Interesting article on homosexuality in the Navajo community. Indian societies have long posed a challenge to Western notions of fixed sex and gender identities. Many have a long history of tolerating, and often holding in high regard, people who choose at some point in their life (usually puberty) to take on the role and identity of the opposite sex. As the article notes, these people frequently married members of the once-same, now-opposite sex, and their marriages were considered as normal and natural as any other marriage. Once referred to generically as “berdaches”, the preferred term these days, from Will Roscoe‘s work on Zuni and other socities, the accepted term nowadays is “two-spirits“. The particular term for two-spirits in Navajo is nadleeh
Western conceptions of gender don’t apply very readily to two-spirits, and it is difficult to apply the term “homosexual” to them without reservations. But, of course, Navajos don’t live in pre-contact Navajo society, they live in a modern Navajo society which has developed for centuries in relation to a conquering Western society. Homosexuality in Western society is a mark of difference, a transgression of the categories we rely on to make sense of human relations. It is also closely related to the modern, Western sense of the self as an individual, driven by private pleasures and passions. Sexuality in Western society is more than a social role, it’s a function of identity, and so the Navajo have experienced the emergence of “gay” identities that don’t quite fit the mold of the nadleeh, yet aren’t quite the same as Western homosexuality, either.
Now gay Navajos are organizing, under pressure from both HIV/AIDS and a social scene, Navajo and Western, that doesn’t quite know where to place this new breed of nadleeh. It would be interesting to know the particular experiences Navajos have in dealing with these pressures, and their responses to those experiences. [Continue reading]
Less Liberty and Justice for All
According to USA Today, the Justice Department is pushing for legislation to extend their DNA database to include not only convicted criminals but also juvenile offenders and even non-convicted arrestees. This means that if you are accused of a crime–even if you are completely innocent–a record of your DNA will be kept by the Justice Department, along with your fingerprints and other personal information. The DoJ is comparing it to fingerprinting, but I think this is a false analogy–DNA extraction is both more invasive than fingerprinting and more telling. A fingerprint is only really useful in establishing your presence at the scene of the crime, and maybe your contact with a weapon or lock combination or other material evidence. DNA can be used to identify carriers of certain diseases and regressive traits, to build a rough physiological profile of a person, to establish ancestry to a degree, to establish paternity and maternity, and so on. Not only could such information be dangerous in the hands of less-than-scrupulous government agents, but it could be even more dangerous in the hands of persons who obtain illicit access to the DoJ’s databases–and somebody will, if a good enough use for that information is discovered.
If passed, this invasion of privacy will apply not only to people who have actually committed crimes, but to people who have not. The whole idea behind the juvenile justice system is that minors are not responsible for their own actions, can not evaluate the consequences of their actions, and may, under the right conditions, still be capable of becoming productive and law-abiding adults. Adding them to the DoJ’s DNA database is a tacit rejection of those ideas. It reflects the assumption that people who commit crimes as youngsters will continue to commit crimes as adults, regardless of time they spend in rehabilitiation facilities. The implications of including innocents are even more disturbing, reflecting the sort of “you may be innocent of this crime, but the fact that you were arrested means you must be guilty of something” mentality that is growing ever more pervasive in today’s America. The fact that you were arrested is taken by the DoJ as proof enough that you are likely to be involved in future crimes.
Given the free reign which the War on Terrorism, especially, has given to law enforcement, it would not be surprising if within a very short time, all Americans have been indexed in the DoJ’s DNA database. If DNA recording is made the status quo for arrestees, why not make require it for everyone who appears in court, or everyone who applies for American citizenship, or everyone who uses federal social services? I’m not trying to make a “slippery slope” argument–it might be possible to manage to get everyone arrested, at least once, just under existing laws. Even law-abiding citizens like Mike Hawash can be arrested under our current anti-terrorism laws–why not you? Or me? The DoJ’s terrorist watch list includes 13 million people–many of which are non-citizens and foreign nationals, but the sheer number of potential suspects for just terrorism-related crimes is an indication of the kind of scale the DoJ is willing to consider for keeping an eye on potential criminals. The DoJ is clearly willing to think big, and that scares me. It should scare everyone.
