Finally. I know that this could still keep going, you know, forever, but the smoke signals and tea leaves and bird guts all have pointed to Norm giving up. Given that this is a unanimous per curiam decision, it’s hard for Norm to show that he was beaten down by a shadowy liberal cabal. Frankly, his attorneys have done well to delay things this long, and I find it highly unlikely that Norm will continue on. Not impossible, but highly unlikely.

All I know is that my state’s junior senator is this guy:

Join science fiction, fantasy, and horror authors Linda D. Addison (Being Full of Light, Insubstantial), K. Tempest Bradford (Interfictions, Federations), N. K. Jemisin (forthcoming: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms), and Alaya Dawn Johnson (Racing the Dark) for a reading and discussion on women of color in speculative fiction. Far from being indifferent to the genre, people of color are creating and consuming SF literature and media more than ever. Come hear some of the best new and award-winning speculative voices of color writing today.

When: Thursday, July 30th @ 7PM

Where: Bluestockings Books, 172 Allen Street (1 block south of Houston), NYC

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At the start of the month, Megan McArdle — who is, I think, pro-choice — wrote:

But in this case, I think the analogy to slavery is important, for two reasons. First of all, it was the last time we had an extended, society-wide debate about personhood. [...]

Listening to the debates about abortion, it seems to me that really broad swathes of the pro-choice movement seem to genuinely not understand that this is a debate about personhood, which is why you get moronic statements like “If you think abortions are wrong, don’t have one!” If you think a fetus is a person, it is not useful to be told that you, personally, are not required to commit murder, as long as you leave the neighbors alone while they do it.

Conversely, if Africans are not people, then slavery is not wrong.

Although Megan is (I think) pro-choice, I’ve certainly heard this argument made by pro-lifers any number of times. But “lack of personhood” was not, in fact, a major pro-slavery argument. I’d recommend listening to (or reading the transcript of) this lecture by Yale historian David Blight, in which he outlines the pre-civil-war pro-slavery arguments.

The entire lecture is worth your time, but here — heavily edited for space — is Blight’s outline of the important pro-slavery arguments.

Now, there are many ways to look at pro-slavery. Deep, deep in the pro-slavery argument–I’m going to give you categories here to hang your hats on–deep in the pro-slavery argument is a biblical argument. Almost all pro-slavery writers at one point or another will dip into the Old Testament, or dip into the New Testament–they especially would dip to the Old–to show how slavery is an ancient and venerable institution. [...] You can therefore assume it was divinely sanctioned. [...]

A second kind of set of arguments, I’ve already referred to, are the historical ones. Here it is not just the venerability of slavery, how old it is, but it’s the idea that it has been crucial to the development of all great civilizations. That slavery may have its bad aspects but it has been the engine of good, it has been the engine of empires, the engine of wealth, the engine of greatness. How would you have had Cicero? How would you have had the great Roman philosophers and thinkers? [...]

Pro-slavery ideology is also part of–at the same time it’s resistant to–the greatest product arguably of the Enlightenment, and that is the idea of natural rights; natural law, natural rights, rights by birth, rights from God, being born with certain capacities. Now pro-slavery writers were inspired by this to some extent, but many of them will simply convert it. They will convert it–they’ll take portions of John Locke that they like, and not the others–and they’ll say the real rule of the world is not natural equality, but it is natural inequality. Humans are not all born the same, with the same capacities, abilities.

Now, then there’s a whole array of economic arguments, and the cynic, the economic determinist, simply goes to the economic conclusions of pro-slavery and nowhere else. [...] “You will say that man cannot hold property in man. The answer is that he can, and actually does, hold property in his fellow, all over the world, in a variety of forms, and has always done so.” [...]

Some would get worried and they would discuss slavery as a necessary evil–this system entailed upon them. [...] “But the question is, in my present circumstances, with evil on my hands, entailed from my father, would the general interest of the slaves and community at large, with reference to the slaves, be promoted best by emancipation? Could I do more for the ultimate good of the slave population by holding or emancipating what I own?” [...] he develops a highly intricate theory of how he’s going to use slavery to save black people. He’s going to ameliorate their conditions, he’s going to make their slavery on his plantations so effective, so good, such a even joyous form of labor, that he will be doing God’s work by improving slavery.[...]

