I see that I haven't been posting much this month. It's been a harried month.

The Ted Kennedy Medicaid for All amendment

Robert Reich calls it like it is, and gets impassioned about restoring the public option to health reform.
"But what more can possibly be compromised? Take away the word "public?" Make it available to only twelve people? "

Subject matter

Hmm. When I started this blog I thought it would probably be mostly about news, followed by health reform, mental illness, and textile history. Instead it seems to be mostly about news, followed by feminism and/or sexuality. Well, writing is a process of discovery. And one of the uncomfortable things about blogging is that more of the process often ends up on display.

Salon's weird sniplet on feminist road trips

I'm not ready to write about this yet--seems like, for instance, I should probably read the book--but I do have to say that it strikes me as something other than coincidental that one of the two "20-something" authors should have killed herself less than two years after this cross-country drive "redefining feminism".
I guess I keep thinking somebody should warn young people that life is hard, and that the answers we have not yet found are sometimes missing not because old people are stupid but because some of the questions defy solution.
Oh, and that there might well be a few barriers to becoming the feminist Kerouac and Cassady besides not knowing how to have fun.

Obama acknowledges war dead exist

Link to photos here.
I am going to believe for now that this means he appreciates the consequences of his war policies better than his predecessor. Or at least that he's still part of the reality-based community, in which allowing or prohibiting the photo op does not change the fact.

9th leading cause of death? Lack of coverage

This Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance study estimates that 45,000 deaths are caused each year in the US by lack of health insurance.
Meanwhile, to get on the CDC's list of leading causes of death in the US, the annual number of victims per year has to top Septicemia, number 10 at 34,234. Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis comes in at number 9, with 45,344 -- right about even with the study's estimate of coverage-linked deaths. (Caveat: the Institute of Medicine, in 2002, found a much lower rate of death linked to lack of insurance, but still considered it enough to constitute a "crisis")

There's still time to add your picture to Move On's photo-petition to the President reminding him that his base supports a strong public option. And Paul Krugman assures you if we get health reform, it will work.

Thinking too much

You know, in thinking some more about the issue of comments it has occurred to me that it's an example of exactly the power imbalance described in Schrodinger's Rapist. That is, that my friend's (Hi, Dave*) complaint, that he couldn't comment on my blog, treads on the idea that I get to set my own risk tolerance, ignores a signal I might have been sending by limiting the sources from which I want to receive comments, and is to some extent or another, kind of the electron version of this one, that his desire to interact trumps my right to be left alone -- or, in this case, my right to feel safe.

"So if you speak to a woman who is otherwise occupied, you’re sending a subtle message. It is that your desire to interact trumps her right to be left alone. If you pursue a conversation when she’s tried to cut it off, you send a message. It is that your desire to speak trumps her right to be left alone. And each of those messages indicates that you believe your desires are a legitimate reason to override her rights."

So I have to think about this. Dave's a little older than me, and has always considered himself a feminist in the sense that he likes strong, smart women, encourages them in the workplace, and doesn't infantilize them. He's my friend because he's encouraged my career since the 1980s, and because he helped me move out of the apartment I shared with a physically abusive mate. Not, you know, one of the bad guys. Without wanting to make his argument for him -- after all, I opened the blog to comments so he could make his own arguments here if he wants -- I think his relatively unprotective ideology has to do with the idea that treating women like delicate flowers is likely to limit their opportunities and is its own form of disrespect. But, oh, you know, there are shades of gray in here that don't lend themselves to polemicizing. I tried for a very long time to be as strong and tough as men, to compete in the world without special accommodations for girliness; but it hasn't protected me from violence, sexual and otherwise; and weirdly enough it has gotten in my way professionally, where people really wanted something a bit more deferential and conventional. Something in heeled pumps.

