spaghetti monsters and sky pixies. I should have expected at least a few derogatory remarks to the effect that some people in the bad old days might have described that sense of thrill and panic as the experience of the Mysterium Tremendum ("but of course we know better") or gone off on rants about how evil priests latched onto these experiences to persuade the gullible peasantry that the flying spaghetti monster was out to get them. But no one who's commented so far even seems to have made the connection between experiences like this and religious belief or practice.

What is depressing is not that these people are not religious believers or even that many are actively hostile to religious belief and practice, but that it simply doesn't occur to them that religion has, or ever had, any connection to such spooky, uncanny, scary or thrilling experiences. And that is the fault of the Church--the utter failure to get it across that enabling people to get these experiences and providing the language to describe them is part of the package, in fact (I believe) the most important part of the package.

Looking at the Church as it is it's no wonder that people don't get it. Look, and what do you see: a jolly little show, clean and boring, where people chat and shake hands, kiddies process in with their crafts projects, there's some singing, and an address in which the priest rehearses some old folk tales and tells people to be nice. What are they getting out of it? They go there to meet like-minded people: dull, puritanical people whose chief interest in life is stopping other people from having fun. But why would anyone want to go to such a thing in the first place? It would be like going to an exceptionally dull awards ceremony every week.

It's detestable: the Church turned itself into this, because it was embarrassed about metaphysics and imagined that this is the sort of crap people wanted. Christianity is a mystery religion--the mystery cult that happened to beat out Mithras and even more remarkably Isis. By its very origin, nature and essence it is supposed to be doing is delivering ecstatic mystical experiences and promising an eternity of the same for initiates. Around that there is a picturesque myth suitable for iconography. That is a mystery religion. The Church repudiated that, out of embarrassment and in the interests of pandering to a secular clientele. Of course they wouldn't really want that--they really want "community," the opportunity to feel useful, consolation, busywork...

And it was so unnecessary. If what they thought was that people wanted social contact and various other secular goods they could have simply done these things outside of the service. But they couldn't leave it at that. They extracted every bit of the numinous that they could squeeze out of the liturgy.

Mr. Wright

I've been reading a lot about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright lately. The discussions invariably muddle two issues: (1) Wright's angry denunciation of US foreign and domestic policy and (2) Wright's arguments for multiculturalism. I have no problem with his denunciations and anger. Wright, and black Americans generally, have a right to be angry. The history of slavery, segregation, exclusion, violence against black people and, even though things have improved, on going discrimination is something all Americans should be angry about. I agree with Wright's remarks about the "US of KKK"; I agree with "God damn America." Our chickens have indeed come home to roost. This is classic, powerful preaching in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets and I applaud it.

It is his suggestion that black kids and white kids think differently, his mythical afro-centric history, and his identity politics that are objectionable. I argue against this version of multiculturalism in my book The Multiculturalist Mystique: The Liberal Case Against Diversity which is now at last available at http://www.amazon.com/Multicultural-Mystique-Liberal-Against-Diversity/dp/1591025532/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207497777&sr=8-1

Assimilation gets a bad name first, because when many, perhaps most people talk about "assimilation" they don't really mean it. The notorious case was Australia's "assimilation" policy for its aboriginal people. When it was implemented at least assimilation didn't mean that Aborigines would were supposed to join the world of white Australians as full, equal members. It meant that Aborigines were to be trained up as farm laborers and domestic servants, and learn enough English to take orders. When I say assimilation, I don't mean that.

Secondly, in the US and other receiving countries, for many of the children and grandchildren of immigrants, assimilation de facto means assimilation to what Alejandro Portes calls a "rainbow underclass." There's a good discussion of this in his book Legacies: http://www.amazon.com/Legacies-Story-Immigrant-Second-Generation/dp/0520228480/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209687012&sr=8-1 I don't mean that either.

When I say assimilation I mean assimilation: acculturation and acceptance, as first class, equal citizens, sharing a common culture with other citizens, without any special obligation to identify with ancestral cultures defined by bloodlines.

Assimilation today, assimilation tomorrow, assimilation forever!

"Then No One Would Be a Democrat Anymore" | The American Prospect

"Then No One Would Be a Democrat Anymore" | The American Prospect: "The Democratic Party: enemy of the working man. It was the political version of that New York Times photograph of the stockbroker and the pipe fitter joined in solidarity in the act of clobbering a hippie -- their common weapon the American flag. That white men in ties and white men in hard hats were radically opposed to one another was a foundational left-wing idea. But as a Republican state senator from Orange County observed, 'Every time they burn another building, Republican registration goes up.' Nixon told his team to get to work...The Republican business class, small-town America, backyard-pool suburbanites, Dixiecrats, calloused union members: now it was as if the White House had discovered the magic incantation to join them as one. Nixonites imagined no limit to the power of this New Majority: "Patriotic themes to counter economic depression will get response from unemployed," Haldeman wrote in a note to himself. Then no one would be a Democrat anymore."

It's all starting to look like a bad acid flash-back, or maybe acid reflux: the 40th anniversary of that annus mirabilis, 1968. I usually look back to my college days with nostalgia, but when the details come into focus I remember how perfectly awful that time was, and how I was torn up with guilt and fear.

I completely identified with the Counterculture--the only place, I thought, where I could be accepted and have a life. The straight people hated us and were out to get us. At the same time, I didn't care for the Counterculture one bit. It wasn't the violence that bothered me but the flakiness and anti-intellectualism, the talk about vibes, astrological signs and karma, the directionlessness, ignorance and plain stupidity. When I wasn't with my trusted friends I had to talk the talk: "Yeah, like, um, like wow that is great stuff. Like, um, yeah I'm a Capricorn." It wasn't just that I couldn't have a conversation about the things that interested me but that I had to fudge and muddy my talk and put up with the muddled, fudged, boring talk of guys who as far as I could tell had no interests or aspirations and weren't much more than vegetables (how else was I going to get laid?).