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Common Voices
Common Dreams is a great website, bringing together dozens, maybe hundreds of liberal-to-radical voices to address the critical issues of the day. Recently, they ran a great piece by Howard Zinn calling for a new take on patriotism, a patriotism that recognizes the common humanity–and the common suffering–of people everywhere, instead of the ephemera of nation, tribe, and government.
We need to expand [our notion of patriotism] beyond that narrow nationalism which has caused so much death and suffering. If national boundaries should not be obstacles to trade – we call it globalization – should they also not be obstacles to compassion and generosity?
Should we not begin to consider all children, everywhere, as our own? In that case, war, which in our time is always an assault on children, would be unacceptable as a solution to the problems of the world. Human ingenuity would have to search for other ways.
They are also carrying a transcript of a speech Tim Robbins gave on “baseball and show business”–and, not coincidentally, democracy.
For all of the ugliness and tragedy of 9-11, there was a brief period afterward where I held a great hope, in the midst of the tears and shocked faces of New Yorkers, in the midst of the lethal air we breathed as we worked at Ground Zero, in the midst of my children’s terror at being so close to this crime against humanity, in the midst of all this, I held on to a glimmer of hope in the naive assumption that something good could come out of it.
I imagined our leaders seizing upon this moment of unity in America, this moment when no one wanted to talk about Democrat versus Republican, white versus black, or any of the other ridiculous divisions that dominate our public discourse. I imagined our leaders going on television telling the citizens that although we all want to be at Ground Zero, we can’t, but there is work that is needed to be done all over America. Our help is needed at community centers to tutor children, to teach them to read. Our work is needed at old-age homes to visit the lonely and infirmed; in gutted neighborhoods to rebuild housing and clean up parks, and convert abandoned lots to baseball fields. I imagined leadership that would take this incredible energy, this generosity of spirit and create a new unity in America born out of the chaos and tragedy of 9/11, a new unity that would send a message to terrorists everywhere: If you attack us, we will become stronger, cleaner, better educated, and more unified. You will strengthen our commitment to justice and democracy by your inhumane attacks on us. Like a Phoenix out of the fire, we will be reborn.
Of course, America has no leaders worthy of the name, at least not in office, and within days of 9/11–within hours–the military machine was already in motion, and what we got instead of hope and a renewal of purpose was this Eternal Retribution, this hirsute bow-legged cock-swinging that seems likely to become the status quo for the foreseeable future.
Zinn and Robbins speak to the best human nature has to offer. There have been times in the last 20 months when I’ve been literally on the edge, seething with frustration and rage and impotence and fear and uncertainty and loathing and contempt, and it their example and the examples of so many people like them that has kept me not only sane but hopeful.
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The Rapture of Colin Powell
After appearing to have finally come into lockstep with the rest of the administration in the build-up to the war in Iraq, Powell seems to be breaking away again. In an interesting development–especially in the context of on-going investigations of Kissinger as America’s representative in the coup–he told a student recently that America’s role in the Chilean coup that brought Pinochet to power in 1973 “is not a part of American history that we’re proud of.” His own State Department flew into CYA mode, issuing a statement that America had no involvement in the coup. Seems like Powell can barely open his mouth in this administration without being contradicted. I only hope that once Powell is out of the administration, whether because he resigns or because Bush falls out (or is thrown out) of office or because he is not asked to repeat his role in the second Bush administration, that Powell will spill his guts, loudly and thoroughly. I also hope that by the time he does, the deregulated media that his clan has played a big role in creating will give him a strong platform to speak from.
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A New Look at What’s Normal
Wired has an article on well curves, curves whose distributions are weighted towards the left and right ends instead of towards the center like a “normal distribution” or bell curve.