There are many pro-slavery writers who developed, like James Henry Hammond, what I would call the cynical or amoral form of pro-slavery argument; and this is a potent form of argument when you think about it. [...] “The only problem with slavery in America,” said James Henry Hammond, is that too damn many northerners didn’t understand it is the way of the world as it is, and they ought to stop talking about the world as it ought to be.” [...] “Is it not palpably nearer the truth to say that no man was ever born free and that no two men were ever born equal? Man is born in a state of the most helpless dependence on other people.”

And then there’s the whole vast category of racial defense and justification of slavery. [...] Probably the most prominent pro-slavery writer to make the racial case–and they all did–but probably the most prominent was George Fitzhugh. [...] “The Negro,” he said, “is but a grownup child and must be governed as a child. The master occupies toward him the place of parent or guardian. Like a wild horse he must be caught, tamed and domesticated.” [...]

And lastly, there was a kind of utopian pro-slavery. [...] In Hughes’s vision and Hughes’s worldview slavery was not only a positive good–it was the possibility of man finding a perfected society, with the perfect landowners fulfilling their obligations, supported by a government that taxed the hell out of them to do it, and perfect workers, would make the South into the agricultural utopian civilization of history.

It’s politically useful for pro-lifers to pretend that abortion and slavery were similar debates, and that the major argument for slavery was the claim that Africans were not people. But that’s simply not true.

(Note that in the lecture I’m quoting, Blight’s intent wasn’t making a case about abortion in either direction — Blight isn’t shading his arguments towards a pro-choice or pro-life outcome, he’s simply explaining the history of pro-slavery arguments. Can pro-lifers cite similarly non-biased sources to support their argument?)

See also: Ta-Nehisi.

* * *

P.S. I can’t resist pointing out that the first few arguments Blight lists — the institution goes back forever, it’s in the Bible, and it’s the foundation of civilization — are also the major arguments used in the present day to argue for banning same-sex couples from marriage.

In an effort to give you as many ways of reading our awesome blog as is possible, we’re now also publishing a Kindle edition. You can subscribe to The Angry Black Woman for $1.99/month and it will be delivered wirelessly to your fancy Amazon-branded eReader. Now you can read ABW on the train home from work, in the bath, or while skydiving.

Even if you don’t have a Kindle, you can go to the page on Amazon and write reviews of the blog. (Ys, I know, there’s much potential for foolishness. I’m counting on cool people to drown out the haters.)

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Longtime “Alas” readers will recall a long-ago co-blogger, my friend and housemate Bean, who still posts a very occasional comment here, plus I often use Bean’s photos for kid blogging.

Sydney and Maddox were recently flower girls at the wedding of Bean to a lovely, quirky guy named Dan.

Many more pictures — not only of the girls, but also of a few other folks of interest to the “Alas” community — below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »

As usual, use this thread to post or link whatever you’d like. Self-linking is entirely welcome.

1. Raising a child to be neither girl nor boy, just “Pop.” Unapologetically Female and Feministing both comment.
2. It’s like a sick Onion headline come to life: Texas police raid gay bar on 40th anniversary of Stonewall. One bar patron is seriously injured.(Via.)
3. Ten things wrong with the President of France’s wanting to eliminate the burqa.
4. And at Global Comment: “Banning women from wearing the burqa is not about freedom, it is about the normalization of the Western performance of femininity.” (Via.)
5. Like a dictionary, but better, and crowdsourced: Wordnic. (Via.)
6. Ezra on Obama, taxes, and giving in to the Republican framing.
7. My God, who wouldn’t want a wife? (I wish she had posted this on “Alas.”)
8. If we wipe out the financial managers, that would solve many problems.
9. How Spike ruined Buffy, and Buffy ruined vampires. (Via.)
10. Israel has made some improvements in response to Obama.
11. How Obama’s big speech in Egypt gets a “C” at best on women’s rights. Although unlike Cathy, I’m not against mentioning that America has problems too; I don’t believe that Obama makes an equivalence just because he mentions them both in the same speech. (It’s a matter of contextual analysis, however, not a hard-and-fast rule.) In the end, the real question is: How could Obama have put it that would have been more likely to make a positive difference? I’m not sure what the answer is.
12. Womanist Musings on prison rape.
13. Unexpected allies department: The Corner gets it right on prison rape.
14. Posted because it’s of interest, not because I agree with all of it: Does it make sense to “ally” with Iranians when I have no idea what I’m talking about? (Via.)
15. Evolutionary psychology is still nonsense.
16. On being a Christian who wants to treat lesbian and gay people justly.
17. No, the financial crash was not caused by the Community Reinvestment Act. It really wasn’t.
18. Little Wheel. You’re a robot trying to wake up a dozing robot city. “Nothin’ too complicated, not really what I’d call a “game”, more like an animated story with a bit of interactivity, but nevertheless, beautiful and enjoyable.”

