If you’re ever feeling down about your life, feeling like you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired, just ready to give up, take a gander at how Roger Ebert is holding up.

The longtime writer and movie critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, best known for his work on the shows Siskel & Ebert and Ebert & Roeper, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. In 2006, he began undergoing radiation therapy for the cancer, therapy that ultimately killed the cells in his jaw and weakened his carotid artery to the point that he nearly bled to death. Today, Ebert is unable to speak, eat, or drink; he has no lower jaw (surgeries to repair it have repeatedly failed, and Ebert has given up on the process).

A lesser person might be embittered, frustrated, and despondent. And yet, as anyone who’s followed Ebert’s writing or tweeting of late knows, Ebert is far from those. He has written about his affliction with grace and humor, and a strong acceptance of his new normal. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t recognize or mourn what he’s lost, but he does it gracefully, as with his post from January in which he discussed his inability to consume food or drink:

Isn’t it sad to be unable eat or drink? Not as sad as you might imagine. I save an enormous amount of time. I have control of my weight. Everything agrees with me. And so on.

What I miss is the society. Lunch and dinner are the two occasions when we most easily meet with friends and family. They’re the first way we experience places far from home. Where we sit to regard the passing parade. How we learn indirectly of other cultures. When we feel good together. Meals are when we get a lot of our talking done — probably most of our recreational talking. That’s what I miss. Because I can’t speak that’s’s another turn of the blade. I can sit at a table and vicariously enjoy the conversation, which is why I enjoy pals like my friend McHugh so much, because he rarely notices if anyone else isn’t speaking. But to attend a “business dinner” is a species of torture. I’m no good at business anyway, but at least if I’m being bad at it at Joe’s Stone Crab there are consolations.

The entire column, as with much of Ebert’s writing, is worth the click-through; snippets really can’t do it justice.

Ebert has faced his illness and the recovery from it without wallowing in fear, or clutching for answers. He has held fast to his humanist beliefs, even at a time when the idea of an infinite, perfect afterlife might bring some comfort. He has accepted his own mortality with a wisdom that I, struggling with the prospect of a non-life-threatening disease that can be cured relatively easily, envy deeply.

That essay deserves quoting too, for Ebert gets close to how I feel about the meaning of life, even as I hope for something beyond the life I have:

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

That’s a beautiful sentiment, and spot on; this life is blessing enough. If we are lucky enough that there is an afterlife, it is a bonus; we do not need it. We are gifted enough already.

Ebert is in the news because of a new profile of him in Esquire, one that portrays him as he is — not as a saint or a martyr, but as a person who has experienced a severe illness and who is still dealing with the scars left by it. A man who is not so lost in his suffering to forget to care for those around him, including his wife, Chaz, who he is clearly still in love with after 18 years of marriage, or his late partner on Siskel & Ebert, and his good friend, Gene Siskel, whose death at the hands of brain cancer still affects Ebert. In what is perhaps the most poignant part of the piece, Ebert shows his interviewer a piece he wrote about Siskel (showing previously written work is easier than using his text pad, which speaks for him these days):

Ebert keeps scrolling down. Below his journal he had embedded video of his first show alone, the balcony seat empty across the aisle. It was a tribute, in three parts. He wants to watch them now, because he wants to remember, but at the bottom of the page there are only three big black squares. In the middle of the squares, white type reads: “Content deleted. This video is no longer available because it has been deleted.” Ebert leans into the screen, trying to figure out what’s happened. He looks across at Chaz. The top half of his face turns red, and his eyes well up again, but this time, it’s not sadness surfacing. He’s shaking. It’s anger.

Chaz looks over his shoulder at the screen. “Those fu — ” she says, catching herself.

They think it’s Disney again — that they’ve taken down the videos. Terms-of-use violation.

This time, the anger lasts long enough for Ebert to write it down. He opens a new page in his text-to-speech program, a blank white sheet. He types in capital letters, stabbing at the keys with his delicate, trembling hands: MY TRIBUTE, appears behind the cursor in the top left corner. ON THE FIRST SHOW AFTER HIS DEATH. But Ebert doesn’t press the button that fires up the speakers. He presses a different button, a button that makes the words bigger. He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they’re just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still, now just shapes and angles, just geometry filling the white screen with black like the three squares. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he’s still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he’s shouting now. He’s standing outside on the street corner and he’s arching his back and he’s shouting at the top of his lungs.

It’s not anger at his plight. Ebert’s anger is focused on more righteous, more evil things, like the corporate wizards at Disney who think blocking his tribute to a fallen friend is somehow protecting the market for the release of a Siskel & Ebert box set some day.

Ebert can’t shout, of course, and yet he can; his writing remains cogent and his mind remains sharp. He is standing against the coming darkness — the darkness that comes for all of us — with his head held high, without apology. Seeing the photo in Esquire, the one that accompanies this post, Ebert wrote, “Not a lovely sight. But then I am not a lovely sight, and in a moment I thought, well, what the hell. It’s just as well it’s out there. That’s how I look, after all.”

Ebert is wrong about one thing: he is still a lovely sight. He’s a brilliant writer and by all appearances a good and decent man. Not perfect. But good. Here’s hoping that he continues to be for many years to come.

I used to live a block west of Garrison Keillor when I lived in St. Paul. Occasionally when out jogging, I’d cross paths with the humorist, out pushing his daughter in a stroller, and I’d nod politely, as talking in such a situation would be un-Minnesotan. I knew quite a bit of Keillor’s oeuvre, of course; growing up in Minnesota is was impossible not to know a bit about the fictional hamlet of Lake Wobegon; indeed, I did a sixth-grade map project about a search for Lake Wobegon, which, as all Minnesotans know, is located under the fold they made in the map to hide the fact that the state was just a bit too big.