I liked school. I loved my academic work and wanted to be a professor so that I could do this work for the rest of my life. I was torn up with shame and guilt for not being a good hippy, for not being in solidarity with my people, for not dropping out, for hating Marcuse, Marx and Continental Philosophy, for grade-grubbing, and above all for wanting a conventional family, a house in the suburbs and a regular job. I never forgave myself for missing the demonstration at the Chicago Democratic convention because I was writing a paper on Mill's phenomenalism.

When classes were canceled after Kent state I was convinced that Academia was going to shut down before I could get my piece of the pie. At the teach-ins I attended our political leaders assured us that traditional colleges would be replaced by Free Universities offering peer-taught classes in meditation and crafts. There would be no more paying students--or paid professors. Colleges would become communes--we would grow our own food in the quad. There would be no more marrying or giving in marriage. We'd work the farm in the morning and sit around on the grass in the afternoon learning macrame. Abstract, irrelevant academic subjects would be abolished. There would be Marxist study circles in the evening at which guys would plan the Revolution while chicks in granny dresses or overalls cooked whole grains and dried beans from scratch. The Age of Aquarius was coming--and I was terrified, angry and guilty.

Maybe it would have been better if I'd gone to a big state university with a good academic reputation that catered for middle class strivers. But I went to a small liberal arts college for rich underachievers, none of whom had conventional middle class aspirations, and most of whom had no aspirations at all. They would drift for a decade or two, knowing that whenever they wanted to get back on track their families would bail them out. I could understand why the hardhats wanted to beat them up.

The Pastor Casts a Shadow - New York Times

A Silly Vicar

The Pastor Casts a Shadow - New York Times

I rarely read Herbert because he's soooooo pious, but this time he's dead on.

Wright is a period piece, pumping out the rhetoric of Black Theology that was fashionable during the late '60s when he was in seminary. The basis of Black Theology, and the various other "new particularisms" that preoccupied theologians during the period, was two-fold. Academic theologians and their clerical proteges regarded the mission of the church as prophetic in the Old Testament sense: to engage in social critique and political action in the interests of justice. It would be hard to argue with this. Toward this end however, theologians and clergy appropriated the analyses and rhetoric of the secular left of the period to articulate their prophetic project

I can understand the impulse. During the high days of the Revolution there was the pervasive view that if you hesitated to endorse the radical line you were a sell-out and a wimp. Views that seemed reasonable or commonsensical were simply bait thrown out by a reactionary Establishment to block social change. Underlying this was a theory of meaning according to which factual truth and falsity were, at best, negotiable. Language was an expression of power relationships, and even language that seemed to the naive purely factual was a mechanism for promoting political agendas. Should I believe P or not? That depended on who was promoting P, whose interests it served, and what the social and political consequences of belief that P would be. Evidence for P was irrelevant or misleading because the Establishment manipulated and invented evidence and, because they controlled the mainstream media and other "respectable" sources of information, regularly bamboozled the public into accepting lies that served their interests.

More deeply however, facts simply did not matter. Was Africa the cradle of civilization? Was Jesus black? To answer those questions we were to consider whose interests the answers served and what the consequences of accepting one answer rather than another would be. White supremacists answered no to both questions and those answers served their interests. We should therefore believe that Africa was the cradle of civilization and that Jesus was black because these doctrines would smack down white supremacists, boost black Americans' self-esteem and promote social justice. History and genetics were largely irrelevant: if even the flimsiest, most conjectural case could be made for these views we should accept them and promulgate them.

Did Wright really believe that the US government spread AIDS and promoted drug-use amongst black Americans? Given any version of the correspondence theory of truth, no. He "believed" these doctrines because they came from the right place, served the right interests and would produce (he imagined) the best consequences. Conspiracy theories like this were current, though by no means universal, amongst the black masses: they came from the right place. More importantly, they served the right interests. They were an expression of the legitimate cynicism and anger of black Americans, their recognition that the government had lied to them and trashed them.

Was O.J. guilty? That was the wrong question to ask. The question was whether he should have been acquitted, and the answer was yes because O.J.'s acquittal was an expression of the cynicism and anger of the black community, the recognition that blacks were treated unfairly in the criminal justice system and in particular that black men were imprisoned, executed and lynched on the suspicion of having violated the purity of white women. O. J.'s acquittal was not about O. J.: it was about the thousands of other black men who had been unjustly treated. Similarly, Wright's conspiracy theories were not about AIDS or crack cocaine: they were about the Tuskegee Experiment and all the other ways in which the US government had screwed over black Americans. Did the government create the HIV virus and promote drug-use? To answer "yes" was not to say something about AIDS or crack cocaine: it was to say that the government had screwed blacks over, and that they had every right to be angry about that. That was true and therefore, interpreted in this way it was true to say that the US government created the HIV virus and promoted drug use to screw over black Americans.

That's theology. Ask the rector of your church whether he believes in "the Resurrection of the Dead and the Life of the World to Come" and he will certainly say "yes." Ask what he means by that and he will tell a long story. If you have a philosophy PhD or some other credential that suggest that he can level with you he will tell you that these clauses in the Creed are really just an affirmation of "life in depth and fullness here and now" or some such twaddle. Resurrection, he will tell you, does not, of course, mean that your body will be reanimated--or that Jesus' body was reanimated--or that you will continue to be the subject of conscious states after bodily death. Rather, he will tell you, when the Church affirms the Resurrection of the Body it means that the body is good, that sensual pleasure is good, and most particularly that sex is good. Likewise, if you pressed the Rev. Wright as to whether he really believed that the AIDS conspiracy theory, if he trusted you, he would say that what he meant was that the US government conducted the Tuskegee Experiment and screwed over blacks in innumerable other ways, and that black Americans should be angry about that.

