I have conservative friends who argue that it’s unfair of the left to paint them all as a bunch of tea-party-attending, Glen-Beck-listening yahoos. They argue that conservatism has a rich intellectual foundation, and that by cherry picking their worst-sounding supporters, we willfully ignore the writers today who uphold that intellectual foundation.

Writers like the folks at The National Review.

Writers like John Derbyshire¹.

Why do I bring this up? Well, its just that as Faiz Shakir points out over at Think Progress, John Derbyshire went on Alan Colmes’ radio show yesterday and took a stand against female suffrage.

DERBYSHIRE: Among the hopes that I do not realistically nurse is the hope that female suffrage will be repealed. But I’ll say this – if it were to be, I wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep.

COLMES: We’d be a better country if women didn’t vote?

DERBYSHIRE: Probably. Don’t you think so?

COLMES: No, I do not think so whatsoever.

DERBYSHIRE: Come on Alan. Come clean here [laughing].

COLMES: We would be a better country? John Derbyshire making the statement, we would be a better country if women did not vote.

DERBYSHIRE: Yeah, probably.

Okay, so that’s bad enough, but Alan Colmes, rightly gobsmacked by this, next asked

COLMES: What’s next, you want to bring back slavery?

DERBYSHIRE: No. No, I’m in favor of freedom, personally.

COLMES: But women shouldn’t have the freedom to vote?

DERBYSHIRE: Well, they didn’t and we got on along ok.

He goes on to argue against The Civil Rights Act of 1964. Of course.

Anyhow, all this illustrates two things for me.

First, it really perfectly encapsulates the strange sort of doublethink you see in conservative political philosophy all the time.

“We believe in individualism! (Just so long as you don’t have sex in ways we disapprove of.)”

“We believe in freedom! (As long as people who disagree with us are not allowed to vote.)”

“We believe in free speech! (But people who criticize the (Republican) president should watch their goddamn mouths.)”

You see this a lot in discussions about economics, where the argument is that government intervention and collective solutions are illegitimate (not just wrong, mind you), no matter how much of the electorate is in favor of them. You see it in the faux-troversies about President Obama’s legitimacy. You see it in Glenn Beck’s rhetoric about how ‘real Americans’ are opposed to President Obama, despite him having won the presidency by an overwhelming majority ². You see it in the analysis we hear every election about how “if it weren’t for the African-American vote, Democrats would be a permanent minority party³ ”

The central idea is this: If you disagree with them, you ought not be allowed to participate in the democratic process in the first place. I contrast this with the way the liberal ACLU operates, fighting for the free speech rights of white supremacists and the religious rights of fundamentalists, both groups who are not (to put it mildly) their ‘core constituency’.

‘Rights for all,’ versus ‘rights for the people who agree with me.’ That’s the difference.

Hell, John Derbyshire makes no bones about it! He says outright, “The conservative case against [female suffrage] is that women lean hard to the left.” That’s not an argument. That’s thuggery.

Anyhow, that’s the first thing I took from it.

The second thing I took away is that when people talk about the rich intellectual tradition of Conservatism, it’s guys like John Derbyshire they’re talking about, so … jeez … maybe they mean something different by ‘intellectual?’

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people

1. Who, as Andrew Sullivan ably documents, continues to believe that gay people are all child molesters. Or at least enough where we shouldn’t let them around our children, best to be safe, etc, etc, etc. (back)
2. And the Democrats having won both houses! (back)
3. Hey look, here’s an example or two from a while back. (back)

So there’s this letter in today’s Dear Abby about the way President Obama is referred to by black Americans/self-identifies as a black man. And it contains an argument I’ve heard before about the white “half” and so I feel compelled to point out a few bits of historical and social context in the interests of not listening to people make this argument any more. First up, we live in a society that coined the One Drop rule to ensure that racism had a solid generational footing. The impact of that rule, Jim Crow etiquette and laws, and a host of other bits of institutional racism are still being felt today. Terms like mulatto and colored carry a whole lot of cultural baggage in America that most (if not all) people with good sense want to avoid heaping on anyone else. So, that brings us to words like biracial or multiracial. And yes, President Obama (much like my eldest son) is technically biracial. However, he is not light enough to pass and so he has spent his life (regardless of the color of his mother and grandmother) being treated as a black man in his everyday interactions.

My son isn’t light enough to pass (not that I’d want him too) either and he sees himself as a black man. Some of that is definitely influenced by upbringing (after I divorced his father, I eventually remarried and his stepfather is black), but it is also a product of what he sees in the mirror everyday. This idea that a society that engineered distinctions like the One Drop Rule, mulatto, colored, quadroon, octoroon, and quintroon is going to be filled with people that look at someone with a skin tone that reflects black ancestry and see the white/Asian/Latino/Indian/NDN ancestry as paramount is frankly ludicrous. I’ll let you in on a secret, your average black American with a family line present in America for longer than 2 or 3 generation is part something else. Maybe white, maybe NDN, whatever the racial background, when they go outside and walk down the street unless they are light enough to pass for white (and have the requisite features of thinner lips and a nose that is high and narrow enough) someone is questioning their background. More importantly they are encountering racism (subtle and overt) that constantly informs their experience.

And yes, there is some backlash (from all sides) attached to the notion of self-identification for multiracial people especially if someone feels that the racial identity established is too narrow/disrespectful of the other ancestry/too general. We’re a country that likes boxes and labels (see every single discussion of Tiger Woods) because we’re a country that has built an entire caste system on racial classifications. My son’s biological father is white, but his experience in society? It’s not that of a white man. It will never be that of a white man. When President Obama refers to himself as a black man it’s not a denial of his mother, it’s an acknowledgment of his experience. Is that a good statement about the state of American race relations? Probably not. But this the reality of living in a country that periodically trots out the idea that being tolerant or color blind is the only way not to be racist.

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As we noted the other night, Roman Polanski holds duel French and Polish citizenship, and both nations’ governments have been assiduously lobbying for his release, because evidently both governments believe that being famous allows you to rape kids. This has allowed leaders in both countries to join Hollywood in declaring that this is really just a case of American puritanism. Yes, we silly Americans, believing that forcibly raping a child is something that should be punished! Surely our European brethren are much more sophisticated, and understand that it’s okay to drug and rape a barely pubescent girl.