This moved me:

Here is the copy from the website:

“Stand by Me” On June 24, Iranian Superstar Andy Madadian went into an LA recording studio with Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora and American record producers Don Was and John Shanks to record a musical message of worldwide solidarity with the people of Iran. This version of the old Ben E. King classic is not for sale - it was not meant to be on the Billboard charts or even manufactured as a CD…..it’s intended to be downloaded and shared by the Iranian people…to give voice to the sentiment that all people of the world stand together….the handwritten Farsi sign in the video translates to “we are one”. If you know someone in Iran - or someone who knows someone in Iran - please share this link CREDITS: STAND BY ME Andy - Vocals Jon Bon Jovi - Vocals Richie Sambora - Electric Guitar and Vocals John Shanks - Acoustic Guitar Don Was - Bass Patrick Leonard - Keyboards Jeff Rothchild - Drums Tiffany Madadian and Nikki Lund - Background Vocals Produced by Don Was & John Shanks Recorded and Mixed by Jeff Rothchild at Henson Studio C, Hollywood, CA June 24, 2009 Thanks to Faryal Ganjehei Written by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller Farsi lyric by Paksima Zakipour Video Edited by Gemma Corfield Mastered by Stephen Marcussen

So Steven Waldman of Beliefnet and Lord William Saletan went on Bloggingheads to discuss abortion, and how we can make the dirty tramps who have them stop. It’s a natural topic of conversation for two people with zero ovaries, fallopian tubes, uteruses, and vaginas between them; since they’ll never have to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term, Waldman and Saletan are free to discuss things logically and scientifically, free from concerns like, say, how this would actually affect a human being.

Remarkably, in a discussion including Saletan, Waldman managed to make the dumbest and most offensive argument: what if we paid those wanton slatterns to keep the precious baby growing inside of them?

Now I wonder, I know this is dangerous territory here, but I’m just kind of thinking out loud…I wonder if we should start thinking about financial incentives or help for women who decide to carry the baby to term.”

[...]

So maybe we ought to be saying to them, if it’s officially important for us as a society to reduce the number of abortions…maybe we should pay her a thousand dollars, uh, I don’t know what the right number is, because you don’t want to create a financial incentive for, uh, making babies.

Genius! The woman gets ten honeybees, the patriarchal society gets its precious, precious baby, and everything is swell. It’s logically air-tight, except for the part of the stuff where he said all about…uh…things.

Before we take this apart on philosophical grounds, let’s first go over the basic argument: we’re going to give women money to continue with a pregnancy she would have aborted. Okay. Well, since we live in a country with de jure legal abortions, every pregnancy can be terminated. So we just agreed to pay every woman who gives birth $1000 cash money. In 2005, there were 4,138,349 live births in America. Presumably, this proposal would increase those numbers, and the numbers are just naturally going up anyway, so let’s say this gets us to a robust 5 million kids a year. At $1000 a kid, that’s a measly $5 billion a year in child bonuses! Pocket change. I mean, sure, it’s just $2 billion less than we give the EPA, but compared to the $660 billion we spent on defense, that’s nothing!

Then again, coming up with $5 billion a year will require higher taxes eventually, and if you hate abortion, you probably hate taxes even more. So somehow, we’re going to have to narrow this down a bit. Why not eliminate married women from the payout? I mean, every child born to a married couple is a loving gift from God, and therefore no married woman has ever had an abortion, so there we go! Now, some naysayers will say nay, that would encourage women and men to postpone marriage until after they had kids so that they can qualify for the child bonus, but that’s just crazy talk.