Nonetheless, there are also the issues framed in Schrodinger's Rapist, the Kathy Sierra case, and elsewhere. I do, actually, appreciate that it is not very nice, if you are trying to be a Nice Man, to feel that you must always be under suspicion. But it is something worse than not very nice, if you are trying to be a responsible, self-sufficient woman, to know that some significant percentage of people are going to see nothing about you but your sexual availability or lack thereof. What I have carried with me ever since I was raped is the sense that nothing I had achieved, created, felt, thought, made of myself, or inherently simply was, none of it mattered. For me, that was what was soul-killing about rape -- that no matter what, I was just nothing but a thing that could be fucked. I had tried for ideological reasons to imagine that rape was not a big deal, as the only way I could think of (forgive me, I was young) to actually protect myself from the psychological damage. It didn't work. I felt erased. And because of the circumstances -- but it's hard to imagine a rape without equivalent circumstances -- it was also impossible to avoid the fact that the rapist might just as easily have killed me. I was obviously not human by reason of being female; he had demonstrated control of my body and the complete irrelevance of everything else about me; and so the difference between rape and murder was, like the rape itself, merely a matter of the direction his whim took. And I didn't know I wasn't going to be killed until I wasn't. I always try to honor that experience by reminding people that rape isn't just unwanted sex; it's unwanted sex with the threat of murder.

Now, I know that admitting I've been raped will be grounds for a certain percentage of readers to just discount this post -- oh, she is damaged, her reactions are extreme. But if 1/6 of women will be raped in their lifetimes, um, that's a lot of women whose thoughts on the issue -- of women's safety -- would be discounted. They are also, logically speaking, the women whose thoughts might be the most pertinent, since they have direct experience of sex-based violence. Instead of dismissing survivors of violence as outliers, maybe they should be embraced as experts. And instead of feeling falsely accused, perhaps Nice Men could feel enjoined to help create a climate of increased safety for women, both the twitchy ones who have already experienced sexual violence, and the others who don't know if or when or how they may be fated to join that sorority.

And, you know, if you can e-mail me to complain that there's no way to comment on the blog, um, couldn't you say what you have to say in the e-mail?

By the way, this is an attempt at irony, like, if there's no harm in being publicly identified, then no problem with using your name, eh? And yet, not really, as "David" was the sixth most frequent male name given in the decade 1940-1949. Some 22,257 Social Security records from the age cohort sport this given name.

Introducing comments

I am a big chicken, and when I first started this blog, I didn't want to deal with comments. Too many horror stories out there about women bloggers being harrassed, not for their ideas, but for their looks, and, well, I am notoriously plain and old. I figured that approximately one person was reading it anyway, and she writes me almost every day. A second person has now looked at the blog and is somewhat fumfered that it does not allow comments. It had not occurred to me that this person, or anyone else non-hostile, would want to comment. But I suppose I ought to allow comments and see what happens. For now I am moderating them, to limit the damage to innocent civilians. After a few weeks of inactivity, I'll probably take down the moderating. Or the comments.
In the meantime, I have been reminded of a discussion I once had with this second person (Hi, Dave!) about Margaret Atwood's story of asking a classroom of undergraduates what their greatest fear was in going on a date. The men said, "being laughed at." The women said, "being murdered." In honor of which, I must link to the delightful this: Schrodinger's Rapist.

What's wrong with this lead graf?

From today's Boston Herald:
State police divers and Boston cops scoured the Charles River yesterday for any trace of 24-year-old William Hurley, who mysteriously vanished outside a Bruins [team stats] game on Thursday.

The Book That Will Not Die

Sigh. The editor at McGraw-Hill told the contractor doing the final mss. and pouring the text into pages that I would be answering the author queries. Didn't tell me, so the first I heard of it was two weeks ago when the other contractor contacted me with chapters. I like the other contractor but that doesn't mean I'm actually enjoying the work that much. I am filling in nutrition analyses on recipes. Mostly, the dietary fiber content is missing, but that still means recalculating the whole recipe on the online electronic recipe calculator. And the problem with that is that the recipes missing the fiber numbers are the ones where the "author" supplied the nutrition info. So when I do the recalculation, it inevitably turns out the numbers are wrong. All the numbers. What appears to have happened is the "author" tweaked the recipes but didn't bother to re-do the nutrition info. It is, like, the one thing I didn't think I had to check on the originals -- I figured where she lifted the nutrition info along with the recipe, the nutrition info would be correct. The other thing that I'm doing is filling in holes I really, really, really hoped the editors at McGraw would deal with -- like, do fresh blueberries and dried blueberries really count as two separate foods? Basically by the time this is over I will have written the whole damned book, in the most inefficient way possible. And the worst of it is, it isn't remotely the book I would have written. For one thing, I hate peaches. Every time I have to calculate the nutrition info of a recipe with peaches in it I think, "What the hell am I doing this for? I'm not putting peaches in anything!"