Except — funny thing — it turns out that far from finding Roman Polanski to be a charming guy who makes swell movies and just once kinda sorta raped a child, and then — funny story — only entered into a relationship with a fifteen-year-old for a while, the European public seems to view Polanski as a creepy pederast rapist who should probably face the music.

We start in Poland, home of Anne Applebaum’s husband. Do the Poles think Polanski should go free? Only about as much as they detest the polka:

One of these steps is an appeal letter to Hillary Clinton. Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski and his French counterpart Bernard Kouchner are sending it jointly (Polanski holds dual citizenship – Polish and French). The main reason the authorities have now started to take a low-key approach is their electorate. An opinion poll published today shows that less than 25 percent of Poles would like to see Polanski escape another trial. “This is a very surprising result,” says Jan Stolarz, a sociologist with a polling organization.

He told ABC News that “in light of the near-hero status Polanski enjoys here, this is very telling. People no longer believe that achievement can buy you immunity and that all are equal before the law…This is very encouraging,” adds Stolarz.

Results of the opinion poll are reflected by many Web site comments. Most readers would like to see Polanski extradited to the U.S.

“I’m ashamed that my president and a few ministers are protecting a pedophile,” reads one. “Law is law and money cannot buy you justice. Polanski, Obama or Mr. Jones — in a lawful state all are equal.”

To many Poles, Polanski had been an iconic figure. Events from 30 years ago, his past, were just an ambiguous blur, certainly nothing that could overcast his greatness.

Today, there seems to be a change. With Polish public reaction so vocal and negative, with the past once again revealed, Polanski’s tarnished image may never recover in his homeland. Only a handful of politicians and fellow artists appear to be dedicated to saving the icon.

Huh! You don’t say! It seems that the folks in New Europe¹ don’t think it’s okay to excuse an artist for raping a child, just because he happens to be famous. But we all know how those Eastern Europeans are. So Soviet. So repressed. Why, they eat barszcz! And pirogies! Hardly a nation full of extra savoir-faire. So let’s turn to the nation that gave us the beguiling word coquette, la République française.

One would think that France would certainly have rallied around Polanski. This is, after all, the country that gave us Maurice Chevalier, best known for “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.” Lock up a man simply because he got a bit forceful after experiencing le coup de foudre? Quelle horreur!

Now, let me preface this by noting that I have not been able to locate a scientific poll of French attitudes on Polanski. But the anecdotal evidence certainly suggests that far from seeing Polanski as the victim of a femme fatale and a repressed America, they feel that whatever the director’s œuvre, his actions seem pretty close to meurtre de sang-froid:

Marc Laffineur, the vice-president of the French assembly and a member of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling center-right party, the UMP, took issue with the French culture and foreign minister’s remarks supporting Mr. Polanski, saying “the charge of raping a child 13 years old is not something trivial, whoever the suspect is.”

Within the Green party, Daniel Cohn-Bendit — a French deputy in the European parliament whose popularity is rising — also criticized Sarkozy administration officials for leaping too quickly to Mr. Polanski’s side despite the serious nature of his crime. On the extreme right, the father and daughter politicians Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen also attacked the ministers, saying they were supporting “a criminal pedophile in the name of the rights of the political-artistic class.”

Meanwhile, an international team of lawyers was fighting Tuesday to free Mr. Polanski from a Swiss jail, where he’s being held for possible extradition to the United States. The arrest last weekend of the 76-year-old filmmaker as he arrived at Zurich’s airport to attend a local film festival is quickly exposing deep fault lines between his supporters in the arts, entertainment and politics and his increasingly outspoken critics.

[...]

Marie-Louise Fort, a French lawmaker in the Assembly who has sponsored anti-incest legislation, said in an interview that she was shocked that Mr. Polanski was attracting support from the political and artistic elite. “I don’t believe that public opinion is spontaneously supporting Mr. Polanski at all,” she said. “I believe that there is a distinction between the mediagenic class of artists and ordinary citizens that have a vision that is more simple.”

The mood was even more hostile in blogs and e-mails to newspapers and news magazines. Of the 30,000 participants in an online poll by the French daily Le Figaro, more than 70 percent said Mr. Polanski, 76, should face justice. And in the magazine Le Point, more than 400 letter writers were almost universal in their disdain for Mr. Polanski.

That contempt was not only directed at Mr. Polanski, but at the French class of celebrities — nicknamed Les People — who are part of Mr. Polanski’s rarefied Parisian world. Letter writers to Le Point scorned Les People as the “crypto-intelligentsia of our country” who deliver “eloquent phrases that defy common sense.”

Mon dieu! It seems the oh-so-above-it-all French are, like people everywhere, properly horrified by the rape of a child. Far from being a sign of American prudery, the arrest of Polanski seems to most of France and most of Poland the way it seems to most of America: as the reasonable outcome of a thirty-odd year flight from justice.

Frankly, I’m not surprised. It always seemed to me to be absurd to believe that the French would see rape as a trifling matter. Still, as with the general left-right agreement in America, it’s heartening to see. And it’s a reminder of just how out on an island Polanski’s strongest supporters are.

1. Just wanted to see if I could get all y’all old-school blog readers to flash back to February 2003. (back)

The fallout from the arrest of Roman Polanski has been interesting and, in many ways, heartening. While there have been many posts defending Polanski — I touched on some yesterday, as did the redoubtable Kate Harding — most bloggers on the left and the right alike have condemned Polanski and praised the arrest. I know, one shouldn’t be surprised that there’s general consensus that someone who drugs and rapes a child, then flees jurisdiction to avoid punishment is someone who probably deserves to be arrested, but it’s still nice to see.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that everyone sees things this way. The film and artistic community, alas, seems to feel that raping a 13-year-old girl is okay if it happened a long time ago, and the perpetrator is famous. Even the liberal Huffington Post has been an epicenter of this activity, mainly because Arianna Huffington has a lot of famous friends who don’t seem to understand why it is that people would want a child rapist brought to justice. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy gives us the usual run-down:

Apprehended like a common terrorist Saturday evening, September 26, as he came to receive a prize for his entire body of work, Roman Polanski now sleeps in prison.