Anger, cynicism and power politics do not play well in 2008, and what Americans found most offensive about Wright's message was his assumption that anger and cynicism were good and would motivate his constituency to play power politics in the interests of achieving justice. Wright was stuck in 1971 but Americans looked back nostalgically to the way things were a decade earlier, to the days of Camelot. As an undergraduate in 1971 I played "Urban Dynamics" a simulation game developed by our college chaplain in collaboration with liberal ministers in Chicago and originally called "Ghetto." Urban Dynamics was a territorial capture game, played out on a board that all of us recognized as a map of Chicago. There were four teams, representing (we were told) WASPs, Irish-Americans, White Ethnics, and Blacks. We started with restricted territories but the goal, we were told, was to capture as much territory as possible for our team, to beat back other teams and to achieve positions of power for our members. Beyond that, the rules were vague, but when it came to the big picture, we were told, that was the way the world worked.

I thought the ground rules of the game were simply crazy. The idea that ethnic groups were out to capture territory and expand their holdings seemed the me simply bizarre. I grew up in a tribal area and that was not the way it was. Moreover, the assumption that ethnic groups were competing teams seemed flat out wrong. The ground rules were however non-negotiable and Chaplain made it clear to us that if we thought otherwise we were simply naive. I was Black in the game but wondered why, in real life, I shouldn't be fighting for the WASPs, or why Chaplain wasn't fighting for them. This wasn't what life was like and certainly wasn't what life should be like.

Wright was however playing Urban Dynamics. He bought into the ground-rules of the game, that blacks and other ethnic groups were competing teams whose goals were to capture territory and beat one another up. Of course, it was just a game. His parishioners were not really interested in beating anyone else up and if white folks showed up at his church they would be welcomed. But he was playing Urban Dynamics and assumed, facts be damned, that cynicism, anger, power plays and identity politics would make the world a better place. That is exactly what Americans in 2008 did not want to hear, and with good reason. And that is what Obama rightly rejected when he repudiated Wright.

Gay Bishop Plans His Civil Union Rite
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/us/25bishop.html?ex=1366862400&en=ea7e0a50aa182a67&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Bishop Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopal prelate whose consecration led conservatives to split from the church, said in an interview on Thursday that he and his partner of 20 years were planning a civil union ceremony to be held in his home church in the diocese of New Hampshire in June.

What a self-serving, self-advertising, self-dramatizing, self-righteous and, on the most charitable account, self-deceiving asshole!

Bishop Robinson said that by scheduling the ceremony for June, he did not intend to further inflame conservatives just before the Anglican Communion gathers in August in Cambridge, England, for the Lambeth Conference, which happens only once every 10 years.

Really? It's a remarkable coincidence that the bish should set the date at the optimal time for maximum media exposure in the run-up to Lambeth and provide ample time for journalists to arrange coverage.

He planned his civil union for June, he said, because he wanted to provide some legal protection to his partner and his children before he left for England for the conference.

What protection? And if his partner and children need protection of some sort, why didn't he figure that out sooner?

Bishop Robinson has received death threats, and he wore a bulletproof vest under his vestments at his consecration in 2003.

Can this jackass really believe that anyone cares where he--or his partner--shoves his dick? Did he really worry that the Episcopalians of New Hampshire were out gunning for him? Or was the concern that some bitter, blue-collar Baptist Bubba from rural fly-over country would hop a freight to New Hampshire to shoot him?

Bishop Robinson initially rejected, but has now accepted, the idea that he will spend the conference days in the Marketplace, an adjunct bazaar where church advocacy groups and purveyors of Christian merchandise promote their causes and wares. He said he would position himself in the Marketplace and at several evening events to make his case about how gay relationships are compatible with Christianity.

What fun! A bazaar featuring "Christian merchandise," with booths where Bishop Robinson and representatives of "church advocacy groups" can hawk their ideologies!

Maybe I'm a little unorthodox here but I don't understand why anyone needs to argue that gay relationships are compatible with Christianity any more than they need to argue that gay relationships are compatible with Plato's views about universals, David Lewis's views about possible worlds or Frank Jackson's views about qualia--past or present. Christianity is a package of metaphysical claims about the existence and nature of God and post-mortem survival, associated with a schedule of cultic activities. Metaphysics has nothing to do with where guys should shove their dicks. It's time for the Church to get out of the ethics business and leave it to qualified secular experts--just as in the past the Church wisely ceded cosmology, astronomy, biology and history to secular professionals.

Bishop Robinson said he was surprised at another controversy that arose last year when he endorsed Senator Barack Obama before the New Hampshire primary...Bishop Robinson said he had talked three times with Mr. Obama, of Illinois, and advised him on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues.

Are we surprised? Septuagenarian Teddy Kennedy bought his 5 minutes of cool by endorsing Obama, but it isn't easy for an ugly old guy to be cool, and for a priest it's impossible, no matter how much he yaps about sex and boasts about being gay. I suppose Robinson is looking for a political appointment in the future administration--maybe as Undersecretary for Sexual Affairs.

Bishop Robinson spoke in an interview at The New York Times, and is promoting his new book, “In the Eye of the Storm: Swept to the Center by God” (Seabury Books). The publicity tour will take him to a few unexpected places: a conference of black church leaders and the Hay Festival, a literary gathering in England.