Well, no. The worst thing is I'll be lucky if I get $2,500 for this. I bet the "author" is getting at least $10,000.

In case you're not already reading Matt Taibbi

If you are not already reading Matt Taibbi, it might be time you looked him up.
Taibbi is the offspring of Mike Taibbi, who was, in my youthful journalist years, a local TV news correspondent. I saw Taibbi pére having dinner once at Joyce Chen's at 11 at night back when I was enthusiastic enough about news to be starstruck by local TV news correspondents.
And that is probably why this offering from Taibbi fils particularly warms the cockles of my profoundly cynical heart in this time of unemployment, disillusion, and retrenchment:

"Let me just say that I’m always suspicious when I see articles about the motivations of journalists. I think they often reflect a misunderstanding of what journalism is all about. Journalists are supposed to be assholes. The system does not work, in fact, if society’s journalists are all nice, kind, friendly, rational people.

"You want a good percentage of them to be inconsolably crazy. You want them to be jealous of everything and everyone and to have heaps of personal hangups and flaws. That way they will always be motivated to punch holes in things."

There's more; equally insightful.

There are several problems with the takeover of news media by publicly-traded corporations. The first is that journalism, like almost every other process intended to result in a functional product, requires some specialized expertise, which the junior MBA wizards in mergers and acquisitions almost never possess, appreciate, or even recognize. I was once privileged to work for a magazine that had been bought out by such a conglomerate (well, actually, nearly all the magazines I've worked for have been bought out by such conglomerates.) In this case, the new owners installed a CEO who decreed that papers, files, books, folders, and materials of any kind could not be left on desktops, bookshelves, or any other horizontal surface overnight. This was before the World Wide Web required a graphical interface (remember Lynx?) and quite a lot of the research material upon which magazine articles were based appeared in the form of written notes, photocopies, books, pamphlets, letters, and faxes; and manuscripts spent much of their working lifespans on paper. Asking us to work without leaving paper on our desks was tantamount to requiring Detroit to make cars without stocking buckets of bolts.

Now, I have read the management books that say you should handle each paper that crosses your desk only once, deal with it or delegate it immediately, and leave your desk clean at the end of every day. That may work for an executive with very short-term goals and a very short attention span; it was never meant as advice for writers of nonfiction. But this publishing genius also arrived early each morning and (while checking horizontal surfaces for contraband, I suppose) patrolled the window offices, adjusting the venetian blinds so that each and every one fell exactly one inch above its sill. Apparently he was unaware that our paying customers -- advertisers -- never actually saw the building. There was no one to impress with our tidiness.

The corporate misunderstanding of journalism has its most destructive effect in the failure to grasp that there's a sound commercial reason for the firewall between content and advertising in the way news media are (or used to be) run: without it, there's no product. In the traditional news media business model, the customers are advertisers and the commodity being sold is readers. But to attract and retain readers, you have to provide a publication that they can trust and learn from. Readers know when they're being fed propaganda and advertorial, and they lose interest. All those brilliant schemes to build synergy for advertisers rest upon an essential misapprehension of the business, and, not coincidentally, undermine the credibility and value of the news content, driving readers away.

The second problem is related to the first, an extension of corporate owners' misunderstanding of the business they bought: most newspapers and magazines could, prior to the current rationalization forced by the digitization of media, deliver a fairly steady, consistent profit, the kind of thing that could support an extended family, like the Hearsts or the Sulzbergers, in sufficient luxury, while providing them with a gratifying sense of civic gravitas. What they couldn't do then and certainly can't do now, is provide an ever-increasing profit margin to satisfy investors who require growth -- which is what Wall Street demands. Papers used to make a solid 20% profit year in, year out. Which is sufficient, for a privately-held company that understands newspapers. But start demanding that the margin grow -- not just the amount of profit, but the percentage -- and the whole thing falls apart. Publicly-traded owners, in order to create the impression of meeting their fiduciary responsibility to their investors, slash resources, and further undermine the validity of the content, alienating readers further.

