The greatest, and also the most disappointing, of these four is Jamshid, for it is Jamshid who establishes social classes, brings the science of medicine to humanity, teaches his people to make clothing and perfume, and in general orders the society if his time such that it is recognizable to us as the kind of social world in which we live. Jamshid, also, however is the first king to allow his pride to get the better of him, declaring himself a deity and losing the farr, which people often translate into English as aura, but is more accurately described as the visible quality in a king that signifies for his subjects the fact that God favors his rule. If you imagine the halos that were drawn around Christ’s head in medieval paintings, but picture them around the heads of kings and understand them to be visible proof of what the Europeans used to believe was the divine right of kings, you have something close to what the farr is.

Once Jamshid loses the farr, there is room for evil to enter the world, which it does in the form of Zahhak, part of whose story you can read in my translation on Ekleksographia. In addition to the word farr, you need to know that peris are supernatural creatures upon which are based the faeries of Victorian England; and you need to know as well that “Demon Binder” was the name given to Jamshid’s father, Tahmures, because he bound Ahriman–the source of evil–and rode him, more or less like a horse, around the world.

Here is my translation of Jamshid’s story, which is also the story of the first Norouz:

Filled with his father’s wisdom, when the world
was done mourning the Demon Binder,
Jamshid joined the line of men
to ascend the throne and wear the crown.
Peace spread across his kingdom,
and the birds and peris bowed to him too.
“I will,” he said, “keep evil from evil-doers’
hands, and I will guide souls to light.
The royal farr rests with me. I rule
as shah and priest.”

He turned first
to making weapons, paving for his warriors
a road to glory and renown. Iron,
beneath his farr, softened, became swords
and helmets, chain mail and horse armor,
and he gave fifty years to training
the men he charged with building his armory.

The next five decades, Jamshid devoted
to clothing, contriving different fabrics—
linen and silk, brocades and satin—
teaching people to spin and to weave,
to dye what they’d woven, and then sew a garment
for feasting or fighting. When he finished, he divided
men by their profession, sending
first to the mountains, to worship their Master
and live lives of devotion, the Katuzi.
Second, he summoned the Neysari,
lion-hearted fighters whose luster
lit the entire land, whose leadership
and courage kept the king secure,
and whose valor ensured the nation’s reputation.
Those who farmed the fields came next,
the Basudi, who sow and reap,
who receive no thanks, but whom none reproach
when there’s food to eat. Free people
who kneel to no one and seek no quarrel,
despite the rags they wear, their care
makes the earth flourish and nourishes peace.
A wise elder once said,
“If a free man finds himself a slave,
he has only his own laziness to blame.”

Jamshid gathered the craftsmen last,
the anxious and stubborn Ahtukhoshi.
Haughty and contrary, they work with their hands
to make the goods sold in the market,
and they are always anxious. Fifty years
marched by while Jamshid showed
each person breathing earth’s air
his proper place and path, teaching
the scope of the life he’d been given to live.

He ordered the demons to pour water
over earth, stirring it into clay
they filled molds with to form bricks.
With mortar and stone, they laid foundations
for public baths and beautiful palaces,
and castles to protect against attack.
From rocks, Jamshid’s magic extracted
the lustrous gems and precious metals
he found hidden there, filling his hands
with gold and silver, amber and jacinth.
He distilled perfumes for his people’s pleasure:
balsam and ambergris, rose water and camphor,
musk and aloe. He made medicines
to bring the sick back to health
and to help the healthy stay that way.

Jamshid revealed these secret things
as none before him had done. No one
discovered and ordered the world as he did.

Yet another fifty years
saw Jamshid building ships
he could sail quickly across the sea,
making port in each realm he reached;
and then, although he was already great,
Jamshid stepped past greatness.
He used his farr to fashion a jeweled
throne, decreeing the demons should raise it
high in the sky, where he sat shining
like the sun, and the world’s creatures gathered
around him, standing in awe, scattering
gems at his feet. It was the first of Farvadin,
and Jamshid set that day aside,
naming it Norooz, “new day,”
the day he rested, the first of the year.
His nobles declared a feast, a festival
of wine and song we still celebrate
in Jamshid’s memory.

For three centuries,
Jamshid ruled in peace. His people
knew neither death nor hardship; the demons
stood ready to serve; and all who heard
the king’s command obeyed it. The land,
filled with music, flourished. Jamshid,
however, gave himself to vanity.
Seeing he had no peer in the world,
he forgot the gratitude that is God’s due
and called the nobles of his court before him
to make this fateful proclamation:
“From this day forward, I know no lord
but me: my word brought beauty
and skilled men to adorn the earth!
My word! Sunshine and sleep, security
and comfort, the clothes you wear, your food—
all came to you through me!
Who else ended death’s desolation
and with medicine vanished illness from your lives?
Without me, neither mind nor soul
would inhabit your bodies. So who besides me
can claim, unchallenged, the crown and its power?
You understand this now. So now,
who else can you call Creator but me?!”

The elders bowed their heads and held
their tongues, silenced by what he’d said,
but when the last sound left his mouth,
the farr left him, and his realm fell
into discord. A sensible, pious man
once said, “A king must make himself
God’s slave. Ingratitude towards God
will fill your heart with innumerable fears.”
Jamshid’s men deserted; his destiny
darkened, and his light disappeared from the world.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Right now, it’s rumored that pro-choice and pro-life Democrats in the House have reached a compromise in which President Obama will sign a statement affirming that current law — specifically, the Hyde Amendment — applies to Health Care Reform. In exchange, Stupak and the “I’m with Stupak” group will vote for Health Care Reform, guaranteeing that Health Care Reform passes.

If that’s how things turn out (and it’s not yet certain), then house pro-choicers won — and Stupak and other pro-life fanatics got their asses kicked. Having Obama affirm that current law is current law is an empty face-saving gesture, so that Stupak’s dozen — which has been whittled down to half a dozen — can back down while claiming they haven’t backed down.

But it’s also possible that Stupak and his half-dozen will win some more damaging concession. Plus, it’s still unclear (at least to me) if the provisions in the Senate bill will, in practice, mean that the Hyde Amendment continues to apply — or if it means, in the worst-case scenario, that private insurance will no longer cover abortion. Even in that case, Michelle Goldberg argues, feminists should still support passage of the bill.

The simple fact is that health-care reform, even with its awful provisions on abortion, will hugely improve the health of American women. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, more than 17 million women are uninsured, and millions more are underinsured. “In 2008, one in seven privately insured women reported she postponed or went without needed care because she couldn’t afford it,” Kaiser reports. Women are more likely to rely on their spouse’s insurance coverage, leaving them vulnerable if they’re divorced or widowed, if their husband becomes old enough to qualify for Medicare, or if their partner’s employer decides to drop dependent coverage, which is happening with increasing frequency. As a study by the National Women’s Law Center found, “Overall, women are more likely than men to have difficulty obtaining needed health care (43% vs. 30%) — a difference more pronounced for uninsured women (68% vs. 49%).” [...]