At any rate, I’ve seen A Prairie Home Companion live, and I’ve read Keillor’s writings in the Star Tribune for years, and generally speaking, I like the guy. But even though Keillor is the apotheosis of “One of Us,”¹ I can’t let his latest missive go. Because unfortunately, whether intended in humor or not, Keillor has written a ham-handed, angry, and anti-Semitic column about Christmas that is, quite flatly, offensive. And that doesn’t even get to the part where he attacks my religion.

Keillor starts off okay, talking about what a douche Larry Summers is. Okay, I think we can all agree on that, and if Keillor talks about his financial mismanagement of Harvard rather than his comments that women’s girl brains can’t handle science, well, Summers’ stupidity is a target-rich environment. Then, suddenly and without warning, Keillor takes a hard right turn into Lake Bigoted:

You can blame Ralph Waldo Emerson for the brazen foolishness of the elite. He preached here at the First Church of Cambridge, a Unitarian outfit (where I discovered that “Silent Night” has been cleverly rewritten to make it more about silence and night and not so much about God), and Emerson tossed off little bon mots that have been leading people astray ever since. “To be great is to be misunderstood,” for example. This tiny gem of self-pity has given license to a million arrogant and unlovable people to imagine that their unpopularity somehow was proof of their greatness.

And all his hoo-ha about listening to the voice within and don’t follow the path, make your own path and leave a trail and so forth, encouraged people who might’ve been excellent janitors to become bold and innovative economists who run a wealthy university into the ditch.

Now, do I believe that the Unitarians at First Church of Cambridge reworked “Silent Night?” Yeah, sure I do. It seems like the kind of thing my fellow UUs would do. Of course, being Unitarians, I’ll bet you a mythical sawbuck that half the congregation goes ahead and sings the original lyrics anyhow, and a non-trivial number try to sing in German, and nobody much cares, because that’s how Unitarians roll. Of course, the fact that it is a German hymn — “Stille Nacht” — rather suggests that the lyrics have already been reworked. Come on, Garrison, real Christians sing in German.

Also: Ralph Waldo Emerson? Transcendentalist philosopher, author of “Self-Reliance,” the man who said, “A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness”? That Ralph Waldo Emerson? Really? Huh. I guess I don’t see how Emerson’s philosophy of individual responsibility and nonconformity leads to a conformist Harvard president betting money in the stock market, but hey, that must be the “joke.”

Indeed, you’re going to find that this column by humorist Keillor is heavy on “jokes.” Not, alas, jokes.

All right, so far, we just have an incoherent jab at Unitarians, the kind Unitarians make weekly.² It wasn’t a particularly funny joke, but okay, I can let it slide. They’re not all gonna be gems.

What comes next, though, crosses over from not particularly funny to outright offensive.

Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that’s their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite “Silent Night.” If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah”? No, we didn’t.

Christmas is a Christian holiday - if you’re not in the club, then buzz off. Celebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice. Go light a big log, go wassailing and falalaing until you fall down, eat figgy pudding until you puke, but don’t mess with the Messiah.

Now, here is where I as a Minnesotan am required by law to say that these two paragraphs don’t say what they say. They’re not a bitter, angry complaint that Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas” and that Garrison Keillor surely didn’t mean to suggest that non-Christians can’t celebrate Christmas.

But I’m not so sure that’s true. And even if it is true — that this is meant as a joke — it fails the first rule of comedy: it isn’t funny.

Indeed, while Keillor may be attempting satire here, it doesn’t really read as satirical. It reads as a particularly nasty barb, a shot across the bow of non-believers. Moreover, who is Keillor’s target here? I think I’m supposed to think it’s intolerant Christians, but I don’t think that. I really feel like his target is Unitarians and Jews, and other nonbelievers during the holiday season. This doesn’t feel like satire. It doesn’t read like satire. This reads angry.

I want to give Keillor the benefit of the doubt here. I really do. But I’m sorry, I just can’t. Whether he meant to or not, he penned a column that is nasty and offensive, and yes, anti-Semitic. And whatever he meant, that’s how the words read to more than a few people. I hope that Keillor apologizes quickly. And I hope that he doesn’t fall back on the tired, “I was just joking” defense. Because I’m sorry, Garrison, jokes are supposed to have humor embedded in them, and they’re not supposed to afflict the afflicted. This is a disappointing column from someone who should be better than this.

I guess it’s like Ralph Waldo Emerson once said — “Every hero becomes a bore at last.”

1. In Minnesotan, “One of Us” denotes a native Minnesotan, especially one who “made it big.” It usually refers to a native, or at least someone who lived here a long time, but it can include someone who got the hell out of Dodge the second he or she could, like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Bob Dylan. (back)
2. Seriously. A running joke at my church is the fact that the last line in our usual chalice-lighting reading has been rendered alternately as “Spirit of Life” or “Spirit of Freedom,” and that we have about an equal division of people saying each. We find this to be both amusing and fitting. (back)

I have tried very hard not to write about the Tiger Woods kerfuffle, because, quite frankly, I don’t really see as it’s my business. Tiger certainly cheated on his wife multiple times, and I don’t condone that behavior, but his offense really is against his wife, and he owes her explanations and apologies, not me. (His wife may or may not have committed assault with a deadly weapon against him, which would be a more serious transgression than cheating, but we don’t know that for sure, and I’m not going to speculate further about it.)

