Fairy Tales

So over at Shady Glade, Alyssa is holding a contest: rewrite a fairy tale! Any fairy tale! Since the kid is so into fairy tales right now she is about to pop, and since the conservative/patriarchal nature of most of these tales has been about to make me pop, yay, we say!

We're entering the contest together.

(Here are the rules here, in case any of y'all want to join us.)

So all weekend we have been researching fairy tales (because you know that is what English professors do first, research) -- or rather, I assigned my tiny research assistant to do the research, while I worked on the current short story. I told her to find the top five she thought we should revise, and get back to me. So she scoured her texts -- she owns about fifteen collections, and we had gone to the downtown Fort Smith library and taken out ten or eleven more, ones she had already long since read, to refer back to -- and then, Saturday evening, while we took our walk, we discussed our options.

She told me there were a few tales she liked but did not understand, and some she liked but wasn't sure we could use.

"Fr'instance," she said, "The Happy Prince."

This is the story of a thrush who is flying with his friends to the coast for a vacation. He stops to rest in the town square in a famous city, on a famous statue, of a famous prince, known as the Happy Prince. It is a beautiful statue, made of lead covered thickly with gold, with sapphire eyes and pearl teeth, a ruby study in the sword at his hip, amythest buttons, etc, etc. The thrush sits admiring the statue in the sunlight, thinking how lovely it is, how happy the prince looks. Then he hears the statue weeping.

"Why, what is wrong?" the thrush asks. "You look so happy. You're so beautiful. You can't be sad."

"I am sad," the Happy Prince says. "I wasn't at first, when the people stood me up. They cheered and they sang and there was music, and little children came to picnic at my feet. Men made speeches. Everyone said I represented brotherhood and goodness, and I was happy then. But I stand in this Square all day and see nothing but grief around me. How can I help but be sad?"

The thrush fluttered his wings, looking around the square. Things didn't look so bad to him. Markets, tradesmen, children, a few soldiers. What was the Happy Prince on about?

"Please," said the Happy Prince. "Would you -- could you perhaps help me?"

"Help you?"

"Please. I'm only a statue. I can't do anything. They said I meant something. But I don't. If you would help..."

"I'm only a thrush," the thrush pointed out.

"But you can act. Please!"

"And I'm on my way to the coast. See? The flock is leaving."

Which was true. They were.

"You can catch up," the Happy Prince said. "Please. This won't take long. There's a little girl. Do you see here? By the church steps. Crying."

The thrush looked. She was small, and dark-haired, and dirty, huddled by the steps, watching those browsing the market stalls with hopelessness on her small face.

"Her father needs money," the Happy Prince said, "or he will be conscripted into the army. He has sent her out to get some. He doesn't care how, he told her. Just get it. She's afraid to steal. He beat her last night when she didn't bring any home. I'm afraid for her. Please. If you will only take her the ruby off my sword."

Well, clearly that would not take long.

"And go with her?" the Happy Prince wheedled. "Follow her? To be certain she has no trouble getting it home?"

"All right, all right!"

The thrush pried the ruby loose and flew off toward the girl.

When he got back, he had the story for the Prince -- how happy the father had been, how wretched the room they lived in, how the father had pawned the ruby and packed and taken passage on a ship and he and the girl had set out for the mountains, where the girl's grandmother lived. The joy on the girl's face, the bare hope on the father's.

The Happy Prince sighed. "This is -- could you? One more thing?"

The thrush fluttered, annoyed. "You said one thing. You said --"

"Just one more! In that room, above the inn? See the window? It's a poet. He's been working on a play. I suppose it's an opera, really. He comes out here, early mornings, and sits under me, singing bits of it. It's so nice. Well, I think it's nice. About a prince, who wants to save his kingdom, and loves this girl down at the end of the valley...she's a farmer's daughter...well, he can't finish the play, he's been out of money for a month, he's had to take work at the docks, it makes him too tired to write or even think, and it doesn't pay him enough to get enough to eat, even. He sat here on his afternoon off, trying to write, but he was so tired he couldn't stay awake. Take a sapphire from my eye, put it on his table, by his candle."

"Your eye?"

"Please."

"Your eye? How will you see?"

"I'll still have one."