Maybe we could ask women if they were going to have an abortion, and if they say, “no,” we could simply not pay them. Brilliant! Nobody would lie for $1000. It’s foolproof!

Okay, now that we’ve reduced the cost to $4 billion or so, we run into our next problem: the .000002% of the recipients of the bonus who actually were swayed from aborting are now going into labor, and they just realized that the copay for giving birth is, like, much more than $1000. And that’s the ones who have insurance. They tell all their slutty friends who are cursed with God’s judgment, and now their friends all want to get abortions again! It’s crazy, I know, but given the expense of labor and delivery and having to pay for an actual child (assuming these children aren’t all given up for adoption, which they wouldn’t be), $1000 is absolutely nothing. (This shouldn’t be surprising; the going rate for surrogates is roughly $20,000 — which is probably lower than it should be, considering the health risks of pregnancy. Of course, that would have our plan costing around $100 billion a year, or about the size of the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security, Energy, Agriculture, and Justice combined.) 

And not for nothing, but $1000 certainly not much of an incentive for women who are, one remembers, already paying easily that much to have abortions – which tends to suggest that the financial implications of childbirth are not the most pressing on women looking to abort anyhow. 

So to recap the plan: we’re going to increase the out-of-wedlock birthrate, encourage women to lie, and pay too little to actually affect the abortion rate whatsoever. It’s a remarkable plan, I don’t know why anti-choicers haven’t thought of this before.

Now, obviously, this plan simply wouldn’t work, but frankly, that’s not the worst part of it. The worst part, of course, is that it’s essentially treating the woman as a rent-a-uterus, a thing that must be placated just long enough to extract the thing of value, the baby, from her. It’s dehumanizing, and it’s demeaning, and it ignores all the problems with actually being pregnant that most women, bless them, soldier through in order to have a child. It’s arduous, dangerous work, which is why people of decent character generally think that we should do what we can to make the work voluntary — to allow women to decide for themselves whether to take on the burden of carrying a pregnancy to term — and to allow them to opt out should they decide, even after they start, that they do not want to continue.

Of course, thinking that requires one to recognize that the work women do in carrying on our species’ existence is tremendously valuable and difficult, and something that they, as humans, should be lauded for. But when your view of pregnancy values the potential human within far more than the actual human without, it’s hard to recognize that. And easy to think that the husk which contains the precious child can be bought off with 15 cents per hour for nine months of ’round the clock work. The husk isn’t that important, you see. It’s just a woman.

I haven’t said anything about the situation in Iran, mostly because I don’t feel qualified to speak about it. I’m watching it, though, following the Twitter feeds obsessively and learning as much as I can about Iran’s history. I’ve been finding fellow blogger Richard Jeffrey Newman’s posts over at Alas especially illuminating about the nuances not being covered in the mainstream media.

I had to think hard about posting this here at ABW, though, because for awhile I wasn’t sure whether the situation in a Persian-dominated country halfway around the world, which has its own entirely different racial issues, was on-topic. Then I remembered a book I’d read a few years back, and considered the historical context that’s a constant undercurrent of the Iran situation, and realized it’s completely spot-on for a discussion of racism.

Because modern racism’s roots, we must remember, lie in European and American imperialism. The many hideous dehumanizations of people of color started centuries ago as an attempt to justify the slave trade and its cruelties. These dehumanizations continue today for the purpose of justifying American financial interests (primarily in oil). We’ve seen this again and again, to most devastating effect in Africa and Latin America, but in other parts of the world as well.

Iran belongs in this category. I was aware that the CIA had helped to overthrow Iran’s last democratically-elected government in the 1950s, replacing it with the tyrannical Shah — which itself touched off the Iranian Revolution and seated the government that is now oppressing its own people. What I hadn’t realized was just how cynical and deliberate the imperialist process was, until I read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins.