At any rate, the Woodses will split up or stay together, and whatever; it’s not really my business. And quite certainly, it isn’t a “scandal,” unless you’re the sort of person who is deeply shocked that in 2009, there are rich, handsome people out there cheating on their spouses.

Enter Richard Cohen, WaPo resident concern troll and sexual harasser, who asks a question that has been on nobody’s mind ever since the Woods “scandal” broke: why don’t women cheat on their spouses like men do? If you don’t want to read any further, the answer is that they’re not driven to conquer things, which is also why women aren’t that successful.

No, really.

Cohen starts his post by noting that every white, middle aged guy he knows doesn’t know why women don’t cheat, which is because, I assume, most of these middle aged white guys Cohen knows have wives cheating on them:

It’s not that there are no women in the Tiger Woods category of professional sport. No woman makes Tiger’s kind of money, of course, but plenty make good money and become celebrities in golf or tennis, and you don’t hear about them hitting on every caddy, pool boy or masseuse. Why?

Well, until the last couple weeks, we didn’t hear about Tiger hitting on every caddy, pool girl, or masseuse. As far as anyone knew, Tiger was playing it straight and narrow, and totally faithful to his wife.

Or take politics. There are now 90 women in Congress, and yet you don’t hear about them recommending their lovers to be a U.S. Attorneys or hiking the Appalachian Trail all the way to Buenos Aires. No female member of Congress is known to have offered the wife of her lover the chance to become a major lobbyist or, just for nostalgia sake, to have had a bit too many and gone for dance in the Tidal Basin. Why?

Well, there are 445 men in Congress. The odds favor men. Also, a quick googling found that Rep. Loretta Sanchez, R-Calif., is currently being accused of carrying on an affair with a defense contractor. I don’t know if she is or isn’t, but it rather undermines Cohen’s point.

Or take corporate America. Fifteen of the nation’s top CEOs are women and there are lot more women one ore two rungs down the cooperate ladder. Yet, you do not hear of them taking their lovers on the company jet and checking them in to resorts as their research assistants. I’m not saying these things never happen, I’m just saying they happen so rarely as to amount to not happening at all.

Uh…yeah. Look, Richard, I don’t remember the last CEO sex scandal that made the news, because frankly, CEOs are screwing all of us all the time, and finding out that they’re screwing someone else specifically really isn’t all that surprising.

Even women entertainers do not carry on like the men do. Okay, Madonna was famous for bedding much of New York’s outer boroughs, but this was no scandal since she was intent on proving… something. Whatever the case, she was not married at the time. Men get caught with hookers and men have multiple lovers and men have groupies, but not women. Why? Why? Why?

Well, Richard, let me tell you about a little thing called the patriarchy, which punishes “slutty” women much more than it punishes “caddish” men, which means that the female entertainer/politician/CEO caught cheating on her spouse is likely to take a much more serious tumble in the eyes of the public than a similarly situated man.

This doesn’t mean women don’t cheat on their spouses. 15 percent of women and 22 percent of men have had intercourse outside of marriage, numbers that are frankly not that different. And the numbers of men and women who have been unfaithful in any relationship are both majorities — 57% of men and 54% of women, numbers that are essentially the same. Women cheat at a healthy rate, nearly as much as men, and it is ludicrous to think that no famous women are among that number. It’s just much more likely that they place a very high value on discretion.

Consider: Kobe Bryant confessed to raping a woman, and is still considered a superstar. Nike still hires him to do ads. He’s still a multimillionaire. Do you think that, say, Mia Hamm would have kept getting endorsement deals had it come out that she cheated on Nomar Garciaparra? Of course not. Her “all-American girl” image would have been shattered. Her endorsements would have been pulled. Her reputation would have been permanently damaged.

Now, I don’t know that Mia Hamm didn’t cheat on Nomar (if she’s interested in cheating, she should feel free to give me a call, as I’ve had a crush on Mia Hamm for something like 20 years). But if she did, she damn sure had to be careful about it, make sure because it simply wouldn’t do for a woman to be caught in the same type of situation as a man. And certainly, if she was tempted, she would have had the previous scenario in the back of her mind in a way that Kobe obviously did not. This is the slut/stud dichotomy, Richard, and I understand why you don’t know about it, because you’re a douche.

But even if you don’t understand it, you still should know better than to spin elaborate just-so stories out of misunderstood ev-psych studies.

We start with a backhanded complement.

We can guess. The first guess is that women are simply smarter than men. Say what you will about Woods, it’s not his wholesome image that has suffered, it’s his standing as a sentient being. A person with the wit of a mosquito knows better than to leave a voicemail message on a mistress’ phone or to text women who, from the angelic looks of them, would sell their own dear mothers for a chance to appear on Inside Edition. Few women are that stupid. Few men aren’t.

Except, Richard, that women aren’t inherently smarter than men. They’re not inherently dumber, either — men and women are cognitive equals. Women are prone to make dumb mistakes and rash decisions just like men are, and if you don’t know that, you don’t know many women.

It’s just that for women, the stakes are much higher in things like this than men. Bill Clinton largely survived his infidelities; do you think Hillary Clinton would have been electable if it turned out she was having an affair with an intern? No. She would have been pilloried for it, even as people allowed that she probably had earned the right. Good girls don’t, cool boys do. Slut/stud, Richard.

