I’m feeling too lazy to put a baby blogging post together today, so go over to Damn Cool Pics and check out their annual “Parent Of The Year” photo celebration. A couple of examples:

This would normally be too sentimental for me (not too mention far too large an image to post on “Alas”), but what the heck, it’s the last day of the year. So by posting this drawing, I’m wishing all you wretches lots of hugs in 2008. Mwah!

Wasn’t that sweet? The drawings are by cartoonist Xiao Lei (門小雷) of Hong Kong. You can see a bit more of her work, and a slightly larger reproduction of the hug drawings, at startdrawing.org.

A few weeks ago, Jacob Zuma was named the new head of the African National Congress. This is part of a larger struggle in South Africa against the policies of the ANC, which has been carrying out a neo-liberal agenda ever since it gained power. Zuma is the left-wing candidate; Zuma’s supporters sang Lethu Mshini Wami (bring me my machine gun). I haven’t read much discussion of this on the blogs I read, which surprised me. I don’t know enough about South African politics to offer any analysis of the ANC. But I wanted to comment on the discussion of Zuma’s election, or the lack of it. There’s definitely been more attention among the socialist blogs I read than the feminist blogs, and the analysis is a little bit like the paragraph above. From Lenin’s Tomb:

Zuma is far from the ideal man to lead such a fight, burdened as he is with corruption charges over bribes from a French arms company, and he is actually doing his best to present his policies as pro-business. He is in all probability an opportunist who has harnessed a unique chance based on the unrest. However, the fact that he has successfully channelled the energy of this revolt into a leadership bid which may lead to him taking power in the ANC (but not the country) is itself significant. And however disappointing Zuma is likely to be (Chavez, he ain’t - even Chavez isn’t always Chavez), the very fact of ousting the wretched Mbeki may give further confidence to the already insurgent working class.

There’s something missing from these stories. Zuma is a rapist. He was acquitted - they always are. But in 2005 he raped 31 year old woman who was a friend of the family. I wrote about the trial last year:

The trial sounds hideous, and familiar. She was put on trial and her sexual history, including other times she had been raped, was put into evidence. When Zuma took the stand he argued that she consented by wearing a knee-length skirt and complaining that she didn’t have a boyfriend: “She had never in the past come to my house dressed in a skirt. Including times when I was living in Pretoria. When she came to me in a skirt after those talks I referred to earlier on, well, it told me something.”

This has been treated as a side-note by many different people. From AP Zuma was acquitted of rape last year, but could still face bribery charges in a multimillion-dollar arms deal. From WSWS “Zuma was sacked from office as deputy president by Mbeki and then faced a further trial on rape charges last year, in which he was acquitted.”

Maybe it’s just that the New Zealand left has developed some clarity on these issues, but if a powerful man is accused of rape and is acquitted that doesn’t mean he’s not a rapist. It means he is a rapist.

The inability to call a rapist a rapist displays an indifference to rape as a political issue. When asked in 1999, 1 in 3 Johannesburg women said they had been raped in the last year - they deserve more than one line in an analysis of the political meaning of Zuma’s victory.

This is the front of Claire and Dave’s wedding invitation.

Now check out the second page of the invitation…

The award-winning invitation was designed by Chris MaClean. Damn, that’s good.

Along vaguely similar lines, I really like Taiwan’s recycle symbol better than ours¹ :

(I like stuff like this. I’m still impressed by the arrow hidden in the FedEx logo lettering, which took me years to notice.)

1. Even though I suspect it wouldn’t work in the US, because it’s too easy to see a swastika in the design. (back)

The story of Katie Jones has been circulating slowly on disability listservs and blogs since the December 9 article in the Chicago Tribune. FRIDA provided an early link to the story, and since then Crip Chick, Shiva, Bint, Trinity, Brownfemipower have all addressed aspects of Katie’s story and the larger issues. Comments everywhere have been… illuminating.

I haven’t written about this before now because these sorts of articles from the mainstream media — this one involving children, parental control of a child’s well-being, disability prejudice, personhood and consciousness, health care in the U.S., living with the aid of machines, “special needs” schooling, and “right-to-die” versus the right to not be coerced to die — contain so much information that is either misleading, incomplete or biased that I can’t think where to begin.