The third problem -- and the one that has, I think, driven a lot of the best reporting to the Web, where not only doesn't anyone know if you're a dog, they also don't know what look you have on your face while you're reading the latest memo from Headquarters -- is that it's impossible to staff a news organization with people who fit in the corporate interpersonal mode. As Taibbi points out, we are assholes. It is our job to ask impolite questions, to have trouble with authority figures, to keep irregular hours, and to fail to aspire to management. We are motivated by being given enough rope. What we want is to be left alone to track down the truth, and then to have a platform through which we can expose that truth to the light of day.

Taibbi again:

"Obviously it would be bad if all journalists were like this, and there is certainly a place for the more gentlemanly school, i.e. those writers and TV reporters who maintain good relationships with politicians and institutions, and work with them to deliver important information to the public.

"But the iconoclastic school of journalist should be a difficult person. You know how when you go on the subway, there’s always one asshole on the train who just has to whip a pen out and draw a mustache on the face of the cute blond stewardess in the Jet Blue ad? That’s the kind of person we’re talking about. A pain in the ass on the subway, and in most places (and personal relationships, for that matter), but very useful in this particular profession."

When you try to turn a news organization into just another corporate office, you end up with HR screeners who don't understand that you might want an employee that walked off a previous job; with corporate strategies that require reporters to stop caring about the only thing that really motivates us; and with a culture that demands a kind of hypocrisy, truthlessness, submission to hierarchy, and taste in footwear that are frankly incompatible with effective reporting. If you want your employees to aggressively question the mayor, you have to put up with employees who will also aggressively question you.

Which is why I find it silly to blame the Internet for the decline of news. If the Internet has made nothing else obvious, it has shown that, after they've satisfied their appetite for porn, people really want news -- news that is tailored to their interests and obsessions. But in abandoning the firewall -- the understanding that you secure readers by giving them news and information that is of interest and value to them and then deliver those readers to the advertisers -- and converting the content of news itself into direct political and commercial messages, corporate management has gutted its own product. It can't provide advertisers with captive readers, and the harder -- and/or more insidious -- the sell, the more readers desert.

It's as simple as this: people are smart enough to mute the commercials. When you make it all one big commercial, they take their attention elsewhere. And if you want to get their attention back, you're going to need some loose cannons who care more about the truth than about the org chart.

Sexuality, feminism, and ambivalence

At the end of last month, a news item reawakened my ongoing ambivalence about feminism and sexuality.

Salon's Broadsheet has a good summary of the current event, which basically began with Naomi Wolf's op-ed for the Sydney Morning Herald, "Behind the veil lives a thriving Muslim sexuality", followed by Phyllis Chesler's spirited rejoinder "The Burqa: Ultimate Feminist Choice?" followed by about 500 reader comments, and David Horowitz and several conservative pundits piling on.

So, to address the original essay: I find it pretty hard to believe that anyone, even Naomi Wolf, seriously considers the main problem with veiling women in Muslim societies is that it impairs their sexuality. I thought it was pretty obvious that veiling is all about defining women in terms of their sexuality. It is because their sexuality is so all-encompassing that their entire lives must be lived "appropriate[ly] channeling" it. That, it seems to me, is the problem: it would be nice if their lives could be about something beyond sexuality.

Also, about Wolf's insipid adventure wearing a salwaar kameez to the market in Morocco -- I have a few salwaar kameez outfits, and wear them in the summer because they are comfortable. But it's basically a long tunic with baggy pants and a scarf. It's just not that different from the other summer clothes I wear as a person who sunburns easily. If Wolf got a novel sense of freedom from wearing a salwaar, I have to wonder what the hell she is sporting the rest of the time. Salwaar kameez is not niqab, burqa or chador. It's a fricking pantsuit. If you feel exploited in the clothes you choose, should you be writing about choice at all?

But the main issue that Wolf's essay and the subsequent discussion brought into focus for me is this: When something is used in the vast majority of instances as an integral element of a system that dehumanizes, exploits, deprives, and abuses women, celebrating it as a feminist "choice" is dangerous. Eliding the exceptional occasions when its adoption truly is a "choice" with the much larger system of oppression provides political cover for a host of abuses, and risks blaming the victims of that system for their own exploitation -- their "choice".

My discomfort with celebrating the veil has given me some insight into my trés un-chic discomfort with celebrating pornography and sex work. For every Jenna Jameson who controls her own career and becomes a millionaire, there are hundreds of girls and women worldwide kidnapped into sexual slavery. And as simplistic and old-fashioned as it is for me to equate pornography in the US to the larger sex trade, it is also simplistic to pretend that a few dozen Jenna Jamesons mean sex work is an empowering, feminist "choice". Mostly, it isn't.