When you’re dealing with something that can end your career, or at the very least ruin your reputation, you’re more apt to be very, very careful. Tiger Woods didn’t worry about leaving messages and sending texts because he realized — accurately, I misdoubt — that the disclosure of his infidelities would not destroy his career. And it won’t. He may take a bit of a financial hit in the short term, but in the long term, he’ll be fine. A woman in a similar position would be a fool to take a similar risk. And so they don’t.

This is also probably a good time to note that there is no “female Tiger Woods,” period. Tiger Woods is on a different plane when it comes to endorsements. Only Michael Jordan comes close. The only woman with the kind of drawing power Woods has is Oprah Winfrey, and she’s chosen to build her own brand, rather than shill for others. And, for what it’s worth, Oprah’s been careful not to get married, hasn’t she?

All right, so women smart, men dumb. That may be it, Richard, but it’s not offensive enough. Can you really be obnoxious?

The other possibility that strikes me is that women seem not to have the evolutionary urge to couple with cheaply dressed strangers. They have a stronger need to mother — to have a child and then raise that child.

Ah, yes, ladies! I know, you say you liked New Moon for the level of shirtlessness involved, but you’re lying. What you really want is to birth babies. There’s no better proof of this than my seven-year-old daughter, who has told me flatly that she doesn’t want to birth babies, because it looks like it’s painful, and there are a lot of kids who don’t have parents who could be adopted. See? It’s so natural that a seven-year-old doesn’t know it!

Also, just so we’re clear, men have no interest in children. My daughter comes up in this column only so I can prove I had sex, not because I love the fact that she’s thinking that deeply about stuff at seven, and find it adorable and sensible.

The male equivalents of the sort of women who have courageously come foreword to claim their reward money for entertaining Tiger are evolutionary bad material. No woman would want them as husbands and fathers. They are what Darwin called dreck, which is Yiddish for cocktail waitress. Since recreational sex can lead to diapers, women have to be prudent. As they say down at the Fed, they have to consider the out years.

Yeah, cocktail waitresses are scum of the earth, and while men may have sex with them, they certainly don’t want to marry them. Also, women never have one-night-stands because evidently it’s 1523 BCE, and the only contraceptive that’s been invented is crocodile dung.

To be fair, in Richard Cohen’s America, abortion is something you probably can’t get, so there is that to consider.

This is why women more than men link sex to love and commitment. I’m not saying that all of them do or all of them do all the time. I’m just saying that there seems to be few women who behave as Tiger Woods did. Even women who have no moral compunction against multiple affairs draw the line at a number somewhat below Tiger’s.

Well, I mean, Jesus, even men who have no moral compunction against multiple affairs draw the line at a number somewhat below Tiger’s. Tiger’s kind of in a league of his own there, too.

Men, like the poor polar bear, have seen their ecology change. Their youthful aggression, so useful for wars of choice (not to mention necessity) or merely hunting saber-toothed tigers, is now just a social menace. Their urge to have sex with just about any woman with a pulse makes them crude laughing stocks. Tiger Woods has become a punch line — and so have men in general. (Thanks, Tiger.) We are a sorry lot. Almost no one, save maybe lachrymose country western singers, will defend the cheatin’ man.

I don’t even know what the hell Cohen is talking about here. Our “youthful aggression” is tied to sex somehow, which I thought was about love, or at least general friendliness. Also, saber-toothed tigers.

As for men becoming a punch line because of Tiger — well, no, you see, just no. Tiger’s a punch line, but if the statistics can be believed, 78 percent of men don’t cheat during marriage. That’s what statisticians like to call “an overwhelming majority.” I’m not saying men never consider cheating — nor that women don’t. (If statistics can be believed, roughly 70 percent of both sexes have said they’d have an affair if it could be guaranteed never to come out.) But most men and women don’t cheat, ever.

The fact that 78 percent of men and 85 percent of women don’t cheat during their marriages suggests to me that, as per usual, men and women are more alike than different. Or, possibly, it proves that women aren’t that driven, not like men are.

But it could be that the urge to get closer to cocktail waitresses and denizens of dimly lit hotel lounges is in some way linked to the drive to conquer, to prevail — to succeed. It could explain why all this time into the Age of Feminism, years after women were liberated, women make up less than 20 percent of Congress and only 3 percent of those top CEOs.

The reason the Glass Ceiling has not broken is that women have other priorities — maintaining relationships and being a mother. This is the way it is, and this is the way it has always been. As any of Tiger Woods’s cocktail waitresses could tell him, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

N’est ce pas?

Yes, that would be one explanation of why systemic sexism has prevented women from reaching parity with men. And I’d totally buy it, if it wasn’t the biggest load of shit produced on land since Amphicoelias fragillimus went extinct 150 million years ago.

Men are successful because we like sex? Really? Well, then, what of women who like sex, a group that includes, at last count, the vast majority of women? Certainly, they would seem to be likely candidates for success, would they not?

Oh, but there’s that slut/stud dichotomy, Richard, which holds women back. You see, women are taught that Good Girls Don’t, remember? So when you’re hitting on a waitress at Perkins at three in the morning, because Cool Guys Do, the woman across the way may be just as interested in hitting on the waiter, but she doesn’t, because she doesn’t want to be That Kind of Girl.

This is tragic, evidently, because a willingness to engage in random sexual encounters is evidently the key to success in life. And women are kept from that success by societal pressures. Too bad.

Of course, the irony is that women are kept from success by societal pressures. Just not the ones Cohen identifies or cares about.