Needless to say, uninsured women already lack abortion coverage. So the burdens of the abortion restrictions in health-care reform will fall mainly on the middle class. To say this is not to suggest that the concerns of middle-class women aren’t important. [...] But preserving health-insurance coverage for abortion at the cost of excluding millions from insurance altogether isn’t much of a victory.

Of course, this debate isn’t just about a utilitarian reckoning of the greatest good for the greatest number. It’s also about principle. Abortion is an important aspect of women’s health care. It’s one of the most common outpatient procedures in the United States, and around a third of American women have abortions during their life. Stigmatizing abortion and segregating it from other kinds of care has a terrible impact on abortion access — many ordinary ob-gyns don’t offer abortion services to their patients, and abortion instruction is severely lacking in medical schools. Health-care reform that excludes abortion from insurance coverage furthers the notion that abortion is aberrant and illegitimate, not something to which every woman has a right.

Anti-abortion forces have had the advantage in this fight because they’re willing to sacrifice the health of millions on the altar of their ideology. Their nihilism gives them leverage. It’s tempting to wish that pro-choice forces could be equally resolute, and it’s possible that stronger demands early on could have made a difference. But it’s too late for that now. The choice is the Senate bill or nothing, and nothing would be a tragedy. There are very few things in this world for which it is worth compromising reproductive rights. But the greatest expansion of the social safety net in a generation is one of them.

So what happens in the future?

I’d like to see pro-choice legislation advance in Congress, but — as we’ve seen — pro-life Democrats are a strong force in the House. So even if the Senate goes forward with reforming the filibuster, I’m not sure that pro-choice legislation can pass the House. Towards that end, probably nothing is more important than supporting pro-choice primary challenges to pro-life democrats. Even if those primary challengers lose, they still send a message to Representatives that grandstanding pro-life Democrats will pay a price.

So if you’d like to donate some money, the person to donate to right now is Connie Saltonstall, who is challenging Stupak. Here’s what NOW says about Saltonstall:

What a relief that a courageous feminist candidate stepped up to the plate to challenge the co-author of the anti-choice Stupak-Pitts Amendment. Thanks to Connie Saltonstall, Stupak’s bullying attempts to use health care reform as an opportunity to restrict women’s access to abortion will be contested at the polls. Saltonstall stated: “I believe that [Stupak] has a right to his personal, religious views, but to deprive his constituents of needed health care reform because of those views is reprehensible.”

Saltonstall is a strong supporter of the full range of feminist issues, including reproductive justice, affirmative action, pay equity, constitutional equality and equal marriage rights. More specifically, she is in favor of repealing the Hyde Amendment, fully funding the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, rescinding the Defense Of Marriage Act, expanding the Family and Medical Leave Act to add paid leave, and undoing the Bush-era damage done to Title IX.

If Stupak does vote for Health Care Reform today, we probably have Connie Saltonstall to thank for it.

* * *

As an aside, can I say that I really fucking loathe Bart Stupak? Not because he’s pro-life; I understand that some people can sincerely disagree with me on that issue, but be decent human beings in other ways.

No, I loathe Stupak because he’s a shallow pro-lifer, someone who cares more about making a big public stink and getting on TV than substantively reducing abortions. But even more, I loathe him because even while he doesn’t have an ounce of sympathy for the women who’d be harmed by his policy, Stupak whines about how haaaard all this is on… Bart Stupak.

It’s genuinely disgusting that Stupak feels nothing for people lacking health care, or woman he’d force to give birth unwillingly, versus his enormous pity and sympathy for himself. It’s like listening to a serial killer whinge on about how his palms sting after a long day stabbing innocent people to death.

Barry Deutsch apparently is another of those low-information supporters so common in the NW who repeat superficial talking points about the bill that depend on glossing over the facts.

I wish you wouldn’t get insulting; I don’t think it adds anything to the discussion. When your arguments are solid, there’s no need for personal attacks.

Obama today said this bill is not about health care reform, it’s about protecting the insurance companies from disruption.

I frankly doubt this is true. Do you have a link to Obama saying this?

And we know that’s true because the CBO said this bill will leave over 23 million non-elderly uninsured.

It’s true, this bill “only” insures 32 million. The remaining 23 million are people who will choose to pay the mandate penalty rather than buy insurance. But at least if these uninsured have a critical need for insurance, they’ll then be able to buy into the system — under the status quo, people who can be insured but choose not to, are turned down by the private insurance companies if they find themselves urgently needing medical care.

The only thing that would cover 100% of Americans is single-payer. But single-payer is not going to happen in the US in a single step, anytime in the next two or three decades, and maybe not ever.

If you’re saying that no health care reform that fails to cover 100% of the uninsured is ever acceptable, then you’re saying we can never have health care reform, ever. You’re saying that the 32 million this bill would cover should remain uncovered, forever.

Those who end up with private insurance — the specific benefits are not specified in the bill, by the way

“Specific” benefits? No. But the general scope of insurance under the health exchanges is defined in the bill; all such private insurance must include, at a minimum:

(A) Ambulatory patient services.
(B) Emergency services.
(C) Hospitalization.
(D) Maternity and newborn care.
(E) Mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment.
(F) Prescription drugs.
(G) Rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices.
(H) Laboratory services.
(I) Preventive and wellness services and chronic disease management.
(J) Pediatric services, including oral and vision care.

That’s a direct quote from the Senate bill; you can find it here (pdf file), on page 105.

Note that under the law, all members of Congress and their staffs would have to buy their insurance from the same health exchanges. Do you really think that Congress would pass a law requiring Congress and their staffs to buy lousy insurance?

Under this bill, 32 million currently uninsured people, would be able to buy insurance the same way Harry Reid does. That’s not a bad thing.

As many don’t accept Medicare and various private insurance plans right now.

The large majority of doctors do accept Medicare, actually. And HCR increases Medicaid reimbursement rates, so presumably that will increase the percentage of doctors who take new Medicaid patients.

That said, let’s say that only about 55% of doctors will take new Medicaid patients, and 75% new Medicare patients. If I’m someone who’s broke and can’t afford to see a doctor, I’m far better off if this bill passes and I can get on Medicaid — which means that about half of all doctors will see me — than I am if this bill fails, and I remain too broke to see a doctor at all.

Are you saying that the only acceptable law is one that will force doctors to accept all patients and all insurance plans, against their will? Do you have any realistic plan for passing such a law over the opposition of the AMA? (The AMA is a far more powerful lobby than the private insurance lobby).

Health Care Reform is a good bill, but it’s not a bill that solves every imaginable problem with the health care system under the sun. You can go on forever saying that this bill doesn’t make everything perfect. But we’re still better off passing this bill and then trying to get more in the future, than we are if this bill fails and we’re starting out again with nothing.