Katie Jones is a second-grader in Lake County, Illinois, who has severe cerebral palsy and whose parents have sent her to school with a DNR order (Do Not Resuscitate) prominently attached to the back of her wheelchair. Taking that much at face value, the implications for Katie, her parents, her young classmates and school employees are complex and profound.

Add to that some mind-boggling facts about both the case and the media coverage of it: The Tribune article portrays cerebral palsy as a terminal disease, and while I’m not well-versed on the very wide range of abilities and medical issues people with CP possess, none of the many people I have known personally have ever been about to drop dead. So that portrayal is dangerously and cruelly incomplete. The Tribune article doesn’t discuss the fact that Katie apparently does communicate thoughts and feelings beyond those independently interpreted by people around her. You must dig to the caption of photo 4 at a sidebar link to even learn she is capable of expressing her feelings at will. And this, at the article’s end:

Before the bus arrived, Beth Jones weaved a French braid into the school girl’s long brown hair, while Allie [Katie’s four-year-old sister] held up a feeding tube. A machine could do the job, but that makes group hugs difficult.

Besides, anything that beeps isn’t allowed in the Jones house.

“When we took her home from the hospital, where there were so many machines, we made the no beeping rule,” Beth Jones said.

The group hug part is completely untrue. I’ve had a feeding tube for two years now, and I can say with absolute certainty that there is nothing about attaching a thin plastic tube to the end of it and running that tube to a machine that makes it hard to hug or be physically close to people. It’s actually less a problem for physical intimacy than an IV in the top of the hand would be, whether that IV is connected to a hanging bag or a machine. Feeding through the tube manually is a perfectly reasonable way to use the tube since basically this just entails using a giant syringe or holding the tube up and letting gravity allow nutrients to travel gently into the stomach, but attaching falsehood and phobia to machines that do this same task contributes to the pervasive ableist belief that people are better off dead than using medical technology for the long-term.

And the “no beeping rule”? There’s the real reason for the DNR right there. Better dead than using a machine that might make some noise.

I understand machines are scary. I get that because I’ve needed to make my own adjustments to them and also because I see it in peoples’ eyes every day. And I do understand people have different points at which they might choose not to live beyond, though I’ll add that there seems to be little reflection upon or respect given to the people who live quite happily beyond those points.

I’d like to hear much much more about the Jones’ “no beeping rule.” Is it because Katie is terrified of the beeping? Does the beeping represent an identifiable point beyond which Katie’s parents don’t feel they can handle her care? Or is the beeping too public? Too intrusive? Too medical? Why is an alarm that can signal a problem that should be addressed juxtaposed against the myth that without machines Katie will die “peacefully” from choking or suffocation? Why is this type of beeping so forbidden in our technological age where cellphones and dozens of other machines chirp at each of us all day long?

It’s not really the beeping, of course. And the answer to Trinity’s question:

Now why is [info that Katie shares thoughts via a communication device] tucked away in the photoshoot and not right there by the article, which is written in a way that suggests she is not aware what is happening?

seems to be that it didn’t seem relevant to the point of the article. Katie’s consciousness and feelings were not important in an article about whether or not she lives or dies and whether or not she gets to go to school in the meantime. What her thoughts about all this might possibly be is not once pondered in the article.

Further discussion can also be found at Wrong Planet, an online forum for people with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

At The Jaded Hippy.

Fifty! How neat.

Please feel free to use this thread to discuss anything you’d like, or to post any links. Linking to your own stuff is definitely welcome.

My plan is to do almost nothing but image posts until 2008, btw. So for those of you who are sick of image posts from Amp, there is an end in sight.

(Part of Roadshow, by Robert Blanz).

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“The Contortionist,” by Original Ann.

And finally, a truly neat-wow animation; more information from the maker at Hipsters, Inc.

The Jewish Defense League (JDL) called for a boycott of Will Smith’s new movie, and for movie studies to blacklist Smith, because Smith said:

Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, “let me do the most evil thing I can do today.” I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was “good.”

The JDL’s webpage (and, I suspect, press release) carries the ridiculous headline “Will Smith Thinks Hitler Was Basically Good.”

After Smith released a statement clarifying that he thinks Hitler is evil, the JDL retracted their call for a boycott and Smith’s blacklisting, but maintained that “we stand by our original assessment that his original comments were offensive.” They haven’t revised their headline as of this moment.