Now, I didn’t like this book. Perkins, who spent the 1970s and 80s working for Chas T. Main, an engineering consulting firm — think Halliburton today — spends a little too much of the book glamorizing himself as some kind of geeky James Bond, lunching with power players and banging his way through the fairer sex; he reads to me as a guy on an extended midlife crisis. That said, the book is spot-on in revealing the ways in which American imperialists function in the modern day. Perkins explains that the NSA, CIA, and US business interests have repeatedly worked together to bribe, blackmail, frame, addict, overthrow, and if necessary, kill the leaders of other nations, so that ours can make more money. He touches on Iran, though only glancingly, but he provides enough other examples in Latin America and Asia, and shows enough of how the pattern works, that anyone who reads this book will have a clear idea of how American fucked up Iran.

And then compounded the initial assault over the next 30 years. Like many of us, I grew up thinking of Iran as “the country of religious fantatics who took American hostages, had something to do with the Contras, and just generally fucking hates us.” This was the framing of Reagan and his cronies, who — as imperialists themselves — had a vested interest in “othering” Iranians. There was frequently a racial component to this othering*, although sometimes it was just matter-of-factly self-serving.

I read Perkins’ book years ago, but I have to admit — I kept thinking of Iranians as a somewhat scary “they” and “them”, even though the book illuminated many of the ways in which they were us. If the US could have done so, it would happily have enslaved the Iranian people — economically if not literally — and frankly, some Americans are still trying. This, I suspect, is what’s really behind the inexplicable demands by Republicans that Obama make a stronger effort to endorse the protesters in Iran, even though this would be the equivalent of shooting the protest movement in the back. My guess is that they want Mousavi’s supporters to be suppressed — so that they can later send in “hit men” like Perkins to offer the same Faustian bargain that got offered to the Taliban of Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein of Iraq. This is their favorite tactic, according to Perkins: cultivate a disgruntled minority and then use their desperation for profit. The hit men arrive bearing gifts and a message of hope: Promise to support our interests and we’ll help you gain power, and then you’ll be free to keep that power in whatever fucked-up way you want.

But this is why I’m so hooked on the Twitter feeds. I no longer think of the Iranian people as “them,” and I don’t think I’m the only person to feel this way. Here’s an excerpt from Twitter Ripped the Veil Off ‘The Other’ — And We Saw Ourselves:

All the accumulated suspicion and fear and alienation from three decades of hostility between Iran and America seemed to slip away. Whatever happens, the ability of this new media to bring people together - to bring the entire world into this revolution on the streets of Iran - has already changed things dramatically.

Yeah. This.

So fight on, people of Iran. I know you don’t like me much; that’s cool. You got cause. I still wish there was more I could do to help — but I think the best thing I can do right now is write to my own American politicians, and urge them in the strongest possible terms to shut the fuck up. And I’ll keep watching. God be with you.

* I’m really, really sorry to link to a post on Michelle Malkin’s site, folks. Unfortunately, it’s a great example of the nastiness that’s out there.

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So. Micheal Jackson is dead. I am having serious trouble processing that. I expected to hear this when I myself was much older. Not now. I wasn’t ready for now. Damn. *sigh* His songs were always there… I liked most of them, but these were my favs Stranger in Moscow and Dirty Diana May he RIP. Damn that’s so freaking surreal…

Anyway. Links.

First, the heavy posts:

Timing Is Everything: Nicolas Sarkozy Defends Women’s Rights by Restricting Them More feminism being used as a pretext for racism. Perfect.

I Didn’t Know "Rest In Peace" Came with a Citizenship Requirement! Yeah, I can’t comment on this one. Because the language I would be using is not allowable in polite company. At all.

And…with very very very STRONG TRIGGER WARNINGS:
Intersectionality and Rape There is a large conversation about rape going on on LJ and I thought that this post was a very very good compilation of links to intelligent posts on the topic.

Then, the thinky posts:

The Intersection of Race and Steampunk: Colonialism’s After-Effects & Other Stories, from a Steampunk of Colour’s Perspective [Essay] Excellent article. But Racialicious consistently brings the cool, don’t they?

Speak CD

Finally, the lighter posts:

The writer of the Steampunk article above, Jha, introduced me to the blog of one Talulah Mankiller. People. You read to be reading her. Seriously.

Take for instance her hilarious and on point eviseration of romance novel tropes in I Love My Dead Gay Husband I&II.