Medicare didn’t make everything perfect, either. But it was a vast improvement over the status quo before Medicare, and for that reason it’s good that Medicare passed. The same is true of Health Care Reform.

And for the next four years waiting is exactly what we will boing and people will continue to be die because they are uninsured. [....] We could instead be putting pressure on Congress….

Four years is better than 15 years, which is about how long it has taken, historically, for Congress to try again after each health care failure.

The Democrats have an unsustainable majority in Congress; it’s guaranteed that they will be losing seats this November. If this is the best health care reform the Democrats can do when they have large majorities, what makes you think they’ll be able to pass a much better, more comprehensive overhaul with a smaller majority?

Or do you think the Republicans are going to pass something better when they’re in the majority?

There will be no next chance anytime in the next four years. “Pure” lefties like you have been “pressuring congress” for my entire life; have you delivered universal care yet?

The real world legislative process is messy and full of compromise. A compromised health care bill isn’t perfect; it doesn’t deliver all its benefits until 2014 (although some benefits would happen right away), it doesn’t cover 100% the way single payer would, it doesn’t force doctors to accept patients they don’t want to accept, and it doesn’t eliminate big corporations that make profits from health care.

But the perfect, pure health care plan — achieved in a single step, rather than through gradual improvements and compromised — is much worse than that, because it will never exist outside of your imagination. I’d rather have health care — even if imperfect — than have what you’d offer me, which is a chance to remain pure and die prematurely for lack of health care.

Taken from Balloon Juice comments:

Whether or not you live in their districts, call the following Congresspeople (who are either undecided or are progressives who are considering opposing the legislation) and ask them to vote in favor of health care reform so that we can finally begin fixing our broken health care system.

Zack Space – Ohio (Zanesville, Dover, Chillicothe) – (202) 225-6265

Marcy Kaptur – Ohio (Toledo) – (202) 225-4146

Bill Foster – Illinois (Batavia, Dixon, Geneseo) – (202) 225-2976

Kathy Dahlkemper – Pennsylvania (Erie) – (202) 225-5406

Chris Carney – Pennsylvania (Clarks Summit, Shamokin, Williamsport) – (202) 225-3731

Melissa Bean – Illinois (Schaumburg) – (202) 225-3711

Steve Driehaus – Ohio (Cincinnati) – (202) 225-2216

Jim Matheson – Utah (South Salt Lake, St. George, Price) – (202) 225-3011

Stephen Lynch – Massachusetts (Brockton, Boston) – 202-225-8273

Peter DeFazio – Oregon (Eugene, Roseburg, Coos Bay) – 202.225.6416

Michael Arcuri – New York (Utica, Auburn, Cortland) – (202)225-3665

Rick Boucher – Virginia (Abingdon, Pulaski, Big Stone Gap) – 202-225-3861

Henry Cuellar – Texas (San Antonia, Laredo, Rio Grande City) – 202-225-1640

John Tanner – Tennessee (Union City, Jackson, Millington) – 202-225-4714

Glenn Nye – Virginia (Virginia Beach, Accomac) – (202) 225-4215

Brian Baird – Washington (Vancouver, Olympia) – (202) 225-3536

Dan Lipinski – Illinois (LaGrange, Oak Lawn, Chicago’s southwest side) – (202) 225 – 5701

Joe Donnelly – Indiana (South Bend, LaPorte, Michigan City, Kokomo) – (202) 225-3915

Marion Barry – Arkansas (Jonesboro, Cabot, Mountain Home) – (202) 225-4076

Harry Teague – New Mexico (Hobbs, Las Cruces, Socorro, Los Lunas, Roswell) – (202) 225-2365

Jerry Costello – Illinois (Carbondale, Belleville, E. St. Louis, Granite City, Chester) – (202) 225-5661

John Barrow – Georgia (Savannah, Augusta, Vidalia, Milledgeville, Sandersville) – (202) 225-2823

Nick Rahall – West Virginia (Beckley, Bluefield, Huntington, Logan) – (202) 225-3452

Solomon Ortiz – Texas (Corpus Christi, Brownsville) – (202) 225-7742

* * *

Here’s the fax I sent to DeFazio:

Dear Representative DeFazio,

I’m writing to urge you to do everything you can to improve the Health Care Reform bill at this late stage. I’m happy to read that you’re negotiating hard with Speaker Pelosi to make this bill fairer to Oregonians. That’s excellent. You rock, dude!

But after negotiations are over — even if you don’t get nothing — vote for it.

This is a matter of life and death for people who — unlike you — don’t have jobs with great health coverage. You owe it to them to swallow a bad deal, and if necessary swallow your principles, and vote for this bill.

Best wishes,

Barry Deutsch

For the past few years, I’ve been peripherally involved by providing extra critiques of student submission stories. My first year, I critiqued Rachel Sobel’s submission story, “The Loyalty of Birds,” which she revised and sold to Clarkesworld Magazine as an impressive debut. She’s an exceptional case, but not the only Alpha student to go on and publish–the Alpha website includes a list of alumni achievements, including publications in Lady Churchill’s, Aberrant Dreams, Fantasy Magazine, and multiple Dell Award placements.

Professional workshops like the Clarions are well known for helping emerging writers, but Alpha goes back a stage further than that. Not every writer starts working as a teenager, but I know that when I was a kid, I was hungry for feedback and eager to meet other writers and be taken seriously–the chance to get together with other writers and receive feedback from real, live authors would have sounded like a dream.

Like any workshop that wants to get the best students, Alpha provides need-based scholarships. And like any workshop in this economy, Alpha is struggling to provide for all of its students. They’ve recently put up a website requesting donations to help them send teenagers to writer-camp.

They are offering a bit of bait, too–donations of five dollars and over will be rewarded with a copy of Ned and Jane, a collaborative girl-meets-zombie story written by the Alpha class of 2009.

Check out their website and consider donating, whether to get the zombie story or just show support for young writers.

That kind of xenophobia, often mixed with racism, emerges quite commonly when discussions of linguistic pluralism or tolerance turn to the question of the degree to which United States society and culture can accommodate the public use, official and unofficial, of languages other than English. When my wife and I decided to raise our son to be bilingual, for example, and we chose to speak only, or at least predominantly, Persian to him for the first couple of years of his life, members of my family were very concerned that we were setting him up for ridicule, and even failure, because they were sure not only that he would learn to speak English with an Iranian accent, but that there was a good chance he would speak English ungrammatically. What bothered me, however, was not this practical concern my relatives had about whether or not my son would acquire English as a native speaker. Misplaced as that concern is–children are, after all, language sponges and can, if they start young enough, learn to speak multiple languages fluently, with the appropriate accent in each, without any trouble at all–I think it’s not an unreasonable one for people to have who have not yet thought closely about how children are socialized into their native language. No matter how exclusively my wife and I might have tried to speak only Persian with him, for example, he was immersed in the culture that is American English in almost every other aspect of his life. It would have been difficult, especially since English is my native language, for him not to have acquired English as a native speaker.