And I'll confess that it's this context that gives me the creeps about some aspects of sex-positive feminism. If for the most part women's sexuality is still used to victimize them, to limit their choices in education, vocation, reproduction, and even movement, then it is, at the very least, short-sighted and self-centered to adopt the symbols of sexual exploitation as if they were merely another option for self-expression.

It is true that women should be free to express their sexuality and not be exploited for it; but is adopting the frank symbols of exploitation really the expression of our own sexuality? It makes me wonder if we will ever know what a real expression of our own sexuality might be. I think not in my lifetime.

I turned 13 in 1970, and as far as sexuality and feminism go, that was more or less the moment when being treated as a combination of support staff for, and spoils of, "the revolution" awoke social-activist women to the necessity for second-wave feminism. I ended up with a mix of leftover 60s pro-sexuality and a feminist belief that I should not allow myself to be treated any differently than a man. I wrote letters to the editor of the local newspaper asking to get drafted so I could flee to Canada.

When I was a teenager, I trotted myself off to Planned Parenthood and got an IUD because I wanted to believe that women's sexuality would be the same as men's if it weren't for the risk of pregnancy. (This was before the AIDS epidemic, and the known STDs appeared to have been well-controlled by antibiotics. The Golden Age.) And then I really tried to match the sexual opportunism of my male friends. I felt an obligation to the ideals of both feminism and freedom to set aside squeamishness and romantic illusions.

What I found was that this left me vulnerable to other kinds of exploitation; despite having taken care of the risk of pregnancy, it wasn't that much fun to have sex just because it was offered. Being naked with another person was some kind of personal, and it turned out there were people I didn't want to get that personal with.

In college, I was exposed to the argument that heterosexuality is bad feminism because "it attempts to convert men one at a time." I objected, because I felt, and still do, that sexual attraction is not innately ideological. (What I said then was that it is about "who makes your socks roll up and down.") We have come to accept this argument about homosexuality; it doesn't seem like that big a stretch to extend it to heterosexuality.

But I will be the first to admit that conducting feminist heterosexuality in practice is not always easy. I appreciate the sexual jolt of the forbidden, of the secret, of the transgressive -- and I appreciate that as social conventions shift, what is forbidden, or secret, or transgressive becomes a moving target. Indeed I worry that the normalization and mainstreaming of so much sexual activity will take all the fun out of it.

But I also think, in choosing our playthings, we who are rich and well-fed and well-educated and well-protected have two competing responsibilities. One is, without doubt, that we should use our position to take greater risks, to play artistically at the edges of danger. I assume that's what Wolf was doing in her essay, and what my friends who write erotic fiction or perform in burlesque shows are doing -- raising the intellectual challenge that we consider what is sexy about these things and why. But that kind of artistic challenge to convention seems to me a relatively rarefied act, something that can lose its meaning, as well as its artistic edge, when it becomes commonplace. Worse, it can cause us to forget the larger world in which women's sexuality is still used against them -- and to forget that at any moment, that "larger world" may include the very place where we are standing.

For me, the responsibility that seems more appropriate to everyday use is the second one. In choosing our playthings, I think we have an obligation to be careful not to make toys of what are still first and foremost weapons. It will be time to treat the the veil (and other symbols of sexual repression) and prostitution (and other symbols of sexual exploitation) as toothless toys only when women are no longer their daily victims.

In lieu of flowers

Okay, seriously, once health reform is passed I will go back to telling stories about Ted cheating at Harvard and hitting on high-school girls after his divorce, and seeing him walk down a Boston street in February eating an ice-cream cone, which is one of the field signs of a true Bostonian but probably did not help him keep his girlish figure. But even my cynicism isn't ready to go there yet. Instead, here is a call to action in Sen. Kennedy's honor, from Joe Conason, who is not usually this good, perhaps because passion and decency really do trump worldliness and ironic detachment. At least some of the time.