Richard, do you want to know why there aren’t that many female sex scandals? Well, first off, recognize everything I’ve said here as a factor. Now, note that overall, the number of women in all of these “famous” situations are dwarfed by the number of men. Female athletes get nowhere near the endorsement deals that men do. There are far fewer women in Congress than men. There are far fewer female CEOs than men. Only in the case of entertainment is there rough parity, and frankly, I can think of several “sex scandals” involving women there — Britney Spears, you may recall, saw her career crippled by one.

Famous women aren’t that plentiful, and they have strong incentives to be discrete. That, it seems to me, is a far more likely answer than the idea that there aren’t that many famous women because women don’t like sex. They may not like sex with you, Richard, but that just shows they have good taste.

No, much as you may want to think that your propensity for sexual harassment and general rape apologism is the key to your success, it isn’t, Richard. It’s just proof that you’re a douche, like the small minority of men and women who cheat on their partners. Only douchier.

And discovers the sinister plot to steal Glenn Beck’s precious bodily organs.

Is he crazy, or is he so sane he just blew your mind?

Krista at Muslimah Media Watch, in the first of a series reviewing the Globe and Mail’s “Behind the Veil” series (about about women in Kandahar, Afghanistan), begins by objecting to the title:

They could not have come up with a more clichéd title if they had tried, and there is absolutely no excuse for such a lack of creativity at such a big newspaper. To illustrate just how overdone this title is, a Google search of “behind the veil” (in quotes) gives about 569,000 results, including articles and books on women in Iran, “Western” journalists’ encounters with “women in conservative Islamic societies”, representations of Muslim women in Indian writings, an Australian woman’s experiences as a nurse in Saudi Arabia, prostitution in Iran, HIV/AIDS in Muslim countries, and even a BBC report from 2001 that also focused on Afghan women. The point is, it’s been done, ad nauseam, especially (but not exclusively) with regards to Muslim women, and “behind the veil” as a name is just plain lazy. Maybe that sounds harsh, but my frustration comes from having seen titles like this time and time again, and the implication that the only reason to pay attention to Muslim women is in order to de-veil them.

In addition to the lack of creativity is the message that this title sends, particularly to Afghan women: “The veil is the only thing that comes to mind when we think of you. It takes us a whole lot of effort to consider that, behind the clothing you wear, there might actually be real people worth talking to.” [...]

Listening to the journalist’s introduction, available in video form from the series’ website, and reading the foreign editor’s note explaining the rationale behind the series, I was struck by just how formulaic it all sounded. Afghan women are to be pitied, and Afghan men and/or culture are at the root of all of their problems. Oppression can be measured by how many layers of clothing women wear. Not that there aren’t problems for Afghan women, but the lack of complexity anywhere in the introduction surprised me.

There’s lots more at Krista’s post (including praising the Globe & Mail for being unusually open about their methodology); I’m looking forward to reading the rest of this series.

This is something I’ve read again and again; women’s activists in Afghanistan, and many other places, are sick of westerners focusing on what women wear as the leading indicator of Muslim women’s oppression. From an article about Sakena Yacoobi, an incredible women’s activist in Afghanistan:

Afghan women “wear hijab because they want to,” she stated. “Yes, there was a time during the Taliban that they had it wear [it], but now if they don’t want to, they don’t have it wear it.” When those outside of Afghanistan see the garb as oppressive and “want to teach us human rights, when they want to teach us democracy, when they want to teach us all these things, [it is] according to Western culture. And that is not right.”

There’s a lot Naomi Wolf says that I disagree with, but this statement (from Wolf’s Facebook) seems on target:

When you travel throughout the Muslim world, listening to women there, you often hear FROM WOMEN THEMSELVES more nuanced views of the headscarf, and of modest clothing, than you hear in the West; and — a point I cannot make often enough — when you actually listen to Muslim feminist or women’s leaders, many of them wish the West, with all its resources and potential for positive dialogue with the Muslim world, would focus its attention more on the life-and-death or survival-level challenges women and girls often face in Muslim countries - and in the developing world generally — from bride killings to legal subjugaton to lack of access to clean water and safety for their kids – than on what women are wearing, as if that is the only possible measure of their wellbeing.

I’m against anyone being forced to dress in a certain way — including using the government to force women and girls not to veil (1 2 3)– but this is not the primary issue facing Muslim women today.

(Many links via Fatemah’s link round-up.)

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)

On the racial Bechdel test thread, we discussed my comic Hereville a little. Hereville, it was agreed, failed the racial Bechdel test (understandably, given the setting, I would say), but passes the “Jewish Bechdel test” and the original Bechdel test. Responding to this, Daran wrote that Hereville “fails the reverse gender Bechdel test - it doesn’t have two male characters who talk to each other about something other than a women.”

While Daran is technically correct — there is no conversation of any note or substance between male characters in Hereville – I think that to apply a “reverse Bechdel test” misses the point.

The Bechdel test asks if, in a movie (or graphic novel or whatever)

1) there are at least two named¹ female characters, who

2) talk to each other about

3) something other than a man.

The point of the Bechdel test, in my view, is not to criticize individual pieces of work. It’s to point out that movies in the aggregate are overwhelmingly centered around male characters and their interests. In an IM, Mandolin wrote:

The Bechdel test is something that’s only useful when applied in aggregate to a field. It is not diagnostic of sexism or racism in a particular work that it does not pass it, or diagnostic of anti-racism or feminism.

The test - gender and race - exists because of a system that removes women’s and poc’s voices. To create a reverse-Bechdel test implies that it’s coherent to suggest that there’s a mass problem with erasing men’s voices from work.

I think sexism against men does exist, including in media, and is a real issue. But I don’t think a “reverse Bechdel test” makes any sense, because sexism against men in media is not similar to the mass absenting of women as central characters, and that’s what the Bechdel test is designed to make visible.