Rather, what troubled me about my relatives’ response was the anger, the tone of one who has been betrayed, that entered their voices, when they would tell me things like, “He’s never going to sound American, you know, and he’s going to hate you for that when he’s older.” Over time, despite the fact that we tried as much as possible to speak English to our son when people who didn’t speak Persian were around, it became clear that much of what some of my family members resented was that they couldn’t understand what my wife was saying to our son when she spoke to him in her language. Not that I don’t understand the discomfort that being unable to comprehend the language spoken by the people standing next to you can make you feel. In the late 1980s, I lived for about a year and a half in South Korea, and I neither spoke nor read a word of Korean when I got there. It was frightening. Moreover, unlike the people in the study I described above–who had no way of knowing what the conversations they were overhearing were about–I knew for a fact that a lot of the people I rode the train with every day, whose conversations I could not penetrate even the slightest fraction of an inch, or whom I passed in the street, or stood on line with at the bank, were often talking about me, and I knew this because they were not shy about pointing at me while they were saying whatever it was they had to say.

It was very hard at first not to assume that at least some of what they were saying was less than flattering, though I learned over time that most were probably just saying an adult version of what the kids in my Chamshil apartment complex would say every time I walked past, pointing and laughing with a delighted curiosity at the strangeness of my presence: Migook saram! Migook saram imnida! (An American! It’s an American!). Still, I have never understood the attitude, which I have only ever heard expressed by Americans, displayed so prominently by two guys from Chicago who were in Seoul for a medical conference of some sort. I know where they were from and why they were in Korea because my friends and I, all of us English teachers at the same school in Yoksam-Dong, overheard their conversation in the Pizza Inn (or maybe it was Pizza Hut, I am not sure) in the Samsung Building, which was one of the places we’d go for lunch when we had a craving for western food. These two men wanted whatever kind of overloaded pizza they were trying to order without one of the toppings on the menu, black olives, which they were trying without much success to explain to their waitress, whose English was not very good and who was very flustered at having to use it, especially as she could sense the rising frustration in her customer’s voices when it became clear to them that she wasn’t really understanding what they wanted. Finally, the waitress said, “Okay, okay!” as if she understood and went back into the kitchen. When she brought out their order a little while later, though, there were black olives on the pizza, and the guys from Chicago were furious. They didn’t exactly yell at the waitress, but their voices were raised as they demonstrated what they wanted by picking the olives off their food and setting them aside. This time the look on the waitress’ face confirmed that she had indeed understood what the men from Chicago wanted, and she took the incorrect order and went back into the kitchen.

I don’t remember why none of us tried to intervene, since there were those among us whose Korean was good enough to defuse the whole situation, but after the waitress had gone back into the kitchen, one of the guys leaned over the table and in a voice choked with anger and frustration said, “Why don’t these people learn to speak the fucking language!” His friend nodded, said, “Do you want to leave?” and they walked out.

Whenever I tell that story these days, I am reminded of a joke I read I-wish-I-could-remember-where:

An immigrant father is quizzing his daughter on her vocabulary. “What do you call someone who speaks two languages?” he asks her.

“Bilingual,” the girl answers.

“Someone who speaks three languages?”

“Trilingual.”

“And what do you call someone who speaks more than three languages?”

“Polyglot.”

“Good job!” the father smiles. “Now, what do you call someone who speaks only one language?”

“An American.”

The truth that sits at the center of the stereotype this joke pokes fun at is one I have spent much of my professional life fighting to change, and so it was with no small sense of irony that I found myself thinking when I walked a couple of nights ago out of the new Bravo supermarket around the corner from where I live not, “Why don’t they learn to speak the fucking language?” but something close to it: “If they know the language, why don’t they fucking speak it?”

My neighborhood is one of the most diverse in the United States. I don’t remember the precise numbers, but the people who live here either come from 60 or so different countries and speak 80 or so different languages, or it’s the other way around: 80 or so different countries and 60 or so different languages. You can walk down the main avenue and hear Spanish, Italian, Persian, Russian, Arabic, French, Polish, Yiddish, Chinese, Korean, Urdu, Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese and more. As you might imagine, the businesses here that are most successful have managed to navigate the politics of language that inevitably emerge in such a polyglot place in ways that strive to make everyone feel welcome, from putting signs in different languages up in their stores to trying to hire a range of people to represent the range of languages in the community; and I have seen store keepers greeting regular customers in their own languages, nothing more than a simple hello and goodbye, and maybe How are you?, but that little bit goes a long way towards making these customers feel welcome, and it contributes to the sense of neighborhood that exists here.

There are, of course, times when the person who is behind the counter, or taking your order in a restaurant, is a new immigrant to whom the boss has given a job, maybe the newcomer’s first in this country, and whose English is correspondingly poor. Frustrating as those situations can be, though, in my experience anyway, the manager or store owner, whose English is usually quite good, has always been there to help. The other night, however, it was the manager who was the problem. Here’s what happened: One of my neighbors was on line ahead of me. When the cashier rang up a can of peanuts my neighbor wanted to buy, something strange must have come up on the register because she called the manager, and the two of them started to speak in Spanish about whatever was coming up on the register each time they tried to ring up the peanuts. After about a half a minute, my neighbor, who does not speak Spanish, asked in English, “What’s wrong?” The manager ignored her and continued to to talk to the cashier in Spanish, gesturing at the price on the register and swiping his manager’s card a couple of times. This went on for another thirty seconds or so, and my neighbor, with some real exasperation in her voice, said, “Look, the can is marked $0.99.” The manager glanced at her and went back to speaking Spanish with the cashier. My neighbor repeated what she said about the price marked on the can, the rising anger in her voice making it clear that she would not allow herself to be so easily put off again. The manager stopped talking, said, “Okay.” Then he pushed some buttons on the register; my neighbor was charged $0.99; the cashier bagged my neighbor’s purchase and turned to begin ringing up the next customer.

Including that next person, there were three people on line ahead of me, and it became quite apparent as I watched them interact with the cashier, that the cashier spoke English pretty well. Just as she was finished ringing me up, I noticed that my neighbor was still standing near the register examining her receipt. She went up to the manager, pointed to her receipt and said, “Wait a minute! Are these peanuts supposed to be 3/$2.00?”

The manager answered, “Yes.”

“But that means,” my neighbor continued, “I should have been charged only $0.66 or $0.67 for the can I bought, right?”

“Well, you said you wanted me to charge you $0.99,” the manager responded. “So that’s what I charged you.”

At this point, my purchase was complete and I started walking towards the door. I wanted to stick around in case my neighbor needed any support, but I couldn’t. The last thing I heard as I left the store was my neighbor saying, “Listen, I want to be charged the right price,” and when I turned around, I saw the manager was walking with her back to the register, so I assumed he was going to refund her the $0.33 she’d been overcharged.