But of course! I expect there will be a book signing at the Marketplace Christian Merchandise Bazaar.

[The opinions expressed here are my personal views and do not reflect the the views of my employer. If you cite or link this piece please include this disclaimer and do not include my professional affiliation]

Krugman on Obama

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/opinion/25krugman.html?hp

A few months ago the Obama campaign was talking about transcendence. Now it’s talking about math...Mr. Obama was supposed to be a transformational figure, with an almost magical ability to transcend partisan differences and unify the nation....Well, now he has an overwhelming money advantage and the support of much of the Democratic establishment — yet he still can’t seem to win over large blocs of Democratic voters, especially among the white working class...Let me offer an alternative suggestion: maybe his transformational campaign isn’t winning over working-class voters because transformation isn’t what they’re looking for.

Transcendence and transformation, whatever they are, are luxuries for the elite. Whatever else Obama is offering, this inspirational, idealistic rhetoric grates on the nerves of people who have real problems: "stuff your transcendence--we want jobs and financial security, health insurance, good schools and safe neighborhoods."

Obama, his groomers and handlers, and his elite groupies don't even get it: they don't understand that this rhetoric plays as "let them eat cake." Of course I don't doubt that if Obama is elected he will actually deliver cake, and bread as well. It is just that this "idealism" as such, and the rhetoric of transcendence and transformation, arouse suspicion and distrust in people who have been fobbed off with symbolic gestures for too long, and offered cheap, worthless intangibles while the material conditions of their lives have steadily degraded.

Unlike Krugman, I do think that Obama will win resoundingly in November--if the Democrats make the case that the misery of these last 8 years hasn't been a result of Bush's personal incompetence but is in fact the inevitable consequence of a failed ideology, and that government is the solution not the problem. That ideology is now so ingrained that it's virtually unfalsifiable. If things go badly we blame that on incompetence or assume that we haven't been consistent in applying the ideology or that we haven't gone far enough or allowed enough time to get the results.

How do you convince the American public, the working class in particular, that for almost 3 decades the US has been involved in a radical experiment which has failed? That for a generation, we have been spending down our capital and going into debt, and that now the chickens have come home to roost?

For Obama, a Struggle to Win Over Key Blocs - New York Times

For Obama, a Struggle to Win Over Key Blocs - New York Times: "Although some polling evidence hints at the depth of racial attitudes in this country and the obstacles Mr. Obama faces winning white voters, it has historically proved challenging to measure how racial attitudes factor into voter decisions. (Respondents do not tend to announce to pollsters that they will not vote for a candidate because he or she is black.) [BUT] It is also hard to discount that Mr. Obama has arrived at this place in his candidacy after winning big victories in very white states." ["But" added]

It isn't race--it's class. But no matter how much evidence to the contrary, pundits are still harping on race.

Race benefits Obama: he would not have won the majority of black votes if he were white any more than Hillary would have won a large block of women if she were male. Of course, it's one of those counterfactuals, but my educated guess is that race doesn't hurt Obama with white voters so much as it helps him with black voters. His problem is that he can't connect with the working class. Among some blacks race tips the balance--after all, Clinton and Obama are very similar when it comes to policy and competence so why not use race as a tie-breaker and vote for a favorite son? There's nothing wrong, or racist, with that anymore than there's something wrong with voting for Hillary because she's a woman--another tie-breaker.

So why do we keep talking about race?

(1) Because we're comfortable talking about race. We Americans have a shameful past; we fought the good fight and made things better, even if there's still a long way to go. We're even comfortable admitting that we still have a race problem--and are still trying to improve. It's part of the grand American story. What we are not willing to admit is that we have a class problem--or that our detestable history of racism has been largely responsible for it.

(2) The commentariat just loves demonizing the white working class--obscuring their snobbery with moralism. Very Victorian. They don't want to admit that they don't like working class people because most working class people are ignorant, inarticulate, conventional, tasteless and boring. So they pretend they disapprove of working class people because they're racists--which, by and large, they are not. They massage their snobbery into righteousness.

(3) Members of the chattering class do not want to admit that they are an elite. I've actually seen a number of articles in response to Bittergate, where Obama supporters point out that Obama is not as rich as the other candidates and, therefore, cannot be accused of elitism. I wonder if these writers are serious. We all know that even if a certain level of wealth is necessary for elite status, it isn't sufficient. Or maybe more precisely, that given a certain level of wealth, your place in the social pecking order is not determined by how rich you are beyond the entry-level wealth requirement for elite status.

I don't think this is going to be a serious issue in the November election. Even if white working class voters don't warm to Obama they'll vote for him. Unless his supporters are so keen to explain why white working class voters aren't enthusiastic by accusing them of racism--and so alienate them.

Aristotle & Obama & Clinton & Mill

Eureka! The real difference between Obama and Clinton supporters is their fundamental take on ethical theory--and that explains the demographics. Obama fans go for Virtue Ethics; Hillary supporters trend Utilitarian. Virtue Ethics is an elitist preoccupation; Utilitarianism is ethics for the rest of us so, predictably, while the elite--individuals, with post-graduate degrees--prefer Obama two to one, high school graduates and drop-outs favor Clinton in the same proportions.

Virtue Ethics and Utilitarianism don't merely give different answers to ethical questions: they frame the moral enterprise differently and ask very different questions. Virtue Ethicists ask: how can I attain arete--excellence or virtue? The moral life on this account is a life of self-cultivation in the interests of achieving virtue, which Virtue Ethicists regard as an essential feature of the good life. It is hardly surprising that Virtue Ethics comes from Aristotle and appealed to fellow members of the Athenian slave-owning rentier class. They had the leisure for self-cultivation and were largely insulated from the circumstances that posed a range of other moral questions.