Of course, Smith’s argument isn’t novel; it’s the sort of philosophy that gets chatted about among friends and family, and in Sunday school, frequently. (This was true even of my childhood Sunday school — which was Jewish). Contrary to the JDL’s reading, by using “Hitler” as his example Smith implicitly acknowledged Hitler’s ultimate evilness (the philosophical conundrum Smith discussed only makes sense when the example is a figure everyone recognizes as vile).

As Marc Lamont Hill writes:

In his quote, Smith accurately pointed out that people rarely view themselves as the living embodiment of evil. Instead, all of us are shaped by ideologies, traditions, and regimes of knowledge that shape who we are and how we view the world. As such, Hitler likely didn’t see himself as evil, but as an agent of what he viewed as positive social change. This doesn’t justify the massacre of Jews, it merely explains how individual identities and practices are constituted by coherent (though often deeply problematic) worldviews.

While I’m sensitive to Antisemitism — I supported the JDL’s boycott of Mel Gibson– this is going too far. Every time someone does more than call Hitler the devil incarnate, they aren’t supporting the Holocaust. Every time someone challenges the Zionist occupation of Palestine, they aren’t antisemitic. This type of thin skinned and reactionary media grandstanding on the part of the JDL does a radical disservice to the legitimate work against antisemitism that is being done around the globe.

Two quick thoughts:

1) Smith has publicly supported Barak Obama’s candidacy (and the JDL called for Obama to repudiate Smith); I doubt that a right-wing celebrity who had said the same thing would have gotten an angry response by the JDL. But a chance to combine liberal-bashing with publicity-grubbing isn’t something the JDL is likely to pass up.

2) The JDL’s inane attacks on innocent statements trivialize actual antisemitism.

There’s no obsession so unlikely that someone hasn’t made a blog for it.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rejects movie posters that aren’t suitable for children to view. As the MPAA recently explained, as they rejected a movie’s poster:

Ads will be seen by all audiences, including children. If the advertising is not suitable for all audiences it will not be approved by the advertising administration.

So that’s why they rejected this poster:

Don’t click through to the rest of this post if you don’t want to see disturbing images…

Felix Lorioux (1872 - 1964) was one of the great children’s book illustrators, but since he was (I think) French he’s not that well known here in the US.

The ASIFA Blog has a great gallery of Lorioux animal drawings — and you can click on them to see really big versions. Yay!

Merry Christmas, for those of you who merry it up today.

Check out Zuckerman’s web site. He also has a book out, Creature, featuring art photos of various beasties posed against a white background.

The Soldiers’ Truce

Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce
By Stanley Weintraub
The Free Press, 2001
206 pages, $39.95 (hb)

It was the war that was supposed to be over by Christmas. It very nearly was. A spontaneous soldiers’ truce broke out along the Western Front on Christmas Eve 1914, four months after the start of hostilities.

Peace on Earth, goodwill to all men — British, French and German soldiers took these usually hypocritical Christmas sentiments for real and refused to fire on the enemy, exchanging instead song, food, drink and gifts with each other in the battle-churned wastes of no-man’s land between the trenches.

Lasting until Boxing Day in some cases, the truce alarmed the military authorities who worked overtime to end the fraternisation and restart the killing.

Stanley Weintraub’s haunting book on the Christmas Truce recounts through the letters of the soldiers the extraordinary event, routinely denigrated in orthodox military histories as an aberration of no consequence, but which was, argues Weintraub, not only a temporary respite from slaughter but an event which had the potential to topple death-dealing governments.

With hundreds of thousands of casualties since August from a war bogged down in the trenches and mud of France, soldiers of all countries were tired of fighting. There had already been some pre-Christmas truces to bury the dead rotting in no-man’s land but these truces had needed the approval of higher authority.

Soon, however, few would care about higher authority as an unauthorised and illegal truce bubbled up from the ranks.

The peace overtures generally began with song. From German trenches illuminated by brightly lit Christmas trees would come a rich baritone voice or an impromptu choir singing Silent Night (Stille Nacht). Other carols and songs floated back and forth over the barbed wire. A German boot tossed into the British trenches exploded with nothing more harmful than sausages and chocolates. Signs bearing Merry Christmas were hung over the trench parapets, followed by signs and shouts of you no shoot, we no shoot.