[A] surprising number of economic and social phenomena now seem to follow… the well curve.
[…]
Large companies… are becoming gargantuan enterprises…. Meantime, small enterprises are also proliferating…. Yet while the big grow bigger and the small multiply, midsize enterprises are waning. The pattern is similar in geopolitics. The past decade saw the rise of both huge multinational federations (Nafta, the European Union) and tiny secessionist movements and small independent states. But the political entities in the middle – countries such as Italy and Spain, for example – are on the unprecedented brink of losing population.
[…]
High-end luxury hotels and low-end budget chains are doing well – but at the expense of midprice accommodations. In retail, Wal-Mart is soaring, boutiques are thriving, but middlebrow Sears is struggling. As The Wall Street Journal noted last year, “consumers are flocking to the most expensive products and the cheapest products, fleeing the middle ground in between.”
Then there’s the drooping middle class. The Federal Reserve Board’s latest analysis of family finances showed that from 1998 to 2001, American incomes were up across the board. But when economists divided the population into five equal segments, a well curve emerged. “Incomes grew at different rates in different parts of the income distribution,” the Fed reported, “with faster growth at the top and bottom ranges than in the middle.”
Other examples range from the size of screen in consumer electronics (an increasing number of small screens on PDAs and well-phones and of large screens like the 45″ plasma screens and HDTVs) to standardized test scores (a large number of students score very well or very poorly, with fewer scoring just “average”). The implications of this might turn out to be quite significant. Bell curves are what we think of as “normal” (in the real-world, not just the statistical sense), with most people being more or less average and a small number of people at the ends of the distribution being “deviant” in some way. These well-shaped distibutions suggest that we are in a period of divergence, that there are developing normativities that are at odds with each other, perhaps even struggling against one another. It is too easy to read this as a single polarization of society–the widening gap and clearer differentiation between rich and poor may or may not be related to the widening gap between high and low scores on standardized tests, for instance–but it does show a need to begin to reassess our concept of “normal”, as well as our society as a whole.
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More on Moore
Michael Moore’s latest project, entitled “Fahrenheit 911”, explores the relationship between the Bush and bin Laden families, apparently going back two generations. In an ironic twist, after a competitive bidding project, Moore secured a pretty lucrative contract from Republican Mel Gibson’s production company, Icon Productions. Moore’s success in getting the very people he attacks–staunch Republicans, publishing companies, etc.–to back his work is interesting; I’d like to think that his backers are expressing a democratic ideal of open access and funding work based on its quality, not its ideology, but I think it probably has more to do with the money to be made from a controversial best seller and maker of incredibly profitable (and cheap) documentaries. Whatever the reason, I’m glad to see Moore back in the studio.
But I worry about this new project. Moore seems to be at his best when tracking nebulous ideas through their possible permutations, rather than when attacking a particular person or organization. “Roger and Me” succeeded not because of its portrayal of Roger Smith, GM’s president, but because it attacked the much more difficult topic of profitability versus responsibility, of corporate ethics versus community. The weakest point of the otherwise brilliant “Bowling for Columbine” was, in my opinion, Moore’s attack on K-Mart, not because they didn’t deserve it, and not because it wasn’t interesting to watch K-Mart PR flacks deal with their own corporate hypocrasy, but because it worked directly against the rest of the movie’s strengths. Moore’s examination of the roots of violence in America suggested that just having guns didn’t make people more likely to kill each other, that there was something deeper in our national identity that promoted violence as a useful and meaningful reaction to adversity and fear. Now, I support tighter gun control laws, but it’s not a position that is supported by Moore’s film, and so the protest at K-Mart seemed more like an easy media trick than a part of the unfolding narrative.
Now Moore is proposing a film that is composed entirely of a localized attack on one person (or, rather, on one family), which doesn’t seem like it will leave a lot of space for the cultural, social, and political factors that have fed into American foreign policy for decades, that fuel American anti-Islamic sentiments, that have allowed us to view government as a set of business relationships. These complexes date far earlier than any Bush’s worldly power, and are far more far-reaching than that of even a White House occupant’s power.