I walked home angry in a way I don’t think I have ever been angry before. I was, of course, indignant on my neighbor’s behalf. Since both the manager and the cashier clearly spoke English well enough, the initial conversation about the overcharge did not have to take place in Spanish, which had the effect of excluding my neighbor from knowing what was going on with her own purchase. More than that, though, I thought about the fact that this Bravo supermarket is replacing a Met Food that had been in the neighborhood, if I remember correctly, for nearly 30 years. In the twelve years that I shopped at that Met Food, I don’t think I saw a single person working there who was not bilingual. Yet, I also never saw store employees do what the Bravo employees did, exclude a customer from a conversation about her or his purchase by speaking a language the customer did not understand. I haven’t seen my neighbor since this happened, and so I don’t know what took place after I left the store. I do know, however, that I will be paying close attention, closer than I normally might, to how Bravo’s employees deal with the politics of language in this neighborhood they are trying to do business in, and this is new for me: that how someone uses her or his non-English, native language might be a factor in whether or not I decide to give that person my business.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

Reduce deficits: $138 billion in the first ten years. ($1.2 trillion in the second decade, although that’s not a precise number at all, just an estimate).
Costs: $940 billion in the first ten years.
Money spent making private insurance more affordable (with subsidies): $466 billion in ten years.
Money spent expanding Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP): $434 billion in ten years.
Money spent on small employer credit (making it more affordable for small employers to offer health insurance to their employees): $40 billion in ten years.

Currently uninsured Americans who will be insured: 32 million. (And the remaining uninsured people will in effect be getting low-cost catastrophic health care insurance, in exchange for the penalty they pay.)

So where does the money come from? $17 billion (over ten years) from people who refuse to buy insurance paying a penalty; $52 billion (over ten years) from businesses who choose to pay a penalty rather than provide coverage for employees; $32 billion (over ten years) from the “excise tax” on the most expensive insurance plans; I-can’t-find-the-number-but-it’ll-be-tens-of-billions-over-a-decade from extending the payroll tax to some currently untaxed income; and nearly 500 billion in savings from Medicare and Medicaid.

Democrats are also claiming that the bill “extends Medicare’s solvency by at least 9 years.” As far as I can judge, that’s not true; the savings are being spent on Health Care Reform, not on extending Medicare’s solvency. (This is the “double-counting” that Representative Ryan - and the CBO - have been talking about.)

It’s going to be a very close vote in the House (although Kucinich, surprisingly, is now going to vote for the bill).

So this bill will raise some taxes, and finds a lot of savings in current Medicare and Medicaid programs. In return, it extends health insurance coverage to millions of Americans, makes Medicaid and CHIP available to millions of currently non-covered Americans, and heavily regulates what insurance companies can do (so that abusive crap like this stops happening).

If you support this bill, please call your representative in the House and let them know.

Today the jury took just two hours to find Adrian Leason, Peter Murnane, and Sam Land not guilty of willful damage and burglary.

In April 2008, they went to the Waihopai spy base and destroyed one of the domes. Since then they have been very clear that they did damage the spy base, but they were not guilty of any crime. They had taken the action that they did to avert much greater harm, including the on-going war in Iraq.

For those interested in the exact legal details I recommend Brian Law. But it’s not the legal aspects of this that I’m celebrating. It’s that the Waihopai 3 maintained that they did it, and that they were right to do it, and the jury believed them.

So here’s something I don’t get: why is it that whenever people start talking about same-sex relations, members of the right instantly leap to bestiality? We all remember former Sen. Rick “Man On Dog” Santorum, R-Penn. Then there was Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and his box turtle lovin’. Now we have former Rep. J.D. Hayworth, R-Ariz., talking about horses.

“You see, the Massachusetts Supreme Court, when it started this move toward same-sex marriage, actually defined marriage — now get this — it defined marriage as simply, ‘the establishment of intimacy,’” Hayworth said. “Now how dangerous is that? I mean, I don’t mean to be absurd about it, but I guess I can make the point of absurdity with an absurd point — I guess that would mean if you really had affection for your horse, I guess you could marry your horse. It’s just the wrong way to go, and the only way to protect the institution of marriage is with that federal marriage amendment that I support.”

Now, look, J.D. — I get that you’re sexually attracted to horses. I’m sure you make regular visits to Tijuana, where you angrily complain that you came here for some hot man-on-horse action, and you don’t care that it’s just an urban legend. I’m sure that scene in Clerks II was oh-so-close to your dreams. And okay, I respect that — we all have our weird hang-ups.

But J.D., what are you and the horse going to talk about when you’re done? Hay? Galloping? The Kentucky Derby? And it’s going to be a pretty one-sided conversation, given that horses aren’t sapient, and can’t talk.

That’s sort of the difference between your sexual hang-up and homosexuality, J.D. You see, when a man loves a man, sure they can get their sweet lovin’ on. But afterward, they can talk about a whole panoply of topics, from the utter fabulousness of Johnny Weir to the upcoming baseball season to excitement about the new Iron Man II trailer to the idiocy of former Republican politicians. You know, just like men and women do.

You see, J.D., people who love other people — regardless of gender — love other people. It’s the “people” thing that’s important, J.D. You can love your horse all you want, but when you take it down to the local justice of the peace, and she asks your horse if it will love and cherish you ’til death do you part, the horse won’t answer. It will just stand there, bemused, as always. Indeed, there’s no way for you to find out if that horse is even interested in you or not.

Two men? Two women? A man and a woman? They can talk to each other. Laugh. Love. Yes, have sex. Find out if they’re right for each other, if they’re someone they want to be with for the rest of their lives. And then, if they both agree, they can mutually decide to pledge themselves to each other, come what may. That can never happen between you and your horse, J.D. And that’s why those of us who support your right to marry a man don’t support your right to marry a horse — and why the slippery slope you propose is all in your oversize muppet head.

Gonzo: I’m going to Bombay, India, to become a movie star!
Fozzie Bear: You don’t go to Bombay to become a movie star. You go where we’re going: Hollywood!
Gonzo: Sure, if you want to do it the easy way!

–The Muppet Movie¹

On twitter last month (I think it was last month; I find twitter-time difficult to reconcile with meatworld time), my friend Kip had an argument about art, effort, and transparency. Or that’s how I remember it, anyway; no doubt that’s all been filtered through my own biases.

Many — most — cartoonists and writers work hard to make their storytelling as transparent and effortless for the reader as they can. This is where “transparency” comes in: the prose (or cartooning) is a clear glass through which the reader observes the story. The clearer the glass, the better.

But what about people who make stained glass windows?

The folks Kip was arguing with — also friends of mine — argued that making readers work hard is pretentious bullshit. Kip agreed, I think, that clarity can be a virtue, but that a creator could reasonably decide to focus on other virtues as well.