He risks extradition to the United States for an episode that happened years ago and whose principal plaintiff repeatedly and emphatically declares she has put it behind her and abandoned any wish for legal proceedings.

Seventy-six years old, a survivor of Nazism and of Stalinist persecutions in Poland, Roman Polanski risks spending the rest of his life in jail for deeds which would be beyond the statute-of-limitations in Europe.

We ask the Swiss courts to free him immediately and not to turn this ingenious filmmaker into a martyr of a politico-legal imbroglio that is unworthy of two democracies like Switzerland and the United States. Good sense, as well as honor, require it.

Interesting how Lévy sort of elides a few things, such as:

• The crime Polanski committed
• The fact that Polanski pled guilty to the crime
• The fact that Polanski is only beyond the statute of limitations because he’s successfully dodged extradition for 30-plus years
• The fact that the vast majority of Holocaust and Stalinism survivors aren’t rapists
• The fact that common criminals are often apprehended like common criminals

Lévy then helpfully provides a list of artists and filmmakers who you can safely avoid doing business with, including Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, Pascal Bruckner, Neil Jordan, Isabelle Adjani, Arielle Dombasle, Isabelle Huppert, William Shawcross, Yamina Benguigui, Mike Nichols, Danièle Thompson, Diane von Furstenberg, Claude Lanzmann, and Paul Auster.

Ultimately, I think the phrase “common terrorist” at the start of Lévy’s screed gets to the heart of the difference of opinion between the European view of this matter and the American one. There is much to like about Europe, but there is no question that culturally, there is a more rigidly defined hierarchy of classes. Polanski is part of the “right kind of people,” and therefore his sins can be forgiven, ignored, swept under the rug.

American culture is not so willing to ignore criminal conduct. Note: I didn’t say totally unwilling. Being rich and powerful can get you out of punishment, whether you’re O.J. Simpson or Ted Kennedy or Dick Cheney. But there is at the very least the notion that this is a bad thing, that justice should, in theory, treat all criminals the same. That a rich, powerful child rapist is no better than a poor child rapist, and that each should face equal punishment.

Reading Lévy’s post and others like it, I don’t get the sense that Polanski defenders believe this. I think they feel that Roman is a famous guy who’s made great art, and all he did was have a little sex with an underage girl, so hey, why not just forget it? Why arrest him as if he was a criminal, when he’s really a swell guy?

Well, because he is a criminal. A confessed one, one who refused to serve his sentence. One who has been evading justice for three decades.

Now, justice may take the form of Polanski having the charges dropped; there is at least some evidence that there were ex parte communications between the prosecutor and the Judge in the case. I’m not an attorney and don’t know how California courts would remedy that, but I do know that they can’t remedy that so long as Polanski refuses to stand up and face the court. By his stubborn refusal to come back and deal with legal matters through legal channels, Polanski acted as a common criminal. And criminals get arrested; I’m sorry, M. Lévy, but they do.

Finally, I find amusing the fact that Polanski is probably in jail today specifically because of the actions of his attorneys:

Roman Polanski’s attorneys may have helped provoke his arrest by complaining to an appellate court this summer that Los Angeles prosecutors had never made any real effort to arrest the filmmaker in his three decades as a fugitive, two sources familiar with the case told The Times.

The accusation that the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office was not serious about extraditing Polanski was a small part of two July court filings by the director’s attorneys. But it caught the attention of prosecutors and led to his capture in Switzerland on Saturday, the sources said.

Polanski, 76, was taken into custody at the airport in Zurich, where he was scheduled to headline the city’s film festival. Details of his appearance were widely available on the Internet. Variety also reported his planned attendance in August, the month after Polanski’s attorneys had filed two separate documents with the 2nd District of the state Court of Appeal asking for a dismissal of the 32-year-old child sex case against the filmmaker.

In both, the lawyers alleged that the district attorney’s office in effect benefited from Polanski’s absence, because as long as he remained a fugitive, officials could avoid answering allegations of prosecutorial and judicial wrongdoing in the original handling of the case.

Yeah, you know, that was probably a really stupid thing to argue. My guess is that to some extent, the L.A. District Attorney’s office was letting this go, not so much because they didn’t believe in the case but because it’s a hassle to try to get someone arrested overseas and then extradited to the U.S. But when you argue that there’s a conspiracy to try to cover up wrongdoing in the case, and that’s why nobody’s trying to bring your client in, you’d better be damn sure that’s the reason why nobody’s trying to bring your client in. If it isn’t, there’s a good chance that the prosecutor will go after your client, hard, to prove they have nothing to hide. And that’s doubly true if your client is a child rapist.

Sometimes it’s just not about us. Really, it’s okay for oppressed and marginalized groups to want to have things that are just for them. I promise you, giving up a teensy bit of space in the world will not kill you. You say this offends you because you consider yourself an ally? Hmm, I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick on the ally concept if you think it means demanding that you be included in everything. In fact being a good ally often involves shutting the fuck up and taking a step back. There’s this curious concept called listening that some folks seem to have left by the wayside. So let me boost the signal a wee bit and point out that when you sound like this person completely ignoring historical and social context in order to bolster your complaints? It is probably a good time to listen to all the people telling you that you’re on the road to Fail. I understand that 2009 seems to be the year where everyone eats their foot, but could we just once not engage in a repeat of the same shitty privileged behavior? I’m starting to feel like we need a “These are asshole moves” bingo board and drinking game for 2010, and that’s a bad thing for my brain and my liver.

No love,

The (mostly) straight woman who would like to stop screaming at the internet.

P.S. Yes, there are certainly some valid criticisms of the way this was handled. And I’m sure there are some valid internal GLBTQ community critiques of the Lambda Awards too. That doesn’t change the fact that this particular critique is built (at best) on privilege and entitlement.