Orgasming Through Penetration Alone

Guys, I took Women’s Health: for most women, this just does not happen on a regular basis, if at all. It’s not because they “haven’t found the right man”; it’s because it’s often physically impossible. So please stop writing this–in some states, romance novels are what passes for sex ed. Think of the children who will one day grow up to be disillusioned, sexually frustrated adults if you keep writing this shit. Do you really want them killing you in a fit of post-coital rage? I didn’t think so.

People, speaking as someone whose expectations are STILL messed up by that pervasive bit of batshittery? I cheered! How can you not love her like I do? And she has more! See I Love My Dead Gay Husband III: Still Dead. Still Gay. And Now with Bonus Manic Episodes (especially the part about the Creamy white thighs *snerks*) and The Werewolf Ate my Homework for a dissection of the wonderful (barf-inducing) world of YA Fiction!

In terms of recs for this week? The Al Jazeera English Program Artsworld, on youtube. Its an absolutely fascinating look at art from around the world, from English gardens to Canadian DNA art to Ghanaian coffins (when I die, I want a book-shaped coffin let me tell you) to Tunisian glassblowing and tons more!

And that’s it for this week! Have yourselves a peaceful weekend!

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Of course, by “Tyranny,” I mean we passed a fairly weak cap-and-trade carbon emission bill through the House of Representatives that will, hopefully, mitigate the damage from what could be the worst environmental catastrophe since the last ice age. But while those of us in the reality-based community think that the passage of Waxman-Markey is, you know, a prudent step in preventing the flooding of Florida and the end of Midwestern agriculture, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Sigh, knows better:

For the YouTube impaired, Bachmann states a number of completely made-up statistics showing that this measure would destroy the economy, and then declares, “But what is worse than this is the fact that now because of this underlying bill, the federal government will virtually have control over every aspect of lives for the American people. It is time to stand up and say: We get to choose. We choose liberty, or we choose tyranny — it’s one of the two.”

Because nothing says tyranny like weak, market-based restrictions on carbon emissions. It’s pretty much exactly the same as what’s going on in Iran, only worse.

Meanwhile, Glenn Beck decided to go after the bill by using a watermelon as a prop. Frankly, given Beck’s rather unique view of the world, this is barely worth mentioning.

Ah, “Joe” the “Plumber,” we just can’t quit you, much as we might want to. I know you like to spend your time in quiet contemplation, but I understand you have some things to say?

“Obama right now is talking about, he can generate more revenue by taxing the top 2 to 3 percent of Americans,” Wurzelbacher said. “Well, you know, that’s immoral. Just because someone’s worked hard, gotten ahead — it’s not your money.”

Ah, yes, well, you see “Joe,” progressive taxation has been a part of American law since the dawn of the income tax. Even Ronald Reagan supported progressive taxation. Are you saying our country is immoral? Why do you hate America?

I kid, of course; your argument basically just proves you’re a libertarian douchebag who hasn’t thought too deeply about anything. It’s not like you called for the death of a politician.

Wurzelbacher has a reputation for being a blunt, politically incorrect speaker. Referring to Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., more than once, Wurzelbacher asked, “Why hasn’t he been strung up?”

Oh. Well, you know, you still have that keen grasp of policy that led John McCain to call you his personal hero, right?

And he glosses over facts. Referring to the Constitution as “almost like the Bible,” Wurzelbacher said of the Founding Fathers: “They knew socialism doesn’t work. They knew communism doesn’t work.”

Of course they did! Everyone knows that Ben Franklin invented the time machine, right after he invented the vibrator.* He and Thomas Jefferson time-traveled to the Soviet Union in 1984, and decided there and then that communism would not work. And thank goodness — had they traveled to Sweden in 2006, all of history might have been different.

Incidentally, “Joe” says he didn’t leave the GOP. Damn liberal media, reporting what he said as if he said it. But I say thank goodness. The Palin/The “Plumber” ticket is still alive for 2012. And that would be hilarious.

*This is why Franklin was so popular with the ladies.

Michael Jackson died yesterday. I wish I could say this came as a shock. Though I didn’t know anything about his health or recent condition, somehow I just found myself unsurprised. And profoundly sad.