Ted Kennedy wanted the public option
"...It is true that Kennedy, the friendly warrior, excelled in bipartisanship. Nearly all of the domestic reforms mentioned here were sponsored by at least one Republican senator. But in every case, those stodgy conservatives were cajoled and whispered (and perhaps shamed) into venturing much closer to Kennedy's perspective. He drew them toward him, invariably against their own habits, not by selling out his progressive goal, but by appealing to the decency he perceived in them.
... [But we] know that he could shout as well as whisper — and that he could be partisan as well as bipartisan. He believed that the time for incremental changes had passed. He was ready to fight. The tragedy of his death is not only that he didn't see the triumph he had dreamed, but that he fell before he could lead the nation to that final victory. Now that victory will have to be won in his name."

I *heart* Barney Frank

Barney, Barney, if you weren't gay and I weren't 51 I would ask to have your children:

Scary thoughts on race

Frank Rich, as always a bit too honest for comfort, today holds forth on what he's calling "racial and nativist panic" among the likes of Brit Hume, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and William Kristol, in reaction to the demographic and political fact that "an entire country is changing faster than these white guys bargained for".
The piece is, as usual, insightful, well-reasoned, and sharply written. And it made me pause for a moment to realize that I don't really have a clue which aspects of my life are made possible entirely by what sociology departments used to call "white privilege". That's the problem with privilege; you get to take it for granted. It's hard enough to cope with age and injury, the way those things disrupt what I thought was just the way the world worked and always would. It's hard enough to cope with the changes in my profession, and the devaluation of some of my best skills. I hadn't sat down lately and thought about what happens when the issue isn't, "how fair am I to ethnic minorities?" but, "how fairly can I be expected to be treated when I am the ethnic minority?"
My one experience in this role, being among the 10% of white kids bused into the city's one all-black elementary school in fifth grade, in 1968, to meet integration quotas, was not pleasant: it included being beaten up on the playground, having my lunchbox stolen, being mocked for my facial asymmetry, and once getting punched into my desk in math class by a classmate who thought I was laughing at him.
It also included having to go back to school after Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, dressed irremediably in my white skin. I wished the weather would stay cold so I could keep wearing mittens and a hat, to cover my face and hands and hair, and maybe not be a target from quite so far away. It gave me the revelation that this was probably something like what my black classmates felt every time they left their neighborhood and set foot in the rest of the city; 15 years later, it allowed me to respect the way my husband went on alert in some parts of Boston. In situations with the potential for racism to turn violent, you are the race you look like from 50 feet away.
One inherent benefit of fairness as a system is that it offers the hope of decent treatment when you are not the one in power. Even if you lack empathy, at some point self-interest ought to suggest at least considering what happens when the table is turned. But I guess if you have enough privilege to draw on, you can pretend there isn't even a table. Anyway, Brit, Rush, Newt, Bill, et al should calm down. They'll be dead before they have to give up very much.
But Rich's essay also included an historical reference that grabbed me.

"The escalating white fear of newly empowered ethnic groups and blacks is a naked replay of more than a century ago, when large waves of immigration and the northern migration of emancipated blacks, coupled with a tumultuous modernization of the American work force, unleashed a similar storm of racial and nativist panic."

When I was in pop culture school I did a bunch of research on the way panics about drug abuse coincided with nativist and racist panics. The temperance movement was, to some extent, a reaction to wine-drinking Southern European immigration; anti-Chinese and anti-black sentiments were exploited in support of the Harrison Act; later rounds of anti-drug legislation parallel waves of black American relocation to Northern cities. There's some kind of panic that connects drug use with demographic change; and the measures introduced in an attempt to control drug use and trafficking also get used to control non-majority populations. It is not entirely a coincidence that the US currently has the highest incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world, nor that our prison population quadrupled since the 1980s as a result of mandatory sentencing enacted as part of the "war on drugs"; nor, finally, that some 70 percent of those imprisoned are "non-white"--including 10% of black males in the United States between the ages of 25 and 29.
So I'm thinking there's one thing that Rich got wrong. His conclusion was this:

The one lesson that everyone took away from the latest “national conversation about race” is the same one we’ve taken away from every other “national conversation” in the past couple of years. America has not transcended race. America is not postracial. So we can all say that again. But it must also be said that we’re just at the start of what may be a 30-year struggle. Beer won’t cool the fury of those who can’t accept the reality that America’s racial profile will no longer reflect their own.