To work, a male version of the Bechdel test should be simple to explain and apply. It should be more about pervasive, aggregate sexism than about individual works. And it should address real sexism against men, rather than just taking a knee-jerk “but what about the men?” attitude which, I suspect, underlay Daran’s comment about Hereville.²

The problem is, I’m not sure a reverse Bechdel test that has any substance is even possible. There certainly are sexist stereotypes about men in cinema; men’s lives are treated as disposable in many action films, for example, and men are sometimes depicted as unfeeling brutes. There’s a whole lot of comedies which endorse the “men just think with their penises” stereotype, or which present men as incompetent dorks who need to be taken care of by female characters.³

But are any of these really statistically pervasive, the way that movies which center men and male characters are pervasive? There are, after all, many movies which don’t feature scores of men dying offhandedly; plenty which don’t depict men as bestial or as thinking with their penises, and so on. The anti-male stereotypes exist, and they should be objected to, but they’re not omnipresent. In contrast, there really are amazingly few movies which can pass the Bechdel test.⁴

So I’ve been trying to think of a male equivalent to the Bechdel test, with no success. That said, maybe I’m missing something. If Daran, or someone else concerned with making sexism against men more visible, were to create a substantive yet simple and elegant test that pointed out sexism against men in movies, I’d certainly welcome that development.

1. In the original Bechdel test, “named” wasn’t a requirement; my poor memory accidentally added that bit later. (back)
2. Although maybe Daran was just joking, and the joke didn’t come off. (back)
3. The female characters, in turn, are presented as competent but also relegated to the less funny and central roles. As frequently happens, this is an instance where sexism against women and sexism against men is interlocking and interdependent. (back)
4. This is even more true if you try to apply the Bechdel test in a substantive way, versus the “loophole” way people often apply it — for example, saying a movie passes because of one ten-second scene. Of course, looking for loopholes is often fun, and I totally understand that, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the substance. (back)

The following advertisement aired on Israeli TV:

The following clip was filmed in Palestine:

Fantasy is a strange thing. (via Lenin’s Tomb)

I really have never understood the concept of the “hate fuck;” it’s way too close to rape in spirit, and…blech. I don’t judge what goes on in someone’s head, and as long as these thoughts stay in your head, fine, but still…yuck.

But going to the next level and actually writing an article naming conservative women you’d like to “hate fuck” is a whole ‘nother level of vile, and actually paying someone for that article is awful, even if you’re Playboy. I mean, I dislike Michele Bachmann as much as the next sentient being, but throwing out sexual fantasies about her while opining that she makes “chemical castration…look appealing” is odious beyond odious.

And it goes without saying that nobody’s written a hate-fuck list naming, say, Rick Santorum.

This is seven kinds of despicable, and it is a reminder that there are plenty of fauxgressives running around who somehow think one can be a good liberal and still hate women. One can’t. By all means, attack the politics of Malkin, Coulter, Ingraham and Bachmann. But do so by attacking their politics, not by asserting that their vaginas make them an inviting target for defiling.

Oh, and by the way, Hot Air, while I appreciate that you’ve discovered misogyny, you guys might want to also police yourselves. Arguing that liberal women aren’t hot is not the way to prove you’re sensitive to women.

Shep Smith appears to still have a soul:

For the YouTube impaired, Shep says, “We are America! I don’t give a rat’s ass if it helps. We are America! We do not fucking torture!”

It used to be that Smith’s comment would have been uncontroversial, even on a conservative station like Fox News. Oh, the profanity would have gotten him into trouble, I suppose, but the comment itself, or his comment in another segment that, “We are America, we don’t torture! And the moment that is not the case, I want off the train! This government is of, by, and for the people — that means it’s mine. That means — I’m not saying what is torture, and what is not torture, but I’m saying, whatever it is, you don’t do it for me! I want off the train when the government starts — I want off, next stop, now!” — that was just what America was, and everyone agreed on it.

Sadly, today we have the dead-enders arguing over whether there aren’t legitimate policy disagreements regarding torture, and whether we oughtn’t just sweep things under the rug, let a new day dawn and all that. Because for too many Americans, torture is A-OK.

Incidentally, a newly-spreading meme on the right is that if there are hearings into torture, things could get uncomfortable for some Democrats. To which I say: good. Those Democrats who signed off on torture are no less culpable than the Republicans who signed off on torture, and I have no sympathy for them. If Sen. Feinstein ends up in the dock alongside Gov. Bush and Secy. Cheney, I won’t shed any tears. You see, for me this isn’t a partisan issue; it’s a moral issue. Like Shep Smith, I want us either not to torture, or I want off the ride. Because pace the Republican mantra, I love my country, and love what it once stood for, even as I acknowledge that we often failed to live up to the standards we set for ourselves. And I hate like sin the fact that so many of the things I love about America were cast aside by the Bush Administration in a fit of paranoia and terror.

I knew Fox News was bad and wasn’t even really an actual journalistic television station, but this? Damn!

So as you may recall, Bill O’Reilly was invited by the Alexa Foundation to give a speech at a fundraiser. The Alexa Foundation is a group that supports rape survivors — a great cause — but the invitation to O’Reilly was odd at best, given that O’Reilly has, in the past, embraced a blame-the-victim approach to the crime of rape. So a variety of crazy lefties pointed that fact out, which seemed pretty reasonable, all in all.

One of the writers who followed the story was Amanda Terkel of ThinkProgress. She had the temerity to suggest that maybe, just maybe, someone who thinks a rape victim could be asking for it shouldn’t have been invited to address rape survivors.