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It’s the end of September, so it’s time for more short fiction by POC! Still a short list this month, sad! But I know that the word is out, so now it’s just a matter of getting more fiction published by us. I hear there’s a new market on the horizon helmed by an editor who is definitely desirous of fiction from diverse quarters. Anyway, here’s the list:

• The Bones of Giants by Yoon Ha Lee — F&SF, Aug/Sep
• Hunger by Gabriela Lee — By Blood We Live (Reprint)
• Finders Keepers by L. A. Banks — By Blood We Live (Reprint)
• Connla mac Lia and the Kingship of Eriu by Amal El-Mohtar — Cabinet des Fées, Issue 8.
• Non-Zero Probabilities by N. K. Jemisin — Clarkesworld Magazine September 2009, Issue #36.

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On an email discussion group, a right-wing friend of mine gloated that youth unemployment in the US is currently at 52.2%. Glenn Reynolds reported the same statistic, and so have many other right-wing bloggers. They’re all relying on the same source, the New York Post’s Richard Wilner, who wrote:

The unemployment rate for young Americans has exploded to 52.2 percent — a post-World War II high, according to the Labor Dept.

Wilner is wrong. Wilner claimed his statistic was for those aged 16 to 24. According to the Labor Department, unemployment for young Americans aged 16 to 24 is 18.5%. (That’s the highest they’ve ever seen “in July”.)

One of Glenn’s readers wrote to tell him that current youth unemployment is 25%, not 52.2%. (Glenn’s reader was a little off-base. It’s 25% for folks in the 16-19 age group; it’s 18.5% for those in the 16-24 age group Wilner was talking about.) Glenn responded by asking “Anybody have an idea what’s going on?”

I have an idea. From the Labor Department’s press release:

The employment-population ratio for young men was 52.2 percent in July 2009, down from 57.9 percent in July 2008. The employment-population ratios for women (50.5 percent), whites (55.2 percent), blacks (36.4 percent), Asians (41.3 percent), and Hispanics (46.5 percent) in July 2009 also were lower than a year earlier.

So I’m pretty sure that what happened is that Wilner is so ignorant that he doesn’t know the difference between the “unemployment rate” — the percent of people who are looking for work without success — and the “employment-population ratio,” which is the percent of people who have a job.

It’s okay not to know that difference. Lots of smart people don’t. But if you’re going to write a column read by hundreds of thousands of people, it would be helpful to have a clue what you’re talking about.

(One last point: The economic situation sucks, especially for employment. We shouldn’t lose sight of that reality as the partisan bickering goes on. 18.5% is tragically bad, and it’ll probably get worse before it gets better.)

(Edited to reword definition of unemployment.]

It’s funny. If your average guy were to rape a 13-year-old girl and then flee into exile rather than paying for his crime, pretty much everyone and their twin sister would agree that he was a scumbag who deserved nothing less than the hammer of justice brought down upon him. Turn that average guy into a rich artist with good connections, and suddenly the crime wasn’t that bad, the girl was probably asking for it (or her mother was, whatever), and it’s really close to fascism to put the guy through the indignity of being extradited to face justice.

I’m having trouble picking out just what my favorite instant rape apology is; there are several good ones, so I just thought I’d share a few of the best.

One of the better ones is from novelist Robert Harris, who was collaborating with Polanski on an upcoming film:

Robert Harris, a British novelist who said he had been working with Polanski for much of the past three years writing two screenplays, expressed outrage over the arrest….”I am shocked that any man of 76, whether distinguished or not, should have been treated in such a fashion,” he said in a statement, adding that Polanski had often visited Switzerland and even had a house in Gstaad….”It is hard not to believe that this heavy-handed action must be in some way politically motivated,” he said.

Why, he had a house in Gstaad! And, and, he’s…uh…old! Clearly he shouldn’t be held accountable for actions he took when he was a poor, foolish boy of…(adjusts glasses, reads text)…just 44 years old. The idea!

Of course, some might say that it’s shocking that a girl of 13, whether “consenting” or not, could be drugged and raped by a man almost three times her age. But I bet she doesn’t have a house in Gstaad. So there.

Joan Z. Shore of The Huffington Post argues that the girl was asking for it, or at least her mom was, and besides, she was almost of age, so…yeah:

The 13-year old model “seduced” by Polanski had been thrust onto him by her mother, who wanted her in the movies. The girl was just a few weeks short of her 14th birthday, which was the age of consent in California. (It’s probably 13 by now!) Polanski was demonized by the press, convicted, and managed to flee, fearing a heavy sentence.

Fun fact: the age of consent in 1977 in California was 16. It’s now 18.

But of course, the age of consent isn’t like horseshoes or global thermonuclear war; close doesn’t count. Even if the age of consent had been 14, the girl wasn’t 14.

As for whether the girl’s mother “thrust” the girl onto Polanski (which she didn’t; testimony at the time indicated the mother was unaware of the photo shoot), it wouldn’t matter if the mother delivered her daughter naked to Jack Nicholson’s hot tub herself, and helped Polanski get the Quaalude ready. No parent can consent to their under-aged child having sex.

Also, of course, this entire line of argument sort of goes out the window when you remember that Polanski drugged and forcibly raped the victim [warning: link goes to graphic grand jury testimony that may be triggering], which kind of makes the age of consent utterly moot. (Incidentally, the fact that she was underage makes the force utterly moot. You can’t be 44 and legally have sex with a 13-year-old in California. Statutory rape has the word rape in it for a reason.)

Many, many articles cited the fact that the victim, now grown up and 45 years old, has said she wants the case to be let go, because each time it gets dredged up it brings up painful memories of her being raped. I choose the Telegraph because its headline puts the word victim in scare quotes, because…something:

In January, [the victim]¹ filed a legal declaration in Los Angeles formally requesting that the outstanding charges against Polanski be withdrawn.

She said Los Angeles prosecutors’ insistence that Polanski must return to the United States before dismissal of the case could be considered as a “cruel joke being played on me”.

She also voiced anger that authorities had detailed her grand jury testimony in related hearings to the case.

“True as they may be, the continued publication of those details causes harm to me, my beloved husband, my three children and my mother,” she said, adding that it was time for closure.

“I have survived, indeed prevailed, against whatever harm Mr Polanski may have caused me as a child,” she said. Polanski had taken flight, she said, “because the judicial system did not work.”