Well, you see how this tale goes. The thrush stays, he dismantles the Prince bit by bit, taking pieces of him to this needy case and that one, until finally the Happy Prince is left blind, shoeless, indeed skinless, nothing but a lump of lead in the town square, and along come the town council and say, hey, what is this thing, what's it doing here? And melt it down to make bullets for it for an up-coming war. As they are doing so, they kick aside the thrush, worn out from flying through the town, mending the world.

"I don't know if I like that story," the kid told me.

"Ha," I said. "I do. I think I do."

"But the Prince dies. The Thrush dies."

"But look how they die," I point out. "When the Prince was alive, what was he?"

She considered.

"A big lie," I said. "He was a symbol of happiness, but was he happy? Only by dying did he become happy -- by acting, by giving himself to mend the world. And the thrush -- what was he intent on before?"

"Going on vacation."

"And once he leagues up with the Happy Prince, he's got something real to do. He has a purpose."

"But at the end..."

I agreed. The end. "They didn't mend the world," I said. "Did they? What's that mean, do you suppose?"

We're not doing the Happy Prince, because we don't think that one need revision.

There's the Boy and the Pearl, where the boy is working in a rice field and finds a pearl, and takes it home to give to his mama, and she hides it in a basket with a little rice at the bottom , and the next morning the basket is full of rice; so she hides it, the next day, in a jar with a few coins, and the next morning...

Or there's the tale of the girl with the wicked stepmother, who says come over here so I can comb your long blond hair, only the wicked stepmother actually combs her hair with an AXE...

"Why are all the stepmothers in fairytakes evil?" the kid asks.

"I've got one word for you," I say. "Which it starts with a P."

She rolls her eyes.

"Here's a better question for you," I say. "Why do none of the fathers in fairytales ever protect the children?"

She frowned.

"And why didn't it occur to you to ask that question?" I added.

"And the answer to both of those questions," I added, after a few seconds, "also starts with a P."

"You blame everything on the patriarchy," she said, annoyed.

"Not everything," I said sweetly. "The patriarchy is absolutely not to blame for the second law of thermodynamics, for instance."

In America

Steinhem slices and dices.

Fat Americans!

Here's one everyone should read.

...when I was about 11 years old, and Mom went to see her doctor because of some problem she was having, and he scathingly told her that her problem was she was fat, and not to come back to him until she’d lost 50 pounds...

This one makes me seethe for several reasons -- one is that mr. delagar is a fat guy, which I don't know whether I've mentioned that here; and this is what he gets whenever he goes to see his doctor, and I mean no matter what his issue is -- he could have a damn pimple on his ass, his doctor would say, well, what do you expect, of course you get zits, you need to lose ninety pounds.

This is the same doctor who told him that being overweight was a moral issue.

Right. People are fat because they have poor moral fiber.

Why mr. delagar keeps going to this guy, hey, good question.

Nor is this attitude unique in our fine country -- I cannot count the number of sweet friends and family who have pointed out to me that mr. delagar has a weight problem ("No! Really?") , or who have informed me that he really "should" do something about it ("Magic unicorn dust, maybe?"), or who dismiss every other feature of his life and character as irrelevant: he's nothing else to them. Just fat.

It is, of course, a prejudice like any other: "He's nothing else to them: just black." "She's nothing else to them: just a Jew." "He's nothing else to them: just queer."

People feel freer to indulge in this one, same as they do in the one against gay folk, some of them, because they reckon fat is something people choose. Just put down the ice cream if you don't want to be 90 pounds overweight! Get up off the couch one time!

Because that's all there is to it, right?

Don't we wish. As the NIH tells us, diets have a failure rate of 98%. Tell me some other "cure" with a failure rate of 98% that anyone would endorse. Not to mention that this cure, in fact, often causes harm: many diets increase the risk of stroke, raise the blood pressure, cause organ damage -- you name it.

Exercise? It helps fitness. It doesn't help much with weight loss, in and of itself.

Do doctors know these things?

Ha! Wouldn't that be nice. I've known these things for about 15 years. In that time, I've found, I guess, about 2 doctors who did.

Do doctors need to know these things?

Do you need to ask? A doctor that sees a fat patient and says, oh, it's your weight causing the problem -- and looks no further? Is that an issue?

And will fat patients push the issue?

Most won't. I used to have to go with mr. delagar most of the time, because he had been smacked too hard and too long by our fat-hating soctiety. He'd been taught he was a second-class citizen and he deserved what he got. He fights back now -- well, except he won't quit this doctor and his whole "moral issue" crap -- but I think he's hoping to educate the dude.