O’Reilly responded in typically mature fashion:

This weekend, while on vacation, I was ambushed by O’Reilly’s top hit man, producer Jesse Watters, who accosted me on the street and told me that because I highlighted O’Reilly’s comments, I was causing “pain and suffering” to rape victims and their families. He of course offered no proof to back up this claim, instead choosing to shout questions at me.

Watters evidently followed Terkel for two hours, following her and a friend to a hotel, where they ambushed her. Terkel responded, it appears, as professionally as possible under the circumstances; O’Reilly’s producer, of course, was about as far from the standards of professionalism as is humanly possible.

I’d comment further, but Terkel already has the most sane response to these events:

The main issue remains: O’Reilly should offer an apology/explanation of why, when a woman is raped and murdered, it’s relevant what she was wearing or how much she was drinking. O’Reilly never asked me for a statement nor invited me on his show before sending Watters to harass me. Since I’m a 5 ft, 100 pound woman with an opinion that he doesn’t like, perhaps O’Reilly believes I deserve to be treated this way.

Bill O’Reilly is a bully and a stalker. He should never have been invited to headline an event for anyone, anywhere. Indeed, one can only hope that he will Go Galt someday; the world will be a better place without him in it.

(Via Shakesville.)

UPDATE: If you are familiar with the Facebook on the interwebs, you can lend your support there.

Not the best reporting I’ve encountered about the financial crisis — that would be an episode of This American Life — but an incredibly substantive discussion for TV. It’s pathetic that TV this good can seemingly only happen on a comedy show.

(If you need background on the Stewart vs. Cramer thing, watch the first two videos here.)

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald points out that the only thing unusual about Cramer, among media talking heads, is that Cramer expresses some contrition.

From FAIR:

Major newspaper, broadcast and cable stories mentioning healthcare reform in the week leading up to President Barack Obama’s March 5 healthcare summit rarely mentioned the idea of a single-payer national health insurance program, according to a new FAIR study. And advocates of such a system–two of whom participated in yesterday’s summit–were almost entirely shut out, FAIR found.

Single-payer–a model in which healthcare delivery would remain largely private, but would be paid for by a single federal health insurance fund (much like Medicare provides for seniors, and comparable to Canada’s current system)–polls well with the public, who preferred it two-to-one over a privatized system in a recent survey (New York Times/CBS, 1/11-15/09). But a media consumer in the week leading up to the summit was more likely to read about single-payer from the hostile perspective of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer than see an op-ed by a single-payer advocate in a major U.S. newspaper.

Over the past week, hundreds of stories in major newspapers and on NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and PBS’s NewsHour With Jim Lehrer mentioned healthcare reform, according to a search of the Nexis database (2/25/09-3/4/09). Yet all but 18 of these stories made no mention of “single-payer” (or synonyms commonly used by its proponents, such as “Medicare for all,” or the proposed single-payer bill, H.R. 676), and only five included the views of advocates of single-payer–none of which appeared on television. [...]

Though more than 60 lawmakers have co-sponsored H.R. 676, the single-payer bill in Congress, Obama has not expressed support for single-payer; both the idea and its advocates were marginalized in yesterday’s healthcare forum. But given the high level of popular support the policy enjoys, that’s all the more reason media should include it in the public debate about the future of healthcare.

I understand that single-payer has no chance in the current political situation — but that becomes a self-fufilling prophecy, not just for now but for the future, when the media refuses to discuss any policy that isn’t currently politically viable, regardless of its support among much of the general public and among many experts. I don’t want the media to go along with the political elites’ decision to ignore the public’s preference; I want the media to push against the political elite’s arbitrary boundaries of which policies are and aren’t worth discussing.

I think what this comes down to what journalism professor Jay Rosen says in this interview: “Savviness is the real idealogy of Washington journalism.”

it’s this notion that that might be a good argument, but that’s not what the committee is going to do, you know? And this kind of religion of - I call it a religion because it’s a faith - that if you’re savvy, that you are realistic, and again, you are vulnerable to irresponsible elites when you do that. You can cut yourself off from your naturally constituency which isn’t them, but an informed and engaged public.

Scholarship and public opinion both say that single-payer is a health care option that deserves serious consideration. But treating single payer seriously might make a journalist look naive — so they don’t.

Real men, it appears, drive Chevys:

A lot of commercials make sexist appeals to insecurity about masculinity, but this one is impressive because it’s just so pure. The Dodge Ram has a heated steering wheel! Manicures! Pro football players! Unstated but heavily implied: Drive Chevy or die a wimp, wimp!

I like to imagine the ad agency people sitting around, spitballing. “You know the problem? Men think they can be real men just by driving any old ludicrously oversized truck. We want to make them know that if you’re in the wrong ludicrously oversized truck, then you’re a girl.”

Curtsy: Sociological Images and Feministe.

Near the end of the sublime Ratatouille, bitter, jaded reviewer Anton Ego pens a column in which he explains that he was wrong about pretty much everything. After discovering that the most sublime meal he’s ever eaten was cooked by a rat, Ego says, in voiceover:

In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.

Citizen journalism, whether it comes from blogs or podcasts or streaming video or mimeographed pamphlet, is a testament to this idea. There are plenty of well-known and well-respected writers and journalists who didn’t come up through J-school, didn’t start life covering the Maplewood city council, didn’t go through any particular training, but found that they had a voice and an ability to cut through to the truth. Nowhere is this more true than in the world of punditry, in which people had been fêted for coming up with opinions and theories that may or may not bear any connection to reality.