The illiterate masses, slaves and thetes who worked to eat and ate to work, did not have the education for moral reflection or the time for self-cultivation. If they had, it is unlikely that they would have had any sympathy for Virtue Ethics and very likely that they would have been outraged by their social betters' preoccupation with self-cultivation. "We've got real problems, important problems, and these jerks are making a fuss about cultivating wisdom, courage, honesty and the like. To add insult to injury, they have the gaul to regard these fancy luxury items as important, and the sheer bloody arrogance to imagine that they're worthwhile people because of the virtues they're cultivated."

I'm with the slaves and thetes. That's why Obama's followers repel me. I used to wonder why they made such a big fuss about "change" when the concrete changes Obama proposed were not significantly different from the changes Clinton advocated. Then I realized that what most were looking for was not a change in the material conditions of their lives so much as a change in the way politics was done. They were sick of cynicism, sick of grasping power-hungry politicians, sick of spin-doctors, negative campaigning and attack ads, sick of dirty politics. They wanted politicians who were not politicians. They wanted Virtue.

They can, I suppose, be forgiven. The quest for Virtue has been the central theme of canonical coming-of-age stories since Catcher in the Rye and Salinger's saga of the Glass family. Salinger's fictional world both reflected and formed the moral vision of privileged children for generations to come. Morally awakened in mid-adolescence, these rich brats were shocked to discover that their parents, and other adults, were hypocrites and that the pious stories they'd been told as children were lies. They resonated to Holden Caulfield's whining about "phoniness," and Seymour's noble suicide out his relationship with Muriel, who sat in their honeymoon hotel room varnishing her nails while Seymour was telling whimsical stories about banana fish to a child on the beach. We were taught that these preoccupations were meritorious, that sensitivity, idealism, honesty and courage were admirable, that crass grade-grubbing was despicable, that ordinary middle-class suburbanites with good middle-class jobs were, at best, to be pitied, and that the little boxes made of ticky-tacky in which they lived were a blight on the landscape. Aristotle and the other gentlemen of Athens would have agreed.

I didn't buy it. I was hemmed in at every turn. The few desirable options I had were were long-shots and the possibility that I would end up living a miserable life was a real and present danger. I obsessed about the number of people who had boring jobs--the supermarket checkers and waitresses, and the legions of women doing routine clerical work. I knew the odds of getting an interesting job were low, and that I would have to fight for all I was worth, grub for every grade and bag every academic credential, to get one. At the same time I worried that my academic investment was too risky and cast about for fallback positions. The problem was that if I invested time and effort in securing a fallback position I would undermine my chances of getting an interesting job. I was desperate--calculating probabilities and utilities, and fighting for all I was worth.

I resented my classmates who imagined that they had innumerable options and weren't scared. I detested the idealism of the '60s, the elite preoccupation with saving the earth and ending the war, and with intangible luxury goods--with honesty, courage, and other virtues, and with peace, joy and love. I wanted a house in the burbs, a Dick-and-Jane family, and above all an interesting job where I could work hard at challenging tasks and achieve. I was outraged by my classmates contempt for my aspirations. I resented their elitism--the same elitism that working class Americans perceive in Obama and his groupies.

We're Utilitarians. We're hemmed in: we can't get what we want and are fighting for all we're worth to avoid poverty and drudgery. We can't afford Obama's childish idealism; we detest his vacuous rhetoric about hope and change. We're sick of this privileged elite who are contemptuous of machine politics, disgusted by the Clintons' power plays and shocked by the fact that in this mean, rough, dirty world people have to lie, cheat and fight to survive. We're sick of these rich, spoiled brats whining about the facts of adult life, like Holden Caulfield grousing about "phonies" or the junior members of the Glass family dabbling in Eastern spirituality and questing for Wisdom.

Would Clinton do any better than Obama if she were elected? I doubt it. Both Clinton and Obama are centrists and neither is promising the kind of change that would seriously improve the lives of most Americans--the establishment of a socialist welfare state in which everyone would have unconditional assurance of a minimally decent life. But even though Obama and Clinton are virtually indistinguishable when it comes to policy, they've become symbols of two radically different moral visions: the aristocratic, elitist moral vision of Virtue Ethics and Utilitarianism, the ethic for the rest of us, who are thwarted at every turn, who have had to fight for everything, who can't afford virtue.

Obama the Elitist

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/12/us/politics/12campaign.html?ex=1365739200&en=7092dcb8d6a829b5&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

At the fund-raiser in San Francisco last Sunday, Mr. Obama outlined challenges facing his presidential candidacy in the coming primaries in Pennsylvania and Indiana, particularly persuading white working-class voters who, he said, fell through the cracks during the Bush and Clinton administrations.

“So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” Mr. Obama said, according to a transcript on the Huffington Post Web site, which on Friday published the comments.

The remarks touched off a torrent of criticism from Mrs. Clinton, Mr. McCain and Republican activists and party officials, all accusing Mr. Obama of elitism and belittling the working class.

This has legs--because it's true. And because it's one of the true things that no one dares to say.

So much for the bowling. Yes, we do know in our hearts that Obama doesn't bowl any more than Bush mucks out the cowsheds back at the Crawford ranch. Yes, we know it's an act directed at us. But it seemed well-intentioned: rather like President Karzei wearing a conglomerate Afghan costume concocted out of bits and pieces of the garb of various tribes. When politicians affect the folkways of hoi poloi or make local references to establish a connection to our states and towns they're just trying to make a connection with us, to show they're aware of us and our lives--that they're on our side.