I understand the victim’s feelings on this. And I sympathize, I do. But for good or ill, the justice system doesn’t work on behalf of victims; it works on behalf of justice. And while the victim is no doubt hurt by Polanski’s drawing this out for decades, ultimately more women would be hurt by a justice system that allowed convicted rapists to avoid punishment simply because they were rich and could afford to flee jail. Ultimately, the victim’s feelings must be considered, but they can not be the determining factor in whether a prosecution goes forward.

I said at the beginning that I was having trouble picking out a favorite rape apologist. But I must confess, I think I’ve settled on one. That would be The Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum, declaring that Polanski’s arrest was “outrageous,” because he’s famous:

There is evidence that Polanski did not know her real age. Polanski, who panicked and fled the U.S. during that trial, has been pursued by this case for 30 years, during which time he has never returned to America, has never returned to the United Kingdom., has avoided many other countries, and has never been convicted of anything else. He did commit a crime, but he has paid for the crime in many, many ways: In notoriety, in lawyers’ fees, in professional stigma. He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar. He cannot visit Hollywood to direct or cast a film.

He can be blamed, it is true, for his original, panicky decision to flee. But for this decision I see mitigating circumstances, not least an understandable fear of irrational punishment. Polanski’s mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto, and later emigrated from communist Poland. His pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered in 1969 by the followers of Charles Manson, though for a time Polanski himself was a suspect.

I am certain there are many who will harrumph that, following this arrest, justice was done at last. But Polanski is 76. To put him on trial or keep him in jail does not serve society in general or his victim in particular. Nor does it prove the doggedness and earnestness of the American legal system. If he weren’t famous, I bet no one would bother with him at all.

Yes, it’s true, if Polanski wasn’t famous, he wouldn’t be in this mess, because he wouldn’t have had access to Jack Nicholson’s house while Jack was out of town. And he wouldn’t have been able to flee to France. And he wouldn’t have been able to live comfortably for 30 years. But hey, the poor guy had to forgo his Oscar! The horror!

Ultimately, Applebaum’s argument is pretty foolish. Admittedly, there’s been all sorts of tragedy in Polanski’s life, but that doesn’t justify his committing several felonies. Most Holocaust survivors did not grow up to become rapists.

But it’s worse than that. You see, you may not realize it, but Applebaum is married to a guy named Radosław Sikorski. Now, that’s pretty uninteresting, until you realize that Sikorski is the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs. Who just happens to be actively lobbying to have Polish native Polanski’s charges dismissed.

This is something Applebaum somehow forgot to mention in her column.

Time for another blogger ethics panel, I guess.

1. If you really want her name, click through. I don’t publish the names of victims of sexual assault. (back)

Roman Polanski, a convicted child rapist who has been living in exile since fleeing punishment in 1978, was arrested on Saturday night in Zurich, Switzerland, on an international warrant. Polanski, 76, has been living in France since he pled guilty to the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. Polanski had made the plea deal in order to avoid the more serious charges of rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious acts upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance (methaqualone) to a minor.

Polanski said in his defense at the time that the 13-year-old child was “sexually experienced,” and “consented,” thus arguing that somehow it would be okay for a 44-year-old to have sex with a 13-year-old in Jack Nicholson’s hot tub even if he hadn’t drugged her, which he had.

Polanski, who has directed a number of films, including Chinatown and The Pianist, had traveled to Zurich to accept an award for his filmmaking. The arrest outraged the government of France, which evidently doesn’t feel child rape is a serious crime. French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand said he was “stunned” by the arrest, adding that he “profoundly regrets that a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already known so many during his life.” Mitterand did not comment on the fact that the ordeal was being “inflicted” on Polanski because he raped a girl, and avoided justice for three decades.

A number of people who’ve worked with Polanski and pretended not to be aware that he once raped a child also came to his defense, arguing that he raped a child a long time ago, and was a really charming guy, and rich and stuff, so he should be allowed to get away with rape and with fleeing punishment for rape.

It remains to be seen whether Polanski will ultimately be extradited to the United States. His attorneys have vowed to fight extradition, and Polanski, as a man of means, is able to hire expensive attorneys. Nevertheless, the arrest serves as a reminder that whatever his skill at directing or his ability to make small talk at cocktail parties, Roman Polanski is a man who drugged and raped a kid. And by his actions he is making sure we never forget it.

Glenn Beck doesn’t really seem to know, despite saying Barack Obama has a “deep-seated hatred” of it:

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

So Rep. Michele Bachman, R-Shame, was down in St. Louis today, where she ignored Lincoln’s axiom on being thought a fool as per usual. But what is really impressive is this little sequence from her departure, as reported by the Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel:

After the speech, Bachmann had only a few minutes to sign autographs and collect a stack of CDs and books from fans who’d followed her into the lobby. I caught up to her as she headed outside and asked if she had any response to the murder of a Kentucky census worker, having noticed that the Census, a constant target for Bachmann, did not figure into her speech. Bachmann recoiled a little at the question and turned to enter her limo.

“Thank you so much!” she said.

That’s…well, it’s pathetic, that’s what it is. It wouldn’t have taken Bachmann but a second to say, “Well obviously, I condemn violence, yadda yadda.”

Of course, someone who didn’t condemn this sort of violence would simply get into a limo and duck the question.

As for the murder of Bill Sparkman, the evidence coming out makes it quite apparent that he was, indeed, targeted for being a census worker:

One of the witnesses who found a part-time census worker’s body hanging in a Kentucky cemetery says the man was naked and his hands and feet were bound with duct tape.

Jerry Weaver of Fairfield, Ohio, told The Associated Press on Friday that he was among a group of relatives who discovered the body of Bill Sparkman on Sept. 12.

Sparkman was a substitute teacher who worked part-time for the census. Law enforcement officials have released very few details on his death, only saying he died from asphyxiation.

Weaver says the man also was gagged and had duct tape over his eyes and neck. He says something that looked like an identification tag was taped to the side of his neck.

Some on the right have suggested this might be a suicide, or possibly the work of drug dealers. Well, drug dealers generally don’t target census workers, and don’t ritualistically display those they kill. As for suicide, the details of Sparkman’s death pretty much eliminate any chance of that.