The shared Christmas rituals of carols and gifts eased the fear, suspicion and anxiety of initial contact as first a few unarmed soldiers, arms held above their heads, warily ventured out into the middle to be followed soon by dozens of others, armed only with schnapps, pudding, cigarettes and newspapers.

The extraordinary outbreak of peace swept along the entire front from the English Channel to the Switzerland border. Corporal John Ferguson, from the Scottish Seaforth Highlanders shared the pleasant disbelief — Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill.

Uniform accessories (buttons, insignias, belts) were swapped as souvenirs. Christmas dinner was shared amongst the bomb craters. A Londoner in the 3rd Rifles had his hair cut by a Saxon who had been his barber in High Holborn. Helmets were swapped as mixed groups of soldiers posed for group photographs.

Some British soldiers were taken well behind German lines to a bombed farmhouse to share the champagne from its still intact cellar. Soccer matches were played in no-man’s land with stretchers as goalposts. Bicycle races were held on bikes with no tyres found in the ruins of houses. A German soldier captivated hundreds with a display of juggling and magic. You would have thought you were dreaming, wrote captain F. D. Harris to his family in Liverpool.

The high command ordered the line command to stop the fraternisation. Few line officers did or could. The truce momentum could not be arrested. Deliberate or accidental breaches of the tacit truce failed to undermine it. Stray shots were resolved by an apology. If ordered to shoot at unarmed soldiers, soldiers aimed deliberately high.

Sergeant Lange of the XIX Saxon Corps recounted how, when ordered on Boxing Day to fire on the 1st Hampshires, they did so, spending that day and the next wasting ammunition in trying to shoot the stars down from the sky. By firing in the air, as the sergeant noted with approval, they had struck, like the class-conscious workers they were in civilian life. They had had enough of killing.

Military authorities feared fraternisation — a court-martial offence, punishable by death, it weakens the will to kill, destroys the offensive spirit, saps ideological fervour and undermines the sacrificial spirit necessary to wage war. It was politically subversive — A bas la guerre! (Down with the war!) from a French soldier was returned with Nie wieder Kreig! Das walte Gott! (No more war! It’s what God wants!) from his Bavarian counterpart.

After mucking-in with British soldiers, a German private wrote that never was I as keenly aware of the insanity of war.

Soldiers reasserted their shared humanity — Private Rupert Frey of the Bavarian 16th Regiment wrote after fraternising with the English that normally we only knew of their presence when they sent us their iron greetings. Now, we gathered, as if we were friends, as if we were brothers. Well, were we not, after all!.

If ordinary soldiers acted on these sentiments, a big danger loomed for governments and the ruling class. If left to themselves, the soldiers would have been home from the shooting war by Christmas all fired up for the class war at home. As Weintraub says, many troops had discovered through the truce that the enemy, despite the best efforts of propagandists, were not monsters. Each side had encountered men much like themselves, drawn from the same walks of life — and led, alas by professionals who saw the world through different lenses.

Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Sherlock Holmes creator, who had turned from jingoistic imperialism to spiritualism after the death of his son in the war, shot an angry glance to military and civil authority — those high-born conspirators against the peace of the world, who in their mad ambition had hounded men on to take each other by the throat rather than by the hand.

The high command on both sides were desperate to restart the war that had strangely vanished. Replacement troops with no emotional commitment to the truce were rushed in. The 2nd Welsh Fusiliers who had not fired a shot from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day were relieved without notice, an exceptional practice. Sometimes threats were necessary — when German officers ordered a regiment in the XIX Saxon Corps to start firing and were met with replies of we can’t — they are good fellows, the officers replied Fire, or we do — and not at the enemy!.

To prevent further spontaneous truces after 1914, the British high command ordered slow, continuous artillery barrages, trench raids and mortar bombardments — immensely costly of lives but effectively limiting the opportunities for fraternisation for the rest of the war. To discourage others, conspicuous disciplinary examples were made of individuals. For organising a cease-fire to bury the dead, which was followed by half an hour of fraternisation in no-man’s land with no shooting for the rest of Christmas Day 1915, Captain Iain Colquhoun of the 1st Scots Guard was court-martialled. Merely reprimanded, the message was nevertheless clear for career-minded British officers.

Tougher medicine was needed when French soldiers refused to return to the trenches at Aisne in May 1917 — 3427 courts-martial and 554 death sentences with 53 executed by firing squad were necessary to crank-start the war on this sector of the French front.