But it looks like a certain segment of the white establishment has been working on its response for 30 years already. And maybe it's time conclude that this is not the path that will keep us safe on the playground in 2042.

Is this a good which or a bad which?

Women police officers issued with uniform hijab

From Times Online, July 28, 2009:

The £13 headscarves are embroidered with the West Country force's name and logo, and come in two colours — black for police officers and blue for community support officers. A spokeswoman insisted that they were not intended purely to cater for Muslim cultural sensibilities but were multi-faith.
"They are designed to be used in any place of worship and can be used to cover the head or the shoulders. For example, plain clothes officers could use them to cover their shoulders in a Catholic Church, or they can be used to cover the head in synagogues," she said.

In other news

I finished chapter 3 of the manuscript I'm ghosting this morning at 7:52 am. I've now done the front matter, chapters 1 - 3, and chapter 6, for a total of 357 manuscript pages. This makes me feel less bad about it having taken a month; that's a lot of channeling what somebody else would write if they could, um, write. I have about 48 hours left to finish the rest of it, and of course I had to sleep all day today. I know I can make it coherent; I just don't know that I can make enough of it coherent enough fast enough.
And, yes, not only can I rant endlessly about the news business, I have some good rantation stored up about book publishing, too. Mainly, I was trying really, really hard to make this not be one of those books where, um, chapters 1 - 3 are coherent and then the whole fucking thing just falls apart. However, no such luck. Because it is, as always, more important to get the book out in time for the New Year, New You promotions than to have a coherent book.
The folks in charge keep telling me I shouldn't be trying to make a perfect book. When did maintaining alphabetical order become perfectionism?

When pseudonews jumps the shark

At this point, I am just so hoping they all get into a fistfight...

In today's periodicals

OK, neither of these items is news but then, it is Sunday, and everybody knows world events observe the Christian sabbath.
Nonetheless, here is yet another example of why Heather Havrilesky is my all-time favorite TV reviewer. Just the right mix of mean, realistic, and humane, with a good ear for the turn of phrase that will make me laugh involuntarily out my nose.

From Embrace the reality TV underdogs!
TV experiments with the unbearable importance of looks, from "More To Love" to "Dating in the Dark"

Salon, July 26, 2009

"Obviously size is a central issue in these women's lives. But if you took a group of medium-size single women in their 20s and asked them the same questions about how successful they've been at finding love, you'd hear variations on the same theme. Average-looking women would claim that their cute friends get all the guys. Women with incredible figures would worry that men only like them for their big racks. Women with advanced degrees would say that men reject them because they're smart and successful. Assertive women would claim that men don't like assertiveness while timid women would say that they're too shy to charm good men.

The real problem is that most men in their 20s aren't all that serious about finding love, period. They would not like it in a boat, they would not, could not, with a goat. Sadly, though, instead of identifying the real cause -- flinchy, commitment-phobic young men -- most women assume that there's some fatal flaw that prevents them from finding true love." (My emphasis, there.)

I must also yet again recommend the estimable former drama critic, Mr. Frank Rich, this time with his attempt to deflate the pompous journalistic hypocrisy on the occasion of the death of Mr. Walter Cronkite.

From: And That's Not The Way It Is

New York Times, July 26, 2009

"What matters about Cronkite is that he knew when to stop being reassuring Uncle Walter and to challenge those who betrayed his audience’s trust. He had the guts to confront not only those in power but his own bosses. Given the American press’s catastrophe of our own day — its failure to unmask and often even to question the White House propaganda campaign that plunged us into Iraq — these attributes are as timely as ever.

That’s why the past week’s debate about whether there could ever again be a father-figure anchor with Cronkite’s everyman looks and sonorous delivery is an escapist parlor game. What matters is content, not style. The real question is this: How many of those with similarly exalted perches in the news media today — and those perches, however diminished, still do exist in the multichannel digital age — will speak truth to power when the country is on the line? This journalistic responsibility cannot be outsourced to Comedy Central and Jon Stewart."

Not, you know, that Jon doesn't do a good job with it. And somehow this makes me want to insert, "They would not like it in a boat..."

Another inch further from shore

Since I was laid off in April I have been writing longer and longer, and more and more, um, didactic, pseudo-column posts on my LJ page. This is probably some kind of abuse of LJ. So I think I am going to switch that activity over here. If I can just consistently remember my passwords and stuff...