There was an elephant in the room, which I can’t recall if anyone mentioned: Kip is the author of City of Roses, a wonderful, web-serialized urban fantasy novel. Kip’s writing emphasizes character, mood, freedom for Kip to explore his own considerable quirkiness, subjective perceptions, and setting. But transparent prose really isn’t what Kip’s about. Kip’s prose could, I think, fairly be described as stained glass. Here, for example, is Kip’s self-described “elevator pitch” for City of Roses:

Violence; violence, and power, in the context of yet somebody else walking up to the groaning boards of fantasy’s eternal wedding feast, still laden with the cold meats from Tolkien’s funeral, and cheekily joining everyone who’s trying to send the whole thing smashing to the ground just to hear the noise all that crockery will make. —But! Also: genderfuck, hearts broken cleanly and otherwise, the City of Portland, Spenser, those moments in pop songs when the bass and all of the drums except maybe a handclap suddenly drop out of the bridge leaving you hanging from a slender aching thread of melody waiting almost dreading the moment when the beat comes back, and the occasional bit of swordplay.

On the one hand, as a reader I gravitate towards clear-as-glass writers (for many years Anne Tyler was my favorite novelist; nowadays I might say Connie Willis.). If I can’t effortlessly understand the prose in a novel, there’s a good chance I’ll put it down.

But (otherhandwise), sometimes what you work for is more rewarding than what’s offered on a platter. There are cartoonists and writers you slow down for; you have to be attentive. It takes a lot more effort to read Dave McKean’s Cages than to read Y: The Last Man. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed reading Y — a funny adventure with cliffhanger endings like clockwork at the end of every chapter — but if you read it at all, you’re appreciating it as much as you ever will. Putting more effort than that into reading it won’t bring any reward and is probably missing the point. In contrast, Cages is a thicker, richer and more nourishing meal. More like a bunch of meals, because it’s worth going back and rereading a bunch of times. If you pay attention, it’ll be worth it, because there’s so much there.

I’ve reread episodes of City of Roses a bunch of times. I’d highly recommend it (first chapter starts here). But it’s not “relax, turn your brain off, and be entertained” urban fantasy. It’s very rewarding, but readers have to put in a bit of work and pay attention. Which means — like Gonzo becoming a movie star — it’s going to have a hard time finding the readership it deserves.

Of course, writing this has made me think of my own work, which falls very much on the “transparent” side of the divide. But, to tell you the truth, I sometimes feel guilty about that. My favorite comics often aren’t as transparent, or as easy reading, as my own comics tend to be. For now, I’m enjoying what I’m doing too much to change it; but someday I hope to experiment with making some stained glass.

1. Bombay seems like an odd choice for this joke. Wasn’t there a sizable movie industry in Bombay in the 1970s? Or am I confused?

The mouseover text is full of win, too.

Five: True, but parents have to die. It’s the only way children can come into their own.

–Battlestar Galactica, “Bastille Day”

When first I wrote about Caprica, I said it was “the story of two grieving fathers.”

I was wrong.

Oh, it’s an easy mistake to make. Daniel Greystone and Joseph Adama are two grieving fathers, both trying to find a way to hang on to their daughters — or perhaps, in Adama’s case, to free his daughter. Their initial contact, sealed by their mutual grief at the loss of their daughters and Adama’s wife in a terrorist attack, sets the stage for what is to come.

But Caprica is not about Daniel Greystone and Joseph Adama. Not really. No, Daniel and Joseph are merely players in a story being written by Zoe Greystone, with tremendous help from Lacey Rand, and with assistance from Clarice Willow, Amanda Greystone, and Tamara Adama. Two of those people — Zoe and Tamara — are dead. Three of them — Zoe, Lacey, and Tamara — are not yet adults.

And all of them are women.

It took some time for this to develop. Daniel did indeed try to save his daughter’s life by uploading her own creation — an avatar of herself, based on everything from brain scans to school records to internet logs — into a robot, a prototype Cylon, the only one he’s gotten to work. Daniel did indeed seek help from Joseph Adama, and his friends in the Ha’la’tha, the Tauron mafia, to steal technology from the Vergis Corporation, in order to try to get his daughter’s robot self working.

But Daniel wasn’t the prime mover in this drama. That was Zoe. She created her avatar, one that survived her death. Moreover, she created the program that allowed her to create the avatar. When the program was destroyed during Daniel’s attempt to upload her into a robot body, he was unable to duplicate her work. She was smarter than he was. She was the one who started the process that saved a part of her.

And when she realized that the transfer did work? That she was uploaded into a Cylon body? Well, she didn’t bother to mention it to the father of her creator — her sister, herself. Daniel had no claim on Zoe. Zoe was her own person. And throughout the series, she has hidden in plain sight, not so much as hinting that she exists, manipulating things behind the scenes — even luring a young technician working on her robot body into some cyber dates, not just because she thinks he’s cute — though she does — but in order to try to manipulate him into setting her robot self free, so she can escape Caprica and make it to Gemenon, where her human twin was heading before her human twin’s boyfriend blew up a train. The line she ultimately uses to snare the technician? It’s all about how trees should be coded in the virtual world.

Both Zoes’ friend, Lacey, is the only other person who knows Zoe’s avatar survives. And Lacey herself is not above manipulating the world to her whim. She is just a teenager, just a girl in a school, one with a headmaster who she mistrusts. But she knows the terrorist organization that Zoe orbited, and she’s slowly seducing a fellow teen, one deeper into the S.T.O. that she, into helping her to ship the Zoe robot to Gemenon. Is she attracted to him? Perhaps — but like Avatar Zoe, she’s using him, first and foremost.

Zoe and Lacey are the prime movers, but they are not the only ones. Amanda Greystone — Zoe’s mom, Daniel’s wife — is dancing on the razor’s edge between reality and unreality. Just like the rest of the Twelve Colonies, I suppose, only Amanda’s scars run deeper than just a love of virtual reality. It is Amanda’s sudden declaration at a memorial service that her daughter, Zoe, was a terrorist sympathizer — and perhaps, a terrorist — that causes a public uproar against her husband’s organization, and pushes him down a path where manufacturing more Cylons seems the only way to save his company.

Sister Clarice Willow, the headmaster of Zoe and Lacey’s school, is marvelously broken, possibly drug addicted, married into a group family that mistrusts her (save for two husbands) — and fanatically, hopelessly faithful that The One True God has a Plan. She is willing to manipulate Amanda to get the program Zoe was working on, because she believes that program is the key to eternal life for all people — the key to the very gates of heaven.

And Tamara Adama — she is lost in the virtual world, an imperfect copy of Joseph Adama’s daughter, created using the same program that created Zoe’s duplicate. She has ended up living her life in a videogame that resembles a cross between Grand Theft Auto and Worlds of Warcraft– only she’s the only character in the game who can’t die. And though she first entered the virtual world blindly, unsure of what she was or where she was, now she has become something more — something able to bend the rules of the game.