Mostly fat patients believe it when their doctors say it's their own fault. Everyone else has always told them the same thing -- why wouldn't they believe it?

I'm Quitting Humanity

Okay, having read the AWB post, I hopped over to Ezra Klein's space and saw this, which was bad enough, you know, given that many of my students live on eight or nine thousand dollars a year, but then, fucking shit, I had to go and read the comments, on the article itself, here, (you have to go off to the side: it's a cute little question,"What's the biggest luxury you allow yourself?" and some of them are very sweet, like "Time with my children," but most of them make me want to eat my gun).

This is just such a rotten country.

The People, Yes!

So some of you might have noticed I'm trying to raise a little feminist/socialist.

It's not an easy thing to do in Pork Smith.

There is also the issue of her daddy, who comes from the bourgeois, and is proud of it. "Yep," he likes to announce proudly, "we owned the means of production. That's right. And I wish we still did. I'd love to exploit the masses some more!"

The kid gives him a tragic look. Then she gives me a tragic look. "He doesn't mean it. Does he?"

"He doesn't," I swear to her.

"You think I don't?" mr. delagar says. "Line'm up!"

This was when we were watching The Age of Innocence last night, and I was brooding moodily on (a) how nothing was happening and (b) how these people spent their lives whining instead of acting -- "What's this fella's issue?" I demanded about Archer. "Why ain't he just light out for the territory? Dump this bint if he doesn't want to marry her, pack a bag, pocket some cash, and go. Good shit. Where's the issue, again?" -- and (c) how, exactly, they were managing to afford this appallingly extravagent life. Which led to the previous conversation, because you just know how. Sweatshop and slave money, that's how. Suffering of others, that's how. Exploiting the masses.

"Can I just watch my movie?" mr. delagar said, plaintively.

Then I read AWB's post, here, this morning, which sort of hooks into my point:

When I was there this week, a young guy who teaches history at a private academy was joining us. We talked a bit about the differences between teaching college and high school, private and public, and he said, “Well, I went to public school, so of course I feel weird about teaching these kids. They all have the ideological foundation for a really engaged political life, but they’re too wealthy to understand their own positions. They think having a McDonald’s hamburger is as big a crime against liberalism as voting Republican.”

“Oh my God!” I said. “I know! This is my outrage at the bourgeoisie! They can’t tell the difference between symbolic problems and real problems, like genocide and torture are somehow beside the point, because, look, some people wear tacky T-shirts and eat Velveeta!”

Elite Lady was enraged. “Believe you me! Those private school children you’re mocking have far more of a chance to do great things in this world than all the middle class people put together. Do you think the middle class knows anything at all or cares at all about the right things?”

Here in Pork Smith, which is less than an hour from the Fayetteville-Bentonville-Rogers triangle, where all the Wal-Money in Arkansas now lives, we have mostly the really poor, and a layer of middle class, then, in thin layers, like crumbling bits of shale, some Wal-Money and some Real Money.

None of which matters to anyone *not* from here, of course -- all anyone from out of Arkansas hears (mr. delagar swears one day he's going to write a book called Out of Arkansas) is that you're from Arkansas, and that's all they need to hear -- but in-state, oh, these tiny differences matter.

Anyway, what do they care about, up the hill, when it comes to our folk in Pork Smith? The lost jobs? How Whirlpool has outsourced its lines to Mexico? What the rising gasoline prices ($3.22 a gallon now) are doing to our students' ability to get to class? (Kind of rough when you're driving 30-40 miles each way each day -- and they can't move to town, either, not with what happened to rent with the housing bubble.)

Nah. They care about how grubby we are and our missing teeth and the piercings and the low-scale nature of our restaurants. That's your library? You might put some books in it! Har. Har. Call that a bookstore? Do you have any books that aren't coloring books? Yukkity yuk! You know, here's an idea, just a suggestion: once you have one Burger King, you don't need another one, right down the block. Might try some other form of food. Maybe a McDonalds! Chortle! Wheeze!

But the other point, and the one AWB also makes, about these enlightened folk up the hill I've noticed is how enlightened they often ain't. They drink shade-grown coffee, yes, or, you know, maybe they do, if it's cool that week to do so, but have they lit out for the territory and, as Bardiac notes here, done anything to help make it possible for the farmers and coffee-growers keep on growing that sort of coffee?