Repression from above won the day against the Christmas Truce of 1914 but it was the lack of soldiers’ organisation from below that stifled the potential for turning the truce into a movement to stop the war.

On the eastern front, on the other hand, fraternisation and peace were Bolshevik policy and in Germany, it was mutinies by organised sailors and home-based soldiers, which finally put paid to Germany’s war effort.

Weintraub has resurrected a beautiful moment in history, made all the more beautiful in the darkness of the carnage that was to follow when four more years of war took the lives of 6000 men a day. Far from a two-day wonder, the Christmas truce evokes a stubborn humanity within us. As folksinger John McCutcheon put it in his 1980s ballad Christmas in the Trenches, the war monster is a vulnerable beast when the common soldier realises that on each end of the rifle we’re the same.

(Reviewed by Phil Shannon for Green Left Weekly, February 13, 2002)

Curtsy: Dulce Et Decorum Est and Rad Geek.

I’m very entertained by very clever logos and lettering puns.

So here’s the Chinese character that means “horse”:

And here’s an ad for a electronic pen that scans and translates between Chinese and English:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Update: I have decided to take the text of this post down until I have a chance to revise and repost it. The comments I have received–and thank you to all who have posted them–have convinced me that, as I said in comment #19, my words are both conjuring things I do not intend and failing to make distinctions that I do intend, and this weakness in the writing means that what I want to say, the questions I want to ask and explore are not only not getting across, but are being misrepresented. It’s not so much that I think the revision will change the mind of anybody who has posted a critical comment, but that, at least, the criticism will be directed at what I actually mean to say, not the unintended implications of my having said it not as well as I should have. Hopefully, I will have that revision up within the next week or so.

An ad from 1954. Why would anyone buy a product if it might make their kid look like an ax murderer?

I’m reminded of the episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in which Spike commented, “If every vampire who said he was at the crucifixion was actually there, it would have been like Woodstock.”

A defensive Romney was peppered with questions today on exactly what he meant when he said — most recently on Meet the Press — that he “saw” his father march with Martin Luther King Jr. Recent articles have indicated that his father, the late Michigan Gov. George Romney, didn’t march with the civil-rights leader.

Admitting that he didn’t see the march with his own eyes, he said, “I ’saw’ him in the figurative sense.”

“The reference of seeing my father lead in civil rights,” he said, “and seeing my father march with Martin Luther King is in the sense of this figurative awareness of and recognition of his leadership.”

“I’ve tried to be as accurate as I can be,” he continued, smiling firmly. “If you look at the literature or look at the dictionary, the term ’saw’ includes being aware of — in the sense I’ve described.”

The questioning did not relent. “I’m an English literature major,” he insisted at one point. “When we say I saw the Patriots win the World Series, it doesn’t necessarily mean you were there.”

Of course, since the Patriots play football, no one would see them at baseball’s World Series. (If Kerry, Gore or Edwards made that error, it would haunt them forever — elitist! girly-man! faker! — but Romney will be given a pass.) That aside, however, what a pathetically lame defense.

Incidently, Romney’s lie about marching with Martin Luther King Jr used to be more extreme. This week, he only lied about his father marching with MLK. Thirty years ago, he claimed that he himself marched with MLK.

As I’ve said before, since conservatives lack credibility on race, they cite MLK to “borrow” MLK’s credibility for their own purposes.

This is a useful tactic for politicians¹ because the large majority of Americans have forgotten the policies MLK actually advocated for. So claiming allegiance with MLK’s memory is a good way for politicians to pretend they’re against white supremacy without actually committing to any policy positions that might have the effect of reducing white supremacy at all.

UPDATE: Mark Schmitt points out that “in fact, Governor George Romney had an extremely impressive civil rights record.” But he also asks:

Is there the slightest reason to believe that in the same position as his father, as it was becoming clear that the Republicans’ path to the presidency ran through the South (Goldwater secured the nomination in 1964 in part by opposing the Civil Rights Act, and Strom Thurmond switched parties that year), [Mitt Romney] would have shown similar courage? Mitt Romney’s shape-shifting adaptation to whatever the Republican prejudice of the moment is (anti-immigration rhetoric, or denouncing the kind of health plan he enacted as “socialized medicine”) suggests that he wouldn’t have been doing any marching.

1. Democrats and Republicans alike (back)