Of course, I don’t know what Moore is planning–after all, he did manage to look at a pretty wide swath of the American cultural landscape through the small lens of the Columbine shootings. But I fear that Moore is allowing himself the luxury of partisanship, of targeting and taking down a personal enemy, instead of exploring and explaining the political landscape at large, which he does so well.
As long as I’m on the topic, I want to discuss Moore’s ample girth. Fighting Nation writes:
Hey Michael Moore, I challenge you to drop your tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken, your bag of White Castle Burgers, your 2 liter bottle of Mountain Dew, your box of Twinkies and your bag of Doritos and run a mile to protest the war. I bet it can’t be done! You fat windbag.
It’s common to see rightists describe Moore as “fat” but it’s not very rare to see even lefties doing so. The implication is that Moore pretends to represent the poor working class and to care about starving children and such, but he’s fat, you know, so how much solidarity can he really feel with the hungry masses? The thing is, poor people are fat, and getting fatter. Go into any K-Mart (on your way to the gun section, perhaps) and visit the large, clearly marked “Big Men’s” section. You’ll notice that it’s just about as big as it’s “normal” men’s section. Now, K-Mart’s clientele are fairly diverse, but one group is distinctly absent from its demographic, and that’s the rich. Check out Fat Land and Fast Food Nation for the inside skinny (sorry, I couldn’t resist) on how fat has become America’s calorie of choice, particularly among the working classes. Moore may have his share of faults, as a person and as a documentarian, but as far as I can tell there is nothing about his size that interferes with his ability to do the work at which he excels.
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The Difference Between Winning and Losing
Yesterday morning, Coalition forces liberated Baghdad, and we finally got to see some of that rejoicing in the streets (and also, a goodly helping of “beat the collaborator”) we’ve been missing so far in the execution of the war. People looked elated, attacking that statue of Hussein with glee and toppling it, elderly women beating Saddam’s image with their shoes (apparently a very strong insult in Arabic cultures; thanks to Electrolite for pointing out the pictures), and welcoming the Coalition troops with the openness our administration has always said they deserved. It was a good moment, when the people of Iraq seemed to finally accept that they were no longer under Hussein’s lash.
By yesterday evening, of course, right-wingers were accusing liberals of not being happy enough, of sulking because we wanted the war to fail, or at least get stuck in a “quagmire”, and so on and so on. Of course, we knew it was coming, no matter what objective was met. When Coalition troops found what they thought was chemical weapons earlier this week, a hearty round of “told you so’s” was raised, and we could hardly expect the capture of Baghdad not to fuel another. For the record, I’m happy for those people of Iraq still living (and civilian casualties seem to have been pretty low, but unfortunately not non-existent; military casualties, on the other hand, don’t seem to play into anyone’s concept of victory, but it’s thousands of young Iraqi men who will never get to take advantage of the liberty America is supposedly going to provide their people, who will never return to their families and loved ones) and I’m especially glad that the Battle of Baghdad didn’t get embroiled in the kind of army-crushing, civilian-slaughtering, urban guerilla warfare that many predicted. But let’s not be too proud of ourselves just yet. The real work in Iraq only starts with the occupation of the country–and it will be a long time before the ramifications of our actions there start to make themselves felt.