Talk is fucking cheap, after all, which was, I believe, the actual point mr. delagar was making in the middle of Age of Innocence last night.

That and could I save the political yap for after the movie one time please?

Map

This map (which I got off PZ) shows you just how seriously rusted into the belt we are, here in the Pork.

I tried to enlarge, to see how red we are. Can't do it. Grr.

Thinking About Religion

This post here, which I found through the Carnival of the Humanists, linked over at PZ, has me thinking again about the whole god-thing.

Y'all know I'm one of those evil atheists. I haven't kept that from you.

Our household, though, is Jewish, and so I'm culturally Jewish, more or less -- mr. delagar is Jewish, we're raising the kid Jewish, we keep the Jewish holidays, all that.

mr. delagar seems to believe in god, about 78% of the time. For instance, he won't eat pork, because the Torah says not to. When I point out that no god exists, so what does this non-existant god care about whether he has bacon, he refuses to argue. (It's not the bacon I care about, obviously. It's the idea of the bacon! It's the patriarchy that is attached to the idea of the bacon!)

The kid, somehow, is a theist -- a sort of theist. A half-theist. She used to be a whole theist. I remember when she realized I was an atheist. "You believe in God, right, Mama?" she asked me.

"Well," I said. "No."

She was four, maybe. She frowned at me.

"It's all right if you do, though," I promised her.

"But where did the trees come from, if there isn't a god?"

(Interestingly, this is the same argument one of my university freshmen made to me once.)

I explained to her, briefly (she's four, remember) about evolution. Later, we got a child's book on it from the library. Later still, I told her that I believed in knowledge -- in books -- that these could save us.

(This led to the very funny exchange at her school.

Her teacher: "And what religion is your mommy?"

The kid: "She belongs to the church of books.

Her teacher: "...she's a Mormon?")

Now the kid says she only part-believes in God. She part-doesn't know. She writes down in the forms at school that she is "Presently Jewish," which makes mr. delagar insane.

I tell my upper-level classes I'm an atheist, if it comes up. My lower-level classes, the freshmen, I don't tell, partly because it doesn't come up -- or hasn't yet -- and partly because I know most of them could not handle it. This is, after all, the part of the country where the polls show they'd vote for a child molester before they would vote for an atheist. And, yesterday, when I sent them off to research the Flying Spaghetti Monster for extra credit, I had six of them whining in my office about how ungodly an assignment it was. And no, they weren't kidding.

Wouldn't this just be a better country if we could shake off the tentacles of religion? This is what I keep asking mr. delagar. It's not just the fucking bacon, I say to him. I do not care whether you ever eat bacon again. It's the idea of the bacon. It's everything the bacon represents. It's the fucking juggernaut behind the bacon, rolling down over our child. Our child.

Our country.

Can't we just kick it off like the bad fucking idea it is?

Please?

(See also this)

Things My Students Don't know About:

FSM

FGM

Blogging

Urban Dictionary

Okay -- some of them knew about the last one.

But good shit, I'm living at the edge of the WORLD, apparently.

Un Lun Dun

I spent the weekend reading China Mieville's Un Lun Dun.

(Hey! Cool! Look at that! I figured out LINKS!)

I've been wrangling with Mieville's work for half a year now -- started with Iron Council, circled back to Perdido Street Station, made a valient rally on The Scar. He's some writer. I'm planning another attack in the fall, when the days are cooler. I might get through a whole book of his then. (I keep staggering to a halt in the forests of language and characters and lying in bed around ten some vastly hot evening saying now what now? Now who is this again? I mean, I like these books. And I like the worlds he's built here. But shit would I like an index or maybe some hot links to go with.)

But this one is his first book for YA readers, so I thought I might could handle it.

I wasn't wrong, either. (Though, yes, here too hot links would have helped!)

This is a fine book (nice pictures too -- I kept snortling over them in delight, so that the kid kept saying, what? what? and I would have to say, well, it won't be funny, because you're not reading it, but look! The evil giraffe! The black window! Snrf! Snrf!) that makes me happy on so many levels.

SPOILERS TO FOLLOW!

First, it's a fine story.

I was a bit taken aback when what appeared to be the main character drops out halfway through -- but that turns out to be the central point, as is soon made clear.