But then a remark like this slips out and we're reminded of what they really think of us and, more fundamentally, that they see us as other--as "you people" who are venting your frustrations by "clinging" to guns or religion, you working class bigots who are stupidly prejudiced against immigrants and minorities because you don't understand the importance of proletarian solidarity. Now we see what a patronizing act the whole thing was all along: we're hurt, and ashamed of having been taken in. We've had a peek behind the scenes and it's ruined the show.

What a pity this had to happen now, because Obama will be nominated and this will dog him. And it's much worse than the Wright episode because it taps into the real problem Obama has with the white working class which is not, as the pundits have repeatedly spun it, race but class. Obama is just too posh: he is an elitist of the worst sort--like the pundits who spin his problem with the white working class as a race problem.

I suspect that the problem most working class people have isn't with race but with latte-drinking liberals who assume that they have a problem with race, write off their legitimate concerns as an irrational response to frustration and imagine that they can be handled--by cute tricks and faux folksiness.

They have real problems and legitimate concerns. They're the ones who compete with immigrants for jobs, and whose wages and benefits are being driven down by cheap immigrant labor. They're the ones who have to worry about a criminal underclass: they don't have the bucks to live in gated communities or safe class-segregated neighborhoods. They're the ones who have to send their kids to public schools where an influx of underclass kids and immigrants with poor English drags their kids down. But instead of taking these concerns seriously, these patronizing elitists assume that they're just ignorant bigots and can be managed.

Big Table Fantasies - New York Times

Big Table Fantasies - New York Times: "Barack Obama insists that the problem with America is that our politics are so “bitter and partisan,” and insists that he can get things done by ushering in a “different kind of politics...John Edwards blames the power of the wealthy and corporate interests for our problems, and says, in effect, that America needs another F.D.R. — a polarizing figure, the object of much hatred from the right, who nonetheless succeeded in making big changes...I have to say that Mr. Obama comes off looking, well, naïve. "

I agree. Like Krugman, who almost always gets it right, I support Edwards and for the same reasons.

What I wonder is why anyone would prefer a vacuous pretty-boy, sponsored by Oprah, to someone who promises to bring about real material improvement. But apparently Oprah has rallied the troops who like Obama for much the same reason that they like Oprah.

I suspect that the reason is that after 30 years of eating shit they don't believe that the conditions of their lives can be improved. Oprah's constituency is almost exclusively female and largely working class. Over half of them have family incomes under $40,000 a year. They spend their days doing dead-end, boring, drudge work without either security or any real chance of advancement. They're uninsured or underinsured and know that one major illness could wipe them out. They're in debt, juggling to make mortgage payments and pay back Pay Day Loans. But they're so used to it, so imbued with peasant-fatalism, that they don't seriously believe that things can be any better. They think that the best they can hope for is niceness and hand-patting.

Oprah is the Opium of the People. When material improvement is impossible, people read self-help books and work on their souls. When they can't get the real goods they revel in smarm, obsess about "relationships," aspire to a "purpose-driven life" and delude themselves into imagining that these cheap intangibles are what make life worthwhile.

Marx was right, though he got the details wrong. He couldn't have anticipated the new secular religion of Oprah, self-help and generic "spirituality"--religion minus the cult, art and metaphysics. It isn't the pie-in-the-sky doctrine or religion in the narrow sense, liturgy and theology, that lulls people into a stupor and induces them to collaborate with their oppressors. It's the religious attitude, the idea that what matter are these intangibles, the search for "meaning," the taste for niceness, the obsession with "relationships" and psychological matters, the drippy sentimentality and self-deception, that block us from achieving the Good Life.

Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Academic Freedom and Evolution

Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Academic Freedom and Evolution: "But the groups arguing for freedom of expression of evolution deniers have not been heard agitating for the rights of Richard Colling. He’s a professor at Olivet Nazarene University, in Illinois, who has been barred from teaching general biology or having his book taught at the university that is his alma mater and the place where he has taught for 27 years. A biologist who is very much a person of faith, these punishments followed anger by some religious supporters of the college over the publication of his book in which he argues that it is possible to believe in God and still accept evolution. “I thought I was doing the church a service,” Colling said in an interview. He believes that religious colleges that frame science and faith as incompatible will lose some of their best minds, and that his work has been devoted to helping faithful students maintain their religious devotion while learning science as science should be taught."

I think I've discovered a new informal fallacy. It should have a Latin tag like the rest of them but since my Latin is limited to singing-Latin I'll tentatively tag it the "Means-Ends Flip-Flop Fallacy." It is the fallacy of opposing some practice because it has bad consequences and then opposing the elimination of the bad consequences in order to discourage people from engaging in the practice.

So, Fundamentalists oppose the teaching of evolution because, they believe, it will undermine religious belief. Along comes a biologist--and not the only biologist--who argues that Christianity and the theory of evolution are compatible. Now the Fundamentalists trash him because, presumably, if loss of faith isn't a threat more people will believe in evolution.

A pattern emerges. In the old days, adults tried mightily to dissuade teenage girls from having sex because it could lead to pregnancy, which would seriously mess up their lives. Fair, I suppose. Subsequently things got fixed so that sex wouldn't have those dire consequences. The Pill and other effective birth control methods became available; abortion was legalized; and girls who had babies were no longer automatically expelled from school or stigmatized. Now the puritans are trying mightily to see to it that girls don't have access to effective contraception or abortion and that pregnancy is punished in order to dissuade girls from having sex.

Then there are recreational drugs. We're waging an unwinnable War Against Drugs because we don't want to support the criminal subculture that surrounds their sale and use. If we legalized them, the criminal subculture would evaporate--or, more likely, get into some other line of illegal business. But we won't legalize them because that would remove the penalties for the use of recreational drugs.