These are the leading characters of Caprica — these five women. Oh, the show does not condescend to men. Daniel is allowed his battle for his company and his search to figure out what makes the one working Cylon prototype work, when none of the others will. Joseph is allowed to try to salvage his relationship with his son, William, and to search for his daughter in the virtual world, where she is said to be. Sam Adama — Joseph’s brother — is allowed to be a Ha’la’tha enforcer who’s quietly showing his nephew the business, and coming home to a husband who worries about him. And these stories are real and deep and important.

But Daniel and Joseph are reacting to the world around them. Zoe, Lacey, Amanda, Clarice, Tamara? They’re acting. They’re the one calling the tune. Daniel and Joseph are dancing.

It’s rather bracing to see. Battlestar Galactica had its share of strong female characters — President Roslin, Kara Thrace, Athena, Three, Six — but this is something more. It’s sad, but it’s rather startling to see in the far-too-male world of science fiction television. And it’s incredibly welcome. Because these characters’ actions are believable, are entertaining, are contradictory and stupid and brilliant and right and wrong in just the way real humans behave. Caprica is not a show about fathers. And it is not merely a show about mothers and daughters and friends. It is a great show about mothers and daughters and friends — and fathers too.

1. I liked this post by John Corvino at the Indie Gay Forum, categorizing the “that’s not the definition of marriage” argument against equal marriage rights into four categories.
2. Howard Stern on Gabourey Sidibe: hard facts
3. Ron Unz at The American Conservative (obviously a liberal hippie think tank) debunks claims of “an illegal alien crime wave.”
4. Crack cocaine sentencing disparity will soon be “One-Fifth As Racist As It Used To Be“
5. Nathan Newman argues that progressives actually got some significant policy wins in Obama’s first year.
6. Cell phones, Facebook, and the war on loneliness
7. Democrats Who Oppose Student Loan Reform Love Banks More Than They Care About Students

* * *

Alas, there’s going to be an outage for a few hours on Sunday while the server undergoes updates.

Shortly after I took office [in 1992 as chair of NYU's History Department], a second-year graduate student came by. A former professional ballerina interested in Eastern Europe, she had been encouraged to work with me. I was not teaching that semester, so could have advised her to return another time. Instead, I invited her in. After a closed-door discussion of Hungarian economic reforms, I suggested a course of independent study—beginning the following evening at a local restaurant. A few sessions later, in a fit of bravado, I invited her to the premiere of Oleanna—David Mamet’s lame dramatization of sexual harassment on a college campus.

How to explain such self-destructive behavior? What delusional universe was mine, to suppose that I alone could pass untouched by the punitive prudery of the hour—that the bell of sexual correctness would not toll for me? I knew my Foucault as well as anyone and was familiar with Firestone, Millett, Brownmiller, Faludi, e tutte quante. To say that the girl had irresistible eyes and that my intentions were…unclear would avail me nothing. My excuse? Please Sir, I’m from the ’60s.

***

[T]he anxieties of contemporary sexual relations offer occasional comic relief. When I was Humanities dean at NYU, a promising young professor was accused of improper advances by a graduate student in his department. He had apparently followed her into a supply closet and declared his feelings. Confronted, the professor confessed all, begging me not to tell his wife. My sympathies were divided: the young man had behaved foolishly, but there was no question of intimidation nor had he offered to trade grades for favors. All the same, he was censured. Indeed, his career was ruined—the department later denied him tenure because no women would take his courses. Meanwhile, his “victim” was offered the usual counseling.

Some years later, I was called to the Office of the University Lawyer. Would I serve as a witness for the defense in a case against NYU being brought by that same young woman? Note, the lawyer warned me: “she” is really a “he” and is suing the university for failing to take seriously “her” needs as a transvestite. We shall fight the case but must not be thought insensitive.

So I appeared in Manhattan Supreme Court to explain the complexities of academic harassment to a bemused jury of plumbers and housewives. The student’s lawyer pressed hard: “Were you not prejudiced against my client because of her transgendered identity preference?” “I don’t see how I could have been,” I replied. “I thought she was a woman—isn’t that what she wanted me to think?” The university won the case.

***

Here as in so many other arenas, we have taken the ’60s altogether too seriously. Sexuality (or gender) is just as distorting when we fixate upon it as when we deny it. Substituting gender (or “race” or “ethnicity” or “me”) for social class or income category could only have occurred to people for whom politics was a recreational avocation, a projection of self onto the world at large.

Why should everything be about “me”? Are my fixations of significance to the Republic? Do my particular needs by definition speak to broader concerns? What on earth does it mean to say that “the personal is political”? If everything is “political,” then nothing is. I am reminded of Gertrude Stein’s Oxford lecture on contemporary literature. “What about the woman question?” someone asked. Stein’s reply should be emblazoned on every college notice board from Boston to Berkeley: “Not everything can be about everything.”

Full disclosure: One reason this piece engages me as much as it does, is that I have the same response as Judt to the question he poses at the end of his post:

So how did I elude the harassment police, who surely were on my tail as I surreptitiously dated my bright-eyed ballerina?

Except in my case she was a dark-haired and compellingly dark-eyed woman from Iran. And I have made the answer my title.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

The killers showed no mercy: They didn’t spare women and children, or even a 4-day-old baby, from their machetes. On Monday, Nigerian women wailed in the streets as a dump truck carried dozens of bodies past burned-out homes toward a mass grave.

Rubber-gloved workers pulled ever-smaller bodies from the dump truck and tossed them into the mass grave. A crowd began singing a hymn with the refrain, “Jesus said I am the way to heaven.” As the grave filled, the grieving crowd sang: “Jesus, show me the way.”

At least 200 people, most of them Christians, were slaughtered on Sunday, according to residents, aid groups and journalists. The local government gave a figure more than twice that amount, but offered no casualty list or other information to substantiate it.

An Associated Press reporter counted 61 corpses, 32 of them children, being buried in the mass grave in the village of Dogo Nahawa on Monday. Other victims would be buried elsewhere. At a local morgue the bodies of children, including a diaper-clad toddler, were tangled together. One appeared to have been scalped. Others had severed hands and feet.

Religious violence is not a new thing. Some of the most enduring images I have from my Jewish education are descriptions of the violence that has been perpetrated for centuries against Jews by Romans, Greeks, Christians and, though perhaps less often, Muslims. One subtext of those lessons was that the Jews, because we were so steadfast in our religious beliefs, because we refused to assimilate, have been made to suffer religious persecution more than any other group; and, indeed, when I was younger, I often experienced real cognitive dissonance when I heard about religious violence that did not involve Jews. Over time, as my vision of the world and my place in it widened, that dissonance disappeared. I came to understand as well that religion was sometimes merely the justifying veneer that one group would place over the violence they wanted to do to another, a way of hiding their more political and material motivation.