I love how the distrust of the text becomes central to the text, and how casual Mieville is about this. (Heh! The text itself doubts itself. It's lovely! A book with a crisis of faith!)

And all the un-puns! Which work! Which become part of the point!

And then (this is a major spoiler, sorry!) how, over and over, it is not being chosen that gets our band through; it is their wits, their loyalty to one another, their own courage: their humanity. In other words, not the finger of fate or god or predistination laid on them, but their own decision to do the right thing. Human behavior wins it, not received valor. It's not because of the sword in the stone; it's because Deeba decided to make the journey, and because she uses her sense. (I love how she tosses the epic conventions out the window -- too dangerous, too stupid, will kill off too many of my friends. Screw that, she says. Screw the text! Let's do it this way. Heh! You won't catch the Hobbits doing that.)

The Kid is a little wary of reading it -- she thinks the giraffes look too scary. But all y'all folk who aren't scared of fierce giraffes should feel free. It's a fine book.

That Waitress I Had!

Janice Shaw Crouse, the Concerned Woman of America, over there at CWA, is Very Concerned about what is happening to Marriage in America Today.

Because of the Children, mind you.

Nothing to do with the women getting all out of their place. It's what it's doing to the little kiddies that concerns Crouse, Concerned Woman Of America.

See, once...

The old song rhapsodized, “love and marriage… go together like a horse and carriage…you can’t have one without the other.” Likewise, for the vast majority of couples in the past, marriage came before children, and children were an integral part of marriage. Couples sang: “we could raise a family, a boy for you and a girl for me.” Today, though, the Pew study revealed that by a 3-to-1 ratio, adults viewed marriage in terms of their own “happiness and fulfillment” instead of including the “bearing and raising children.”

Nasty feminists. Encouraging women to care about their own lives and that.

Result? Now Crouse has a waitress like this!

We caught a brief glimpse of how these trends played out in one young woman’s life last weekend at a restaurant. Our waitress was an almost-surly teen who at first appeared to have a speech impediment, which turned out to be simply the challenge of trying to talk with a large metal stud in her tongue. Toward the end of the meal, after establishing rapport, I asked her why she had the stud. She replied, surprisingly with a smile, that she got it when she was 15 to make a statement to the effect that she was a “semi-bad” girl –– I didn’t press for an explanation of what constituted semi-bad. I didn’t have the heart to hear about it.
When I asked what her mother had to say about the stud, her reply was, “Oh, she’s cool with it.” And her dad? He’s “irrelevant.” But then, curiously, she interjected rather fiercely, “Oh, he is around.” Clearly she wanted it understood that, even though her parents were divorced, she did indeed have a father and that they did make contact from time to time.

But then as she amplified the details a bit, it became clear that for the most part the contact –– when it occurred –– was because she initiated it. “I call him sometimes,” but, “he doesn’t matter, my mom is the one that counts.” She is not a statistic; she is a lovely young woman who, sadly, can be described as emotionally malnourished.

http://www.cwfa.org/articledisplay.asp?id=13384&department=BLI&categoryid=dotcommentary


Emotionally malnourished. Um, why? This kid smiles. She speaks, apparently to the point and with supporting evidence. She, I might well point out, has a job, and not a slacker's job, either. What evidence does Crouse have that this is a "bad" woman?

Oh. Right. I forgot. Tongue stud. Sorry. Must be an evil woman after all.

Elsewhere in the essay Crouse claims that growing up with a single mother is "disastrous" for children, something the students from single-parent households in my classes might like to know, I suppose. She cites as her source The Urban Institute, so I went to their page and scouted around. They do have some studies on single mothers, mostly on the effects of the welfare cuts and what those did to mothers trying to raise kids. Mixed results, according to UI -- more single mothers finding work, but are less secure. Also, fathers don't provide child support on any regular basis, which increases child poverty. Since poor children are most at risk, this is an issue, obviously. But it's poverty, not the singleness of the mama, that's the issue here, a point Crouse takes care to obscure*.

I would say it's pointless to rail against women like Crouse, thinkers like Crouse -- let them smile smugly at one another and die out -- except they aren't dying out, are they? They're not even diminishing. That movie, Ratatouille. Which I liked. I did like it. But think about that movie one minute.

Here's the conversation I had with mr. delagar about it.

"Oh, come on," I said to him. "Think about the rats. One minute. Tell me what was wrong with the rats."