But while an artist can come from anywhere, that does not — as Ego notes — mean that anyone can be good at a job. As anyone who’s read a big chunk of the blogosphere knows, there are a few brilliant bloggers, a bunch of good bloggers, a ton of passable bloggers, and a nearly infinite supply of terrible bloggers. Not everyone is cut out for the business of transmitting the news to people.

And that brings us to “Joe” the “Plumber,” Samuel Wurzelbacher, who has for reasons unknown to any humans been hired by Edsel Media to cover the Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip.

Now, I have experience in journalism. And I’ve been writing on the internets since 2002. I’ve appeared on national television and national radio. And while I’m far from an expert on Israeli-Palestinian relations, I at least have been following the issues for a while. And I can tell you flatly that nobody should send me to cover this conflict; I’m not qualified to do it. There are better people for the job. And yet if someone lost their mind and sent me to cover events there, I feel certain that I would be a combination of Stephen Crane, Sydney Schanberg, Joe Rosenthal, Lady Florence Dixie, and Morley Safer compared to Joe the Sideshow Freak:

There’s a lot there, but here’s the money graf:

I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think journalists should be anywhere allowed war. I mean, you guys report where our troops are at. You report what’s happening day to day. You make a big deal out of it. I think it’s asinine. You know, I liked back in World War I and World War II when you’d go to the theater and you’d see your troops on, you know, the screen and everyone would be real excited and happy for ‘em. Now everyone’s got an opinion and wants to downer, ah, down soldiers. You know, American soldiers or Israeli soldiers.

I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting. You know, war is hell. And if you’re gonna sit there and say, “Well look at this atrocity,” well you don’t know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it.

So basically, Joe doesn’t know diddly, except that really, when dealing with war, America and other nations are served best by receiving only propaganda and spoon-fed happy talk from the government.

I’d trash Joe, but really, it’s not his fault; he’s just expressing the certain strain of wingnut thought that dissent is bad, debate is negative, and that when our country goes to war it is our duty to simply shut up and go along with it, whether it’s a terrible idea or not.

Of course, he’s not expressing it particularly intelligently, but that’s what you get for sending a faux plumber to be a faux journalist.

The really amazing stuff starts at 3:44:

“It’s the möbius strip of issues! There’s only one side!”

As M.J. Rosenberg says, Stewart did something very brave here. Look, I think we all can agree that Hamas is a group of idiots, and sure, them shooting rockets is a bad, stupid, and evil thing. But Stewart dares to note that Israel hasn’t exactly been good to the Palestinians either. That there is, in fact, more than one side to the issue. And that both sides should get an airing.

For this, I’m sure he will be pilloried as being anti-Semitic, because despite being Jewish and having sung “Can I Interest You in Hanukkah?” Stewart clearly hates all Jews, because he has a nuanced view of what’s happening in the Middle East. As for me, I appreciate that at least one newscast dared to step up and note that we are getting just one side of this story. And I’m totally unsurprised that it’s The Daily Show

Glenn Greenwald lists Politico’s “Top 10 political scoops of 2008“:

(1) Katie Couric’s interview of Sarah Palin (CBS)

(2) McCain can’t say how many homes he owns (Politico)

(3) Obama’s “bitter” comment (Huffington Post)

(4) Sarah Palin’s shopping spree (Politico)

(5) Turmoil in the Clinton camp (Washington Post and Atlantic — “The behind-the-scenes tension was captured by the reporters in one memorable exchange: ‘[Expletive] you!’ Ickes shouted. ‘[Expletive] you!’ Penn replied. ‘[Expletive] you!’ Ickes shouted again.”)

(6) Jeremiah Wright tapes (ABC News)

(7) The Pentagon’s military analyst program (NY Times)

(8) Bickering in the McCain camp (NY Times Magazine)

(9) John Edwards’ affair (National Enquirer)

(10) Powell endorses Obama (Meet the Press)

Number seven is certainly an important story (and one that got virtually no coverage on TV), but the rest is… Well, as Glenn says,

In fairness to Calderone and his comrades in the political press, our media currently covers a country that has very few substantial problems and an administration that is renowned around the world for being competent, honest, conventional and quite uncontroversial. In general, countries which enjoy great tranquility, prosperity, and stability — such as the U.S. today — can afford the luxury of fixating on the types of fun and trivial stories which comprise the list of top “scoops” heralded by Politico.

It’s not that all of these stories were meaningless and not worth reporting. Palin’s difficultly answering simple questions — and what it implied about her readiness to step into the Presidency — was relevant knowledge for voters to have, for instance. And a lot of these stories are irresistibly fun. But it shouldn’t be on anyone’s “top ten scoops” list. It wasn’t a “scoop” that they deserve credit and praise for — Katie Couric didn’t work to ferret that story out. Someone just turned a camera on.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of in-depth reporting about the election that didn’t happen — or that happened, but didn’t get picked up on in any consistent fashion. After all the debating talks about Afghanistan, how many Americans could find it on a map? How many Americans, after all this time, could even guess at if Iran’s government is Sunni or Shiite? How many know, even in broad outlines, the differences between McCain’s and Obama’s proposed health care plans are? There may also have been some torture going on somewhere, and maybe some war crimes covered up, and possibly a tiny twinge in our economic health, but you’d never know it from Politico’s top ten.

But of course, reporting like that won’t sell papers, or pull in eyeballs, the way simple and fun narratives will. I’m not sure that good reporting is possible, except in erratic sparks, in a profit-driven news model.