In deciding to write this, I went through many thoughts on why I feel able to be sad about Michael’s death and to even say positive things about him when I would not extend the same charity to other flawed artists. For example, when Ike Turner died I was unwilling to allow his talent to overshadow my feelings about his history as an abuser. And if R. Kelly were to die today I would think it was a shame, but I would not mourn. In the former case I don’t have much opinion on the talent of the individual; in the latter, I do feel that the man has a lot of talent, but I can’t separate that from the disgust I feel at his sexual adventures with underage girls.

So why don’t I feel the same about Michael?

I can’t give you a good answer. Perhaps because I feel like, whatever Michael is alleged to have done, I can see how the damage done to him in life could have led to it. Doesn’t excuse it, certainly. But it allows me to personally look past it to the good things about him: his music.

The first music video I ever saw was Thriller and I was around 3 years old. My aunt was excited to have me watch it, my mother thought it was too scary for me. But in the end my aunt won and I tried to match those dance moves all night. Michael’s music has been in my ear since before I was born. And before I was five I could sing all the lyrics from every song on Thriller and a bunch from his Jackson 5 days, too.

I was too young at the time to understand the implications behind Michael being the first black artist on MTV. As an adult I still feel a sense of incredulity when I think about that. In the 80s there was still a need for someone’s talent to transcend their race. But Michael did and music (and television) is all the better for it.

The first record I bought with my own money was Bad. Dangerous and HIStory were the first CDs I ripped to MP3. I know that in my music-listening life there has rarely been a month that’s gone by without my listening to some of his music. It seemed like everything he set himself to do he did really well. The singing, the dancing, even the acting.

The videos! Oh goddess, the man pioneered music videos as cinema. Thriller did us all in, but as I sit here searching YouTube I’m reminded of so many more. Remember the Time, Black or White, Smooth Criminal (the long cut), Bad, Jam…

I saw him in concert once when he was touring after Bad came out. It was… amazing. He was a machine. Dancing, singing, never stopping for hours. He gave the crowd everything and then he went on to do it every night for everyone else. It increased my love for him ten-fold.

I think I mourned the MJ I adored many years ago. I had no expectation that he’d make a satisfactory comeback, though I would have been happy to be surprised. It all ended sometime after HIStory for me. Invincible didn’t impress, Blood on the Dance Floor didn’t even register. I felt bad for that. But Michael changed, and not in the way he was able to change before to keep up and transcend.

Still, today I am sad. Because the image of him I have in my head is that amazing entrance to the stage for the Dangerous tour. He exploded out of the stage in a spray of fireworks and then just stood there, silent and still, for a full five minutes, with the bearing of a god. He knew he was good. He knew that, in those moments, he was a rock god. And then the music would start, and he would move, and the concert began, and everything else melted away.

Rest in Peace, Michael Jackson. You and James Brown can spend eternity trading moves. Maybe you’ll teach him to moonwalk.

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Via Boingboing, this is a great clip of an interview with Savana Redding, the girl who, at 13 years old, was illegally strip-searched by her school.

The money quote for me is when she says:

When I was a kid and they asked me to do this, I didn’t know that … y’know, that it was wrong. I didn’t know that I could say no.

She didn’t know that she could say no. Think about that.

Well, first off, she shouldn’t have had to say no. Women shouldn’t have to say ‘don’t rape me,’ either. No means no, but she didn’t even know it was an option, and she shouldn’t have had to. It’s not a child’s responsibility to remind an adult of what is ethical.

Second, the similarity of this language to the kind of language we hear from people who have experienced statutory rape or were molested underlines that this was a sexual violation, and (like statutory rape and child molestation) one premised on taking advantage of her age, inexperience, and deference to authority.

I’m sure that that’s not how the vice principal intended it, but it doesn’t matter what the intentions were. A crying 13 year old girl was humiliated by being forced to strip in front of adults.

It astounds me that anyone would even try to come up with a justification.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people (even people under 18).

It feels odd to be promoting myself and my work now, with everything that’s going on Iran, and in the context of everything I’ve been posting, but there is a good interview with me up on the blog More Babel,which is the editor’s blog for the online journal Babel Fruit. I answered questions about translation, classical Iranian literature, my own poetry and more.