"What?" he said. He was cooking. A very nice meal, too. Ratatouille brought out the chef in him. We've had all sorts of interesting things since we saw the movie. Chicken Kiev last night.

"One minute. Think one minute."

"I don't...what?"

"Girl rats!" I yelled at him. "Where were the girl rats?"

He rolled his eyes.

"Where were the girl waiters!" I yelled. "Why didn't any girl customers have any major lines? Are there no women in PARIS?"

He pointed out the main character, the cook, who--

"ONE! ONE! The fucking Smurfette principle! Cut me a break!"

And on from there.

The patriarchy, he does not die. He grows like kudzu, he swarms and swarms. I wish we could ignore items like Crouse. I wish they would just go away.




(*Here, in fact, is what the Urban Institute suggests as a solution:

(1) enabling parents to meet their family’s needs while working in lower-wage jobs,
(2) helping families weather gaps in parental employment,
(3) supporting parents’ job advancement,
(4) helping parents combine work and child-rearing, and
(5) improving children’s well-being and development.

They add: Helping low-income working families also requires paying attention to the adults’ lives as both parents and workers. Because low-income families are less likely than better-off families to have flexibility at work, are more likely to be raising children with physical or emotional health problems, and are more dependent on each week’s paycheck without significant private resources, they face even more wrenching conflicts between family and work than other Americans.

http://www.urban.org/publications/411475.html

Yes, UI is talking about parents here; not single moms; but notice the focus is on helping; on paying attention to the lives of the adults as human beings; on recognizing that the parents are, in fact, human beings, that the mother and father aren't just tools to be exploited in Crouse's idealogical war. What a concept, huh? Trying to actually solve a problem?)

Invigorating -- But, well...

I assume you've seen Keith Olbermann's message to Bush from last night, asking both Bush and Cheney to resign -- if not, go do that, now. I'd link, but you know my rotten links. It's everywhere, you won't have trouble finding it. Put Olbermann, Libby, Bush, into for your search terms, you'll get a gazillion hits.

Most of them, I'm interested and pleased to see, favorable to Olbermann. I went through the top six pages of Google Blog Search and found only two blogs that didn't say something like Olbermann ROXS!!1! and one (from Montana), a fella who admitted he was more of an O'Reilly fan, who said Olbermann was just too leftist for him, that had a tepid response. He said he just didn't think Bush or Cheney would resign.

Yeah, me either. To do that, either of them would have to have the least awareness of what they're doing to the country -- what they've done at all. Bush wouldn't look the mother of a dead soldier in the eye. He won't face up to any of it. Cheney won't look at the pictures of the torture victims, pictures that wouldn't exist if he hadn't helped get us into a useless, evil war. And, mostly? Neither cares. If they did look? If someone could make them understand the harm their actions have caused? Fuck it, I imgaine their response would be. Because they aren't who got hurt, after all, or any one they know about. They take care of their own, and the rest of us? Well, we can just do the same, and if we can't, it's because we're losers and we deserve what we get.

Yeah

From Overheard Everywhere:

Pretty lady: You say a lot of bad words. Some people say that happens when you don't have the intelligence to express your self otherwise.

College kid: That ain't the case with me. I got a fuckin' vocabulary, man. I just use words everyone understands, like 'shit' and 'fuck' and what-not, so I don't obfuscate my meaning.

Twisty!

"...For my part, I have stated on numerous occasions (following the materialization in my personal sphere of a pair of nieces), children are an oppressed class. Their universal and legitimately reviled unruliness is not natural. It is a product of neurosis generated by patriarchy’s two main replicatory units: the nuclear family, which directly supports male dominance, and the single mother household, which indirectly supports male dominance a) by acting as an underclass dependent for its survival on paternalism and b) by incubating a ready supply of disadvantaged candidates for membership in the all-important working and military classes.

Of course kids are obstreperous hellions. They dislike oppression as much as the next guy.

It is my firm belief that although children are not born with an innate sense of propriety and obeisance to the bizarro social order currently imposed, neither is there inherent in the human species a biological imperative to behave neurotically, except when neurosis is imposed by crippling external forces. Which it is.

In other words, we may blame the patriarchy for obnoxious kids. Just as we blame it for rape, marriage, FGM, and God."

Shit, yes, is all I have to add.

For the rest of this brilliant post, go here:

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/

The Beginning of Time? Really?