Then there are illegal aliens. We don't like them because, we believe, they're dirty, dangerous and live in ditches and because, since they have no legal rights, can't unionize, and so can be exploited by employers, they drive down wages for working class Americans. If we legalized them, provided them with a path to citizenship and enforced anti-discrimination regulations they wouldn't live in ditches or work in the informal sector for sub-minimum wages under the table and so wouldn't drive down wages for working class Americans. But if we legalized them we might end up with more immigrants.

So here is the fallacy. We don't like x because it has y consequences. We become so accustomed to associating x with these bad y consequences that we come to believe that x is bad per se. Then, we oppose disassociating x with its bad consequences because we recognize that if x didn't cause y more people would do x.

I wonder: suppose there were a pill that provided all the benefits of exercise and a healthy diet. I would bet that the puritans would oppose making it available to the public on the grounds that if people could get it they wouldn't bother with exercise or healthy food.

Islam’s Silent Moderates - New York Times: "It is often said that Islam has been “hijacked” by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates. But where are the moderates? Where are the Muslim voices raised over the terrible injustice of incidents like these? How many Muslims are willing to stand up and say, in the case of the girl from Qatif, that this manner of justice is appalling, brutal and bigoted — and that no matter who said it was the right thing to do, and how long ago it was said, this should no longer be done?...while the incidents in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and India have done more to damage the image of Islamic justice than a dozen cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, the organizations that lined up to protest the hideous Danish offense to Islam are quiet now."

Ayaan Hirsi Ali suggests that the problem is Islam. But here, I believe, she is dead wrong. The problem is the "Solidarity of the Oppressed" and the valorization of lower class males, the peasants and proles. This is an old story in the West and, in particular, amongst elite leftists.

During the Vietnam Era, we counterculture chickies were supposed to support our men by waitressing so that they could do the important theoretical work of the Revolution--reading Marcuse, drinking beer and singing old union songs. We did our part for the cause by doing the secretarial work while they organized, speechified, and played political games: the position of women in the movement was, as Bobby Seele put it, "prone." Black women were even worse off. There was a remarkable comedy sketch on "In Living Color" years ago, in the form of a monologue by a black woman: "I'm a proud Black woman. I support the Cause. And when my man come home, he beat the crap out of me." This was the Freudian Moynihan Doctrine: to promote the interests of blacks, it was vital to boost the self-esteem of young underclass males by providing them with education, training, jobs and promoting female subordination. The problem, as Moynahan and his successors saw it, was "black matriarchy": women could support themselves--by welfare or menial work--and so undermined fragile male egos. The fix was to see to it that men got education, training, jobs and opportunities and that women didn't get those opportunities or welfare "as we knew it" so that they would be forced to depend on men for financial support.

The progressive/liberal view was that women could wait. And, of course, the conservative view was that they could, and probably should wait, forever. Progressives in any case held that women's concerns weren't a priority. First we needed to combat the oppression of minority males and when that was taken care of there would be time for luxuries like feminism. In the meantime women were supposed to sacrifice their interests to support the cause of minority empowerment, which meant the empowerment of lower class minority males, sacrificing to support the Solidarity of the Oppressed. In the developing world, women's rights could wait. First we had to take down imperialism and neo-colonialism. The priority was the fight against Western hegemony which included Western feminism. Once that was fixed there would be time to attend to women's interests. Women, in any case, could wait: feminism was a luxury, a frill. First fix it for the men and then maybe we could afford the luxury of women's rights.

Hirsi Ali is wrong: Islam is not the problem. The Old Testament is bloody awful: there are plenty of texts that are comparable to the one from the Koran that she cites. But contemporary Jews don't behave like their ancestors did 3 milennia ago. Christians destroyed pagan shrines, killed heretics and unbelievers, conducted crusades and ran inquisitions. Bu they don't do that anymore. The texts are there, and there's ample historical precedent for behaving badly, but no one pays any attention. Religion isn't the issue.

So why don't "moderate Muslims" denounce the brutality of their co-religionists? Because Muslims have been defined as a victim group and the Solidarity of the Oppressed Doctrine dictates that even if privileged members of victim groups find the behavior of their fellow victims stupid, brutal or even just plain silly they mustn't let one and, most particularly, mustn't go public since that would be aiding and supporting the Oppressor. That would be Uncle Tomism of the worst sort. So black women were supposed to stand by their men. And feminists like me are supposed to support other feminists however stupid or pointless their projects. And "moderate Muslims" are not supposed to criticize their fellow Muslims: to do so would be to sell out, to provide aid and comfort to the Oppressor.

It isn't religion. Christians feel free to criticize fellow Christians and to repudiate their views because we aren't defined as a victim group. Mainline Christians, including me, publicly repudiate the doctrines and practices of Fundamentalists, and Fundamentalists publicly denounce us. We squabble in the public square about evolution, sexual ethics, and everything else because as members of a privileged group we don't have any obligation to show solidarity. Muslims, defined as a victim group, don't have that luxury. They're obliged to circle the wagons.

The question is whether this is a good strategy and experience suggests that it is not.

Episcopal Diocese Votes to Secede - New York Times

Episcopal Diocese Votes to Secede - New York Times: "FRESNO, Calif., Dec. 8 — The Diocese of San Joaquin voted on Saturday to cut ties with the Episcopal Church, the first time in the church’s history a diocese has done so over theological issues and the biggest leap so far by dissident Episcopalians hoping to form a rival national church in the United States...

It will be a huge, huge legal battle,” said the Rev. Ephraim Radner, a leading Episcopal conservative and professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College in Toronto. “The costs involved will bleed the Diocese of San Joaquin and the Episcopal Church, and it will lead only to bad press. You have to wonder why people are wasting money doing this and yet claiming to be Christians.”