One thing I said that I happen to like:

I also discovered that the most popular contemporary translations of classical Iranian poetry into English–those of Rumi by Coleman Barks and of Hafez by Daniel Ladinksi–were more concerned with spiritualizing the texts and writers they were translating than in rendering any but the most tenuous connection between their translations and the original texts, not to mention the culture in which those original texts were written and where they are still very much a living literature. It’s not that I think all translation must hew to a particular line in relation to the original text; nor do I think that either my personal dislike for Barks’ and Ladinsky’s work (neither moves me) or my objections to their motives and methods (about which more below) means that their work is bad in some absolute moral sense–though it does seem to me that it is false advertising to call Ladinsky’s work translations and that it would be more appropriate to call them “writings after Hafez,” or “versions of/improvisations on Hafez,” or some such thing. Rather, it’s that, given both the history of the translation of classical Iranian literature into English and my personal connection to that literature through my wife, my son and the many Iranian friends I have, I feel very strongly the degree to which past translations, including those of Barks and Ladinsky, have been very explicitly invested in misrepresenting Iran, its culture, its literature and, ultimately, its history. More to the point, this misrepresentation was not the misrepresentation of which all translation is guilty by definition; it was an almost willful–and sometimes fully willful–misrepresentation that grew out of the political or spiritual, non-literary agenda of the translator.

More Babel: Talking With Richard Jeffrey Newman.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

So, a few months ago my husband took an illustration gig. That project is now published and it is a really good book for little black girls who need to remember that they are beautiful just the way they are. When he took the commission it was for a friend’s mother and at the time it seemed relatively unimportant since it was really being done as a favor. Fast forward to now when our nieces are hitting that age and we’re hearing them criticize their looks left and right and all of a sudden we’re looking for other books like this one and realizing that we can’t really find them. Oh, we’ve found a couple but for the most part despite all the talk about self-esteem in kids there’s not a lot addressing what it’s like for a child of color in a society that uses a beauty standard based in whiteness.

And although I admit I hope that a lot of you go buy this book, I’m also hoping that you’ll be inspired to create more books like this one. Because listening to little girls critique themselves on every level is awful. And they need to see images of WOC in the media that are positive and nurturing and beautiful. And it’s not enough to start that message when they are 7 or 8 (we thought it was) because society starts teaching them something else entirely right from birth. It’s not enough to have the token fairies of color (ala Disney) or the one black Princess (again Disney) we need to make the media reflect the world that we all live in.

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From the NYT:

In a ruling of interest to educators, parents and students across the country, the Supreme Court ruled, 8 to 1, on Thursday that the strip search of a 13-year-old Arizona girl by school officials who were looking for prescription-strength drugs violated her constitutional rights.

The officials in Safford, Ariz., would have been justified in 2003 had they limited their search to the backpack and outer clothing of Savana Redding, who was in the eighth grade at the time, the court ruled. But in searching her undergarments, they went too far and violated her Fourth Amendment privacy rights, the justices said.

Had Savana been suspected of having illegal drugs that could have posed a far greater danger to herself and other students, the strip search, too, might have been justified, the majority said, in an opinion by Justice David H. Souter.

“In sum, what was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear,” the court said. “We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable.”

The dissent was written by Thomas.

The court also ruled that the vice-principal could not personally be held liable for his actions in this case. Dissenting from that decision were Ginsburg and Stevens. However, lower courts can still decide to hold the school district liable.

(Curtsy to Sailorman in comments.)

But I decided that, since the Iranian government has shut down just about every outlet by which people there could get there stories out, and since the Iranian government is trying so hard not only to take control of how events in Iran are shaped, but also to hide what is going on there–check out this article in particular–that it is more important to bear witness when we can and watching this video will be nothing if it is not bearing witness: not to sentimentalize the man being tortured in this video in the way that Neda has been sentimentalized, but because if we do not bear witness, then the people who perpetrated and the people who gave license to the perpetrators for this kind of thing will have won. (I will add that an Iranian friend of mine points out that the thugs in the video are speaking a language other than Persian.)

I will say it again: This video is very, very, very, very disturbing, and if you have triggers it will likely pull all of them.

ETA: This clip from The Daily Show is also worth watching:

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.