The argument of Frank Furedi's here puzzles me.


"Since the beginning of time, [No, I ain't messing, it's how his essay starts!] one of the clearest markers of an enlightened society has been the moral status it attaches to human life."

[Stop laughing! If we postulate that creationism is real, then I reckon time can begin when human life does -- why NOT?]

Furedi goes on:

"The humanist impulse that once drove the development of the modern world has been replaced by a tendency to view humanity with suspicion, or even outright hostility. The vocabulary of our times – ‘human impact on the environment’; ‘ecological footprint’; ‘human consumption’ – invokes a sense of dread over the active exercise of human life. Apparently, there are too many of us doing too much living and breathing."

"Today, many green-leaning writers and activists argue that population control is the best solution to the problems we face. This belief that there are ‘too many people’ inhabiting the globe has reared its ugly head numerous times over the past 200 years. Since the times of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), a catastrophic vision of population growth causing the collapse of society has formed an important part of the culturally pessimistic outlook."

"As one Malthusian crusader notes: ‘A non-existent person has no environmental footprint; the emission “saving” is instant and total.’ (1) This preference for the non-existent over the existent speaks to a powerful anti-humanist sensibility. And it is not only eccentric and isolated misanthropes who value ‘non-existence’ as being somehow morally superior to existence – rather, this outlook is symptomatic of a wider trend for devaluing the status of human life."

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/printable/3503/


Since I've taught Victorian Literature every Spring for the past four, I can, sort of, guess what he's saying about Malthus -- that is, it wasn't overbreeding so much that Malthus found icky, as it was who was overbreeding (that is, those nasty inferior poor folk with the inferior genetic stock): sort of the same argument being made by a certain segment of our population today. (Oh noes! Soon in America WHITE PEOPLE will be a MINORITY! You white girls must BREED! Make babies! Lotz! Now! Because those bad immigrants! Look! They brreeeeed!)

So he's arguing that the root to population control shares a root with racism...because back when we discovered that we might be able to outbreed our planet (ie the Victorian era) some scientists had some racist notions.

But it's not clear why we should conflate arguing that it might be a good plan not to have eight or nine kids, in today's biosphere and economy, with murdering children -- as he's kind of suggesting here:

"The catastrophic imagination in contemporary Western culture has encouraged the Malthusian lobby to target the very aspiration for procreation. Controlling fertility is now described as a duty rather than a matter of choice. ‘Couples making decisions about family size do so in the belief that it is a matter for them and their personal preferences alone’, says the OPT, with incredulity (6). The idea that people should have the right to make choices about their family size is dismissed as an indefensible outrage against common sense.

"This assault on the right to procreate is often intrusive, even coercive. Take the example of Rwanda. The world was horrified by the mass slaughter in Rwanda in 1994, during which an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed. Yet it appears that, so far as the population-control lobby is concerned, there are still too many people living in Rwanda. As one headline earlier this year put it: ‘After so many deaths, too many births.’ Apparently, ‘After the 1994 genocide, in which more than 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered, it seemed difficult to believe that overpopulation would ever be a problem. Yet Rwanda has long had more people than its meagre resources and small area can support.’ Now, with the guidance of Western non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the Rwandan government is planning a sweeping population-control programme. "

Birth control is not in itself the moral equivalent of genocide -- although I will agree that the choice about birth control should be left to the woman herself. If she wants one kid, fine. If she wants ten, whatever. (That's why that joke about the Duggers always bothers me. Yeah, it's not a clown car; on the other hand, it's their business if they want 17 kids. On the other hand, I know, they aren't keeping it their business, are they -- they're using their 17 kids to try to convince all of us we should all have 17, it's KIDS AS A SERMON! YAY! but whatever.)

Furedi does have a point. It's just not the one he's making. If you want to see the point to be made on this issue, head over to Pandagon, where Amanda is doing her fine job laying it all out for us, here:

http://pandagon.net/2007/07/02/pandagon-book-club-killing-the-black-body/

(ARG! Broken links again. Rats.)

Why do I feel like this is my fault...

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The Kids Will Eat Me Alive!

Chick looking into her palm, then at thug nearby: Man, I'm a preschool teacher! Don't sell me the wrong drugs!

Bar
Ft. Smith, Arkansas

Overheard by: her best friend

(http://www.overheardeverywhere.com/)