If they wanted to redeem their mortal souls, people like Bachmann and Glenn Beck, people who have been slagging on the census for months, could at the very least condemn this act of violence. I might even be willing to believe them. It’s possible they didn’t think their words had the power to motivate people. (They certainly fail to motivate me.) It’s possible they didn’t think through the consequences of what they were saying. It’s possible that they actually feel terrible about all this.

It’s possible. But the longer the silence goes on, the more clear it is that it’s pretty unlikely. I suspect Bachmann sleeps quite well at night. I suspect she isn’t bothered by this murder one bit. And I suspect that she’ll come out as a pro-choice, atheist, lesbian Democrat before she takes even the basic human step of saying that this sort of violence is wrong.

I’d love to be surprised, Rep. Bachmann. I’d love for you to prove me wrong. But I don’t think you’re going to.

So I have the headache from hell, and I wasn’t able to finish the disabled women athletes post. I’ll try to get it up on Monday. In the meantime, environmentally friendly housing has been on my mind. These links are from two old posts I did last year:

Cob Houses
Pic from:Welsh Youth Forum on Sustainable Development

Cob houses are made with a mixture of clay, straw, sand, earth and water. The ingredients are similar to an adobe brick home, but, unlike adobe homes, cob houses can be built in wet areas and areas prone to earthquakes. Because the earth walls of a cob home are typically more than 2ft thick, they are naturally energy-efficient. Meaning cob homes stay cool in the summer, and warm in the winter.

Cob homes also give home-owners more control over design and construction. They are owner-built, and the unique nature of the material gives the owner-builder the ability to create nearly any kind of design. With a little help from your friends and a few free weekends, you can build your own cob home for next to nothing, often from materials that are already on site.

Useful links

1.How to build a Cob House (with loads of pictures)

2.How to build a cob house, (another website)

3.The Hand-Sculpted House, A Practical and Philosophical Guide

4.Building with Cob, a step-by-step guide

5.Cob Works: Company that helps you build one

6. Advantages and Disadvantages of Building With Cob

7.Green Home Buildings:Cob Houses

8.Building in a cold climate

9.Tons. Of. Pics. Seriously. Its a HELL of a gallery

Earthships (GLEE!!!!! I want one of these!)

More Earthship Informational Videos on Youtube

Advantages and Disadvanatages of Earthships

Article in Wired that breaks down the concept

Books, Videos, History, Facts

Earthship.net

Buy an Earthship

More books

Where they’ve been

dirt cheap builder: books, dvds available to teach you how to build homes cheaply and sustainably

Real estate listing of available earthships

Informative article in The Guardian:What a load of rubbish

Scotland’s first Earthship

Earthship Architectural Plans

Earthship:Brighton

John Kejr’s Earthship blog-get listings, ask questions find out how to make glass bottle bricks…

Container Homes

Container Homes in London

SG Blocks Container Homes in the US

SG Blocks Website

Informative Article with cool pics

And now a word from our sponsor...

Your ad could be here, right now.

Well, not quite, but it was an awesome comeback, imo. From Talking Points Memo:

Just before the Senate Finance Committee wrapped up for the long weekend, members debated one of Sen. Jon Kyl’s (R-AZ) amendments, which would strike language defining which benefits employers are required to cover.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) argued that insurers must be required to cover basic maternity care. (In several states there are no such requirements.)

“I don’t need maternity care,” Kyl said. “So requiring that on my insurance policy is something that I don’t need and will make the policy more expensive.”

Stabenow interrupted: “I think your mom probably did.”

The amendment was defeated, nine to 14.

Senator Kyl, by the way, is firmly anti-abortion, with a 100% perfect voting record according to the NRLC and a 0% voting record according to NARAL. So he thinks the government should force unwilling pregnant women to give birth, but objects to requiring insurance companies to pay for maternity care. Because that might make Kyl’s annual insurance premiums a few dollars higher.

The word “asshat” is so inadequate.

You can now pre-order Last Drink Bird Head, an anthology of flash fiction by science fiction and fantasy writers (”flash” means “very short”), including our own Mandolin, writing as “Rachel Swirsky.”

What Is Last Drink Bird Head? That’s the catalyst editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer provided to over 80 writers in creating this unique anthology, with all proceeds going to Proliteracy.org. All each writer got was an email with “Last Drink Bird Head” in the subject line and the directions “Who or what is Last Drink Bird Head? Under 500 words.” The result? Last Drink Bird Head is a blues musician, a performance artist, a type of alcohol, a town in Texas, and even a song sung by girl scouts in Antarctica. Famed designer John Coulthart did the interior, which features bobbing bird heads in the corners of the pages, so that the antho is also a flipbook.

In addition to Mandollin, contributors include Peter Straub, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Brian Evenson, Henry Kaiser, Gene Wolfe, Hal Duncan, Jeffrey Ford, Rikki Ducornet, Holly Phillips, Stephen R. Donaldson, K.J. Bishop, Michael Swanwick, Ellen Kushner, Daniel Abraham, Jay Lake, Liz Williams, Tanith Lee, Sarah Monette, Conrad Williams, Marly Youmans, Cat Rambo, and many others.

From a neurologist’s blog:

Dear President Obama,

I’m writing to you for the first time.

I don’t want this to be a political blog. There are plenty of other sites for that. But we now face a national crisis of such serious proportions that it dwarfs other issues, such as global warming, health care, and middle-east peace. It now threatens the very fabric of our society, and directly affects every citizen. And I can remain silent no longer.

It’s still September, and every store near me ALREADY HAS THEIR CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS UP!

I have nothing against the holidays, Mr. President. Peace on Earth and all that stuff. But moving them up as if they were being held in another time-zone or alternate universe is getting out-of-hand. As far as I know, Christmas hasn’t budged in my lifetime. And treating every day like it was Christmas (like the stores seem to want me to do) is not helping.

The well-respected Nick documentary program, The Fairly Oddparents, has carefully researched what would happen if Christmas were held every day (Episode 107, air date 12-12-01 I have kids, OKAY!). Their conclusion? It would be catastrophic.

More.

Now, I’m a heterosexual man. And as such, I will freely confess that I like breasts. They’re definitely in my top five body parts human beings have, even though only about 50 percent of human beings have them.¹

That said, the thing about breasts that I generally like the most is that they’re usually attached to living, breathing women, and I like women, because, you know, they’re people. Many of them are people I like, and consider friends. All of them are worth far more than the breasts attached to them; that should go without saying.