Also, all this news of the Iraqi people welcoming their “liberators” makes me wonder. The Iraqis aren’t idiots; they know who butters their bread at the moment. I’m reminded of an excerpt from Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22”, posted a couple weeks ago at Busy, Busy, Busy:
“I don’t believe anything you tell me,” Nately replied with a bashful, mitigating smile. “The only thing I do believe is that America is going to win this war.” “You put so much stock in winning wars,” the grubby iniquitous old man scoffed. “The real trick lies in losing wars, in knowing which wars can be lost. Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how splendidly we’ve done nonetheless. France wins wars and is in a continual state of crises. Germany loses and prospers. Look at our own recent history. Italy won a war in Ethiopia and promptly stumbled into serious trouble. Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped start a world war we hadn’t a chance of wining. But now that we are losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better, and we certainly will come up on top again if we succeed in being defeated.” Nately gaped at him in undisguised befuddlement. “Now I really don’t understand what you’re saying. You talk like a madman.” “But I live like a sane one. I was a fascist when Mussolini was on top, and I an an anti-fascist now that he has been deposed. I was fanatically pro-German when the Germans were here to protect us against the Americans, and now that the Americans are here to protect us against the Germans I am fanatically pro-American. I can assure you, my outraged young friend” – the old man’s knowing, disdainful eyes shown even more effervescently as Nately’s stuttering dismay increased – “that you and your country will have no more loyal partisan in Italy than me – but only as long as you remain in Italy.” “But,” Nately cried out in disbelief, “you’re a turncoat! A time-server! A shameful, unscrupulous opportunist!” “I am a hundred and seven years old,” the old man reminded him suavely.
[…]
“I can’t believe it,” Nately remarked grudgingly, trying stubbornly not to watch him in relation to the girls. “I simply can’t believe it. “But it’s all perfectly true. When the Germans marched into the city, I danced in the streets like a youthful ballerina and shouted ‘Heil Hitler’ until my lungs were hoarse. I even waved a small Nazi flag that I had snatched away from a beautiful little girl while her mother was looking the other way. When the Germans left the city, I rushed out to welcome the Americans with a bottle of excellent brandy and a basket of flowers. The brandy was for myself, of course, and the flowers were to sprinkle upon our liberators. There was a very stiff and stuffy old major riding in the first car, and I hit him squarely in the eye with a red rose. A marvelous shot! You should have seen him wince.”
Now, this administration seems to be doing everything possible to make sure that the Iraqi people do not win this war (or the peace), but let’s face it, where brute force won’t get the job done, we’re just not very effective forces. You need a leader assassinated, a democratically-elected government overthrown or undermined, call America; but if you need a democratic system–a People’s government, if you will, but don’t tell anyone I said “People’s”–built up that recognizes basic human rights and works to establish equality for everyone, if you need a reconciliation process to clear away 25 years of bad, bad memories, if you need a nation free from the tyranny of terrorism and warlordism, an ethnically and religiously pluralistic society in which men, women, and children of all sorts can live and prosper… well, American is not the team to call in.
So, three cheers for the Iraqi people. They’ve defeated Saddam, now they have to fight a war for the hearts and minds… of America.
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How Does it Feel to Be Like Mike?
Michael Moore explains the “backlash” against his comments at the Oscars: Bowling for Columbine experienced a surge in theater viewings and in pre-orders for the forthcoming video release, his book Stupid White Men jumped back to the top of the bestseller lists (for the fourth time!), he obtained funding for his next project, and he’s received tons of supportive letters and e-mails. He even seems to be getting a laugh out of the hate mail.
On the standing ovation that accompanied the announcement of his win for Best Documentary Feature, he says:
It was a great moment, one that I will always cherish. They were standing and cheering for a film that says we Americans are a uniquely violent people, using our massive stash of guns to kill each other and to use them against many countries around the world.
Seems like Mike’s weathering the “storm” pretty well.
And that’s what’s interesting. Of course, Mike’s said all along that the sales of his books belied the idea of a nation firmly behind their President. Yes, other voices like Ann Coulter’s, who couldn’t be further away from Moore politically or stylistically–yeah, both go over the top from time to time, but can you imagine Coulter having a sense of humour about anything? (And no, acting like those wacky liberals are oh-so-funny doesn’t count.)–sold well, but this just reinforces the fact that, despite the polls, despite the Fox News ratings, despite everything, there’s a wide diversity of opinions out there, and not just among the relatively estranged punditocracies of the left and right, whose job it is to be outrageous (but reasonable, oh so reasonable).
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