You do have to wonder. But I'd say that the national Church and its various local subsidiaries are pouring out this dough because they can. EUCSA is stinking rich and can't even begin to use up those bucks paying denominational bureaucrats, of whom there are many, lavish salaries or maintaining a high-rise on prime Manhattan real estate. "815" (Second Avenue, NY) sucks up money that goes from individuals to parishes, parishes to dioceses, and thence to HQ. Moreover, some dioceses and parishes are flush with endowment and sitting on very expensive real estate themselves.

But the money they spend going at one another full throttle will be chickenfeed compared to the costs of a US presidential campaign. The cost for the 2004 race was 4 billion and the current campaign is expected to be significantly more expensive. So this is how the Market works. Consider the transaction costs in legal fees and advertising: doing business as such costs money. And the cost of doing business seems to be greater than the intrinsic value of the product. It's like they're selling pet rocks, where the only value of the product comes from it's being packaged and marketed. Moreover, when firms that sell pet rocks compete, the only way they can add more value to their products is through better packaging and more extensive advertising. So to compete, since their products are inherently worthless, firms compete by spending more and more on the inherently worthless business of doing business.

This isn't a flaw that comes from the lack of fit between the market model and the real world: it isn't a consequence of irrationality. It's inherent in the very nature of competition. People have a taste for products that are effectively packaged and advertised. That's de gustibus so we can't call them irrational for acting on it. Nevertheless, at least intuitively, advertising and packaging are a waste just as war is a waste. Yet in both cases the costs get cranked up higher and higher just because there is a competition, just because the market is, after a fashion, working.

So here is the Episcopal Church fighting this war which is a war of pure waste. No one dies but nothing material is accomplished. It's simply a matter of pouring out money in legal fees so that lawyers can draw up documents and argue with one another until one side runs out of money and has to say uncle.

US: Record Numbers for World’s Leading Jailer (Human Rights Watch, 5-12-2007)

US: Record Numbers for World’s Leading Jailer (Human Rights Watch, 5-12-2007):

"the United States is the world’s leading prison nation,” said David Fathi, director of the US program at Human Rights Watch. “Americans should ask why the US locks up so many more of its citizens than do Canada, Britain, and other democratic countries. The US is even ahead of governments like China that use prisons as a political tool.”"

Easy question. This is the new Jim Crow. A significant number of Americans assume that there's an unsalvageable underclass that can't be educated, made productive or civilized but can only be contained. In the past, in northern cities as well as the South, they were warehoused in no-go areas where they couldn't do damage to the rest of us.

According to the narrative, the end of segregation opened the Gates of Hell: the damned poured out to rape and pillage, and the cities burned. Those were the Long Hot Summers yesteryear. Since then, in place of urban ghettos we've created a mass incarceration system to warehouse them and keep them from doing damage to the rest of us.

Obama the Feminist: No Thanks

Feminist Pitch by a Democrat Named Obama - New York Times

The Obama campaign is, in some ways, subtly marketing its candidate as a postfeminist man, a generation beyond the gender conflicts of the boomers. In the video released this week, Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois, says that Mr. Obama understands issues of concern to women “in his gut,” not as “a kind of pandering.” The writer Alice Walker describes Mr. Obama as “someone who honors the feminine values of caring for all.” Obama strategists also highlight his leadership style — his promise of consensus-building and moving beyond the politics of polarization and fear — as especially appealing to women. “His message is about listening, bringing people together, the skills women appreciate,” said Betsy Myers, the campaign’s chief operating officer.

What a bullshitter--and what patronizing, sexist crap: "feminine values of caring for all" and the idea that "consensus-building" is supposed to be "appealing to women." It's good to know that women are still going for tough old Hillary.

There was not a damn thing in this article on Obama's "feminist pitch" about what Obama proposes to do for women, or for anyone else. Is he going to promote equal pay for equal work--or even better, equal work for women? Is he planning to establish universal pre-school? Does he have any views about family leave? Does he have any ideas about training programs for low-income women? Not that I could see.

This man is vacuous. But much, much worse he, or at least his groomers and trainers, are sexists of the worst sort, imagining that even though he isn't offering women anything, women will vote for him because he's a caring Sensitive New Age Guy. And women will of course prefer to have a man in authority, providing that he's sensitive, protective and "caring," than a fellow-women.

Sorry. Women, particularly working class women, are still enthusiastic about Hillary. And Hillary also gets a bigger share of the black vote than Obama. Working class women and minorities, who have serious practical concerns, don't care about Obama's "caring."

I'm still for Edwards. He's more focused on bread-and-butter issues than any of the other candidates and further to the left. That's all that matters to me. But I warm to Hillary and will be delighted to vote for her if she's nominated. My second-favorite president, after Teddy Roosevelt, was Lyndon Johnson--that ugly cuss of a professional politician, consumate wheeler-dealer, tough guy and master of the Senate, who established the Great Society and took down Jim Crow. Kennedy, beatified as a martyr, really wasn't much of anything: he botched things with Cuba and almost got us into a nuclear holocaust; he did little or nothing for civil rights or for the alleviation of poverty. We don't need another JFK or, even worse, another Clean Gene McCarthy leading a Children's Crusade. We need a tough, pragmatic--even corrupt--politician who can get results.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | India's 'pink' vigilante women

You go, girl!

BBC NEWS | South Asia | India's 'pink' vigilante women: "They wear pink saris, the traditional Indian dress for women, go after corrupt officials and boorish men, and brandish sticks and axes when the push comes to shove."

This is what women should be doing--not hugging trees.