Because women have breasts, they can get breast cancer. That’s a bad thing. Happily, there are a number of organizations out there working to combat this disease, and that’s great, because finding treatments for breast cancer will keep women alive. And since I have a number of women who are friends and family of mine who I’d like to stay alive for as long as possible, I’m foursquare in favor of doing things to improve their health.

That concern, I should note, is completely distinct from whether I want there to be lots of cancer-free breasts for me to stare at. Because, you know, if breast cancer was a disease that simply deflated breasts and had no other effects whatsoever, I’d say it was a pretty meaningless thing to cure. Indeed, given that one of the more common cures for breast cancer is a radical mastectomy, current breast cancer treatments are properly focused on protecting women at the expense of their breasts. And I’m all for that, because the loss of a breast or two is infinitely less tragic than the loss of a human.

Evidently, though, I’m crazy to think this way. Really, the important thing is the breasts. Canada’s ReThink Breast Cancer says so, and who am I to argue?

Now, the dumbest thing about this ad — other than that it mysteriously features a group of stereotypically Soviet submariners from bad movies of yore — is that the focus of the ad is squarely on saving “boobs.” Because, you know, men (and women, I guess, but mostly men) like “boobs.”

Well, sorry, but I’m not so worried about that. Yes, if by happy accident breast cancer treatments manage to reduce the number of mastectomies, that’s great — but it’s great because mastectomies are painful, difficult surgeries that put women through a great deal of pain and suffering.

I don’t care about breasts.² Oh, I like them fine, but I’m not that worried about them. The women they’re attached to are what concern me, them and their friends and their families. Unlike the insinuation of the ad, I actually care about women beyond whether they’re attractive enough for me to ogle. And I daresay that this does not differentiate me from the vast majority of men in the world.

Believe it or not, but men are capable of empathy. We are capable of feelings other than lust and rage. And we are capable of realizing that the reason breast cancer research needs funding is because it will keep more women alive longer. And that is unquestionably a good thing.

I’m insulted by this ad. Because I don’t need to “rethink” my attitude toward breast cancer. Just as we don’t need an ad urging that we must save the penises by researching prostate cancer, we don’t need an ad telling us that curing breast cancer will save breasts. If it saves women, that’s quite enough, thanks.

(Via Judy Berman)

1. Some women don’t have them, some men do. Hence, roughly 50%. (back)
2. Using the word “boobs” makes you sound like an 11-year-old. (back)

People who promote “traditional” marriage, and oppose official support for or recognition of other family forms, are often the same people who worry about the relatively low fertility rates in the US and other wealthy nations.

The blog Demography Matters quotes from a newspaper article, about attitudes towards motherhood in Germany — attitudes that too many cultural conservatives in the United States share.

Unbeknownst to most outsiders, Germany is the most difficult place in Western Europe to be a working mother, with a deeply ingrained culture of machismo that expects women to give up their lives once they have children.

The ideology itself was Ms. Hoffritz’s biggest barrier. When she talked about her frustrations, her friends and relatives openly denounced her as a rabenmutter – literally “raven mother,” a woman who abandons her children, like the mythic ravens throwing their chicks from the nest. It is a term routinely applied to working mothers in Germany.

“When I got pregnant, even though I’d had a career for 20 years, everyone expected me to drop my job forever, to take care of my son and not do anything else all day for the rest of my life, and they got angry when I said otherwise,” she says. “Friends just thought I should be a full-time mom.”

This attitude, unsurprisingly, discourages women from having children. A new study by Jean-Marie Le Goff compares higher-fertility France with lower-fertility Germany:

Women in France, Le Goff argues, have access to a whole variety of family structures, from the traditional nuclear marriage family to a family marked by cohabitation to single motherhood, with a relatively long tradition of recognizing the responsibilities of parents towards their children regardless of their legal status, with the idea of mothers working outside of the home not only being accepted but supported by any number subsidies to parents to affordable and accessible day care. In West Germany, social and policy norms tend to support traditional family structures. The result? In France, people are childbearing age are split between two sectors, one defined by marriage relationships and the other defined by cohabitation relationships. On the other side of the Rhine, people of childbearing age are split between people who have children and people who don’t. Katja Köppen’s Second Births in Western Germany and France (Demographic Research 14.14) further points out that whereas Frenchwomen seem to enjoy an institutional structure that encourages motherhood and there isn’t a contradiction between high levels of education–hence employment–and fertility, there is such a contradiction in western Germany, with government spending priorities in the latter country being directed towards the support of traditional families. It’s not too much of a surprise, then, that the German Federal Statistics Office reports that [the number] of childless women is rising, particularly in the former West Germany.

Personally, I don’t care if fertility in the US goes down or up; I suspect any deficit in our population caused by declining births can be made up for by increased immigration. But those who are concerned about fertility rates, should consider supporting, rather than denigrating, alternative family forms.

(Curtsy to Economic Woman.)

I liked this interview with Dennis Baron, the author of A Better Pencil.

Historically, when the new communication device comes out, the reaction tends to be divided. Some people think it’s the best thing since sliced bread; other people fear it as the end of civilization as we know it. And most people take a wait and see attitude. And if it does something that they’re interested in, they pick up on it, if it doesn’t, they don’t buy into it.

I start with Plato’s critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They’re not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down — the ultimate irony.

We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won’t have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there’s no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant — it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of “this is going to revolutionize everything” versus “this is going to destroy everything.”

So it’s always true that the new technology — whatever that new technology is — is going to destroy civilization, make kids into idiots, etc.. Fortunately, this never actually seems to be the case. (Not so far, anyway). If anything, scholars seem to be finding that the internet — by making people write much more — is making us into better writers.

P.S. By the way, it’s also not true that the current generation of kids knows less than past generations did. People have been saying that about young people since at least the 1800s, and it never seems to have been true.

You may recall that back in June, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-You Serious?, declared that the census was part of the vast left-wing conspiracy to install Barack Hussein Super-Allah Muslim Muslim Muslim Obama as dictator-for-life of the American Soviet. At the time, she said of the census, If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps.”

One can draw a bright, straight line between rhetoric like that and this horrific crime:

The FBI is investigating the hanging death of a U.S. Census worker near a Kentucky cemetery. A law enforcement official says the word “fed” was scrawled on his chest.

The body of Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old Census field worker and occasional teacher, was found Sept. 12 in the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky.

Investigators have said little about the case. A law enforcement official, who was not authorized to discuss the case and requested anonymity, tells The Associated Press the word “fed” was written on the dead man’s chest.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Let’s not muse that this might have been a “lone nut” somewhere. This was a calculated act of political violence, one that was encouraged and supported by Michele Marie Bachmann. By raising the specter of internment, of government-sanctioned attacks on the American people, Bachmann gave those “nuts” a real reason to fear the government.

If the government was seriously thinking about interning Americans simply for their political views — even if those views are directly opposite mine — I’d be first on the line to prevent it. And yes, I’d prefer to resist it though peaceful resistance if possible, but I would view violence as acceptable in defense of liberty.

Of course, the government isn’t thinking about interning Americans, for any reason whatsoever. There is no evidence, credible or otherwise, that even hints that they could be. The most oppressive thing Barack Obama is planning to do is provide health care to people who don’t have it. As for the census, it’s going to happen in 2010, just like it’s happened every ten years since the founding of the Republic, because the Constitution says so, not because Barack Obama has suddenly and capriciously demanded that all people come to Bethlehem to be taxed.

By taking a legitimate and non-controversial function of government — having some idea of how many people we have in the country — and by turning it into a secret neo-Marxist plot, Bachmann has posited a world in which even census workers are stormtroopers of destruction. Were she a private citizen, we might ignore her. But she isn’t. She’s a member of Congress, an elected official. If she’s saying that this is true, is it any wonder that someone out there would believe it?

Bachmann has a responsibility to her constituents and her country to conduct herself in a responsible manner. That she has chosen not to is to her everlasting shame. This death is, at least in part, on her head. And she owes her constituents, her country, and most important, the family of Bill Sparkman an apology. But I won’t hold my breath.

This review was originally posted on a literary blog that no longer exists called The Great American Pinup. My understanding is that the blog was hacked and that attempts by the people who ran the blog to resolve things using Google’s help screens were unsuccessful. I am reposting the review here because I think the books are important enough that the review should continue to be available.

Talk about two very different books by two very different poets, but there are connections, and since I read the books back to back, I want to talk about them side by side. I first met Suheir Hammad some years ago when she came to Nassau Community College (NCC), where I teach in the English Department, to give a reading as part of a day-long program on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The program was sponsored by NCC’s International Studies Committee and it generated, even in the planning, a lot of controversy. I was not involved in putting the day together, so I do not know the specifics of went on, but I do know that the college administration voiced concerns about adequate security, about who the panelists would be and whether a balanced view of the conflict would be presented. What they meant by “balanced,” however, at least as I understand it, was that no one who spoke for the Palestinian side should express views that were overtly hostile to Israel. It did not seem to bother them that people representing the Israeli side might express views overtly hostile to Palestinians and/or Arabs, and, sure enough, one of the speakers was a woman representing a far-right Jewish organization—not Israeli, but Jewish—who spoke quite forcefully about the Arab/Muslim plot to take over the world. It was almost as if she were quoting from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, except that all the references to Jews had been changed to Arabs.

During lunch that day—her reading was in the evening—Suheir and I spoke about “One Stop (Hebron Revisited)” a poem from her first book, Born Palestinian, Born Black, that I had used in a class I’d taught the previous semester called Introduction to World Jewish Studies. The poem is a response to Baruch Goldstein’s February 1994 massacre of 29 Muslims—approximately 100 were injured—in which the speaker, a woman, imagines the violence she would have done to a Jewish man she sees had she “caught [him] on the train/on an empty car into flatbush.” The poem is painful to read, not only for the specific details of the violence it describes, but also for the nakedness of the rage it expresses. The speaker is in pain, and it is hard not to feel implicit in the details of what the woman describes how much she hates herself for even imagining that she would perform those acts.

When I taught the poem, I asked my students, all of whom happened to be Jewish and most of whom came from conservative and orthodox religious backgrounds, if they thought it was anti-Semitic. I was truly surprised when they said no, that if they were in the writer’s shoes, they would have felt a similar anger and that Suheir Hammad therefore had every right to express herself in the way that she did. I told Suheir this and she also was shocked and then she told me that “One Stop” was a poem she never read when she gave readings. I don’t remember her precise words, but I think she told me she was afraid to. It was so angry and so violent that she was not sure how her audiences would react. I told her I thought it was a poem that people needed to hear, that she owed it to herself and to her audiences to read it, precisely because the pain and the violence in the poem are so deeply embedded in the emotional center of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and no one should be spared a confrontation with that center.

My own opinion is that, to the extent the speaker in “One Stop” holds the Jewish man she sees on the train in New York City responsible for the views of Baruch Goldstein and, by extension, the policies of the State of Israel, the poem is anti-Semitic, or, to be more precise, the speaker expresses her rage in anti-Semitic terms. Because her rage is comprehensible, however, it is also an excusable moment of Jew-hatred, no different than the way, say, the rage of a Black South African during apartheid might be directed at all South African whites, despite the fact that there were many whites in South Africa who opposed apartheid. What matters is whether the speaker, once she has calmed down, takes responsibility for that moment. In “One Stop,” she does not, nor do I remember, frankly, whether Hammad takes on the question of that responsibility in any of the other poems in Born Palestinian, Born Black, and since I do not have the book handy, I can’t go back and check. My overall recollection of the book, though, is that it is more angry than it is about coming to terms with anger. I remember a couple of withering poems protesting the way Middle Eastern women are exoticized in the US, and I remember poems that were clearly intended to confront the reader with the physical horrors of occupation. (It occurs to me as I write this that I also should state explicitly that I am not accusing Suheir Hammad of Jew-hatred in any form. Not only is it a mistake to confuse a poet with the speakers of her poems, but I have met her and talked to her, and I just don’t think she harbors that kind of hatred for anyone.) Read the rest of this entry »