The more I heard and read about religious violence, the more familiar the scripting of it became–and it is remarkable how similar the scripts are; how carefully scripted the incitements to violence are, if not the violence itself, regardless of the religious denominations involved–and, eventually, the stories I would hear left me feeling more numb than anything else. Yes, it was horrible that people were killed, but, I would think, as long as religion contained within it the possibility for someone to decide that he or she is following the one true path and that all those not on that path are morally and spiritually inferior and therefore suspect, then the potential for religious violence inhered in religion, and there was no escaping it.

I continue to believe that, I suppose, which is why I tend not to write about religious violence as such: I just don’t think there is all that much to say, or, rather, that I have much to say that would be useful. Still, this story, which has also been reported on Yahoo! News and other news outlets–the New York Times puts the death toll at 500–brought me up short. In part, this is because I have a very close friend from Nigeria, and she has talked often about the tension between Muslims and Christians in her country. Indeed, this massacre is said to have been retaliation for a similar slaughter of Muslims perpetrated by Christians some time ago, and I can even imagine, from the way in which she talks about it, that my friend might have been among those Muslim-killing Christians had she been in the country and the circumstances been “right.” I feel, in other words, a personal connection to this story that I have rarely felt, not least because my friend might have been among those killed whether or not she had participated in the prior massacre.

I did not know about how deeply my friend’s fear, mistrust, and hatred of the Muslims in Nigeria ran until after our friendship was well-established. She says she feels this way only about Nigerian Muslims, not about people who follow Islam in general, and I believe her, and she tells stories about her own experiences in Nigeria and the experiences of the people she knows to justify herself. The fact that she makes this distinction, of course, suggests that the issues at stake are not really religious, but the fact that they are expressed religiously–in terms of spirituality and morality and the one true path to God–makes it hard, even just between the two of us, to get at what those stakes really are; and then I think about the way our invasion of Iraq and ousting of Saddam Hussein made space for the Sunni and Shia to go at each other’s throats–check out this NPR interview with Deborah Amos about her new book, Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East–and even the Israeli-Palestinian struggle over the status of Jerusalem, which is so often played out in religious terms. And when I think about how may more examples I could list, I cannot help but feel that maybe it’s all, always, political; maybe the god or gods all these people fight over is just a way of not having to take responsibility for their own politics, their own desire for power, their own inability to share, their own fear of everything that makes them vulnerable; maybe the need to make your religion the only true one is nothing more than fear and cowardice, and we all know how thin the line is between the coward who cowers and the coward who becomes a bully.

It has been a very long time, since I was an undergraduate in fact, that I have known personally someone who could place her or himself so easily, so firmly, so absolutely, on one side of this kind of divide and so thoroughly forget that the other side is also inhabited by people; and yet even as I write that, it would be dishonest of me not to own up to the fact that I too once stood with Israel, as a Jew, in strictly religious terms, in a way that denied the humanity of the other side.

That we all have this capacity within us is by now a cliche, but how do you learn to accept that impulse in someone who has become your friend? Because if you cannot accept it–which is not the same thing as approving of it, or allowing it to go unchallenged–then there can no longer be a real friendship. This is the question that I am confronting.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

For me, this was the most exciting news all week. The Magnes Zionist describes the scene:

Around five thousand demonstrators protested the eviction of Arab families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem and the settlement there of rightwing Jewish extremists. It was the largest Sheikh Jarrah protest and the largest joint Israeli-Palestinian protest so far.

The protest was composed of an interesting mix – Jewish leftwing activists, mostly (but not entirely) young; the Zionist left Meretz-Peace Now crowd, mostly (and entirely) old; Israeli Palestinian activists, and representatives of the evicted families. There were Israeli singers and a Palestinian hip-hop group from Shuafat. Many of the speeches were given in Arabic, both Jerusalem colloquial and standard, and judging from the crowd, more of the younger Israeli Jewish activists understood the speeches than the older generation. The “drummers” and the clowns were there in full force – these are activists who play the drum and dress up as clowns in an attempt both to lighten up the protest, and to drive home the point of non-violent protest.

Sara Benninga’s speech at the protest, “There is a New Left in Town,” is well worth reading in whole (it’s not very long). But here’s a bit of it:

[The New Left] is a partnership between Palestinians, who understand the occupation will not be defeated by missiles and bombs, and Israelis, who understand that the Palestinian struggle is their struggle.

The new Left joins hands with Palestinians in a cloud of tear gas at Bil’in and gets beaten up together with them by settlers at the South Hebron Mountain.

This Left stands by refugees and labor migrants in Tel Aviv and fights against the Wisconsin Plan.

The new Left is us — all of us!

Everyone who came here tonight. Everyone who dared cross the imaginary line between West and East Jerusalem, despite the threats and intimidation.

We are all the new Left that is emerging in Israel and Palestine.

We are not fighting for a peace agreement. We are fighting for justice. But we believe that injustice is the main obstacle to peace.

More: The website of the Sheikh Jarrah protesters is here.

Rabbi Brian attended the protest and reports: 5,000 Protest in Sheikh Jarah

News accounts: the JPost story, Haaretz, and Al Jazeera.

Some photos on Flickr.

Nisi and Cynthia are the authors of Writing the Other, a practical text aimed at helping authors write characters unlike them. The book is an excellent teaching tool, full of practical advice, and supplemented with exercises. VanderMeer writes:

I love Writing the Other because it espouses in a very specific and detailed way what I’ve always thought about writing characters, and even about writing minor characters: you need to fully inhabit them. Which is to say, if your characters aren’t going to just be carbon copies of you and your own experience of the world, you need to be able to see clearly through other people’s eyes.

Ward and Shawl teach workshops on the subject, though I haven’t yet had the privilege of taking one. The second best thing is reading what these smart women have to say.

Check out Nisi and Cynthia’s bios, and read their first post on The Unmarked State.

(Comments at Big Other or Booklife Now)

But Foley’s support of victims of rape and abuse isn’t stopping with money. He’s also donating his time as an online counselor for RAINN:

They have my first name when they sign in. There are times when the [screen] goes dead. Some women understandably may not want to talk to a man. But for the young lady I talked to, I think she appreciated my perspective. I told her I have four children, including a daughter about her age. She was very worried about what her parents might think. In those cases you have to continually reassure victims that they are victims. We let them know how brave it is for them to reach out for help.

It would be easy for Foley to live in comfort, to take the proceeds from his books and invest them in himself, to use his fame as a wrestler to make his life easy. Instead, he drives a 2002 minivan because it works (and because, he says, it helps teach his kids that nice things aren’t everything), and he donates his time and money to helping make the world a better place for victims of sexual abuse.

I don’t know about you, but I think Mick Foley has figured out what this whole life thing is supposed to be about.

There were moments–long moments–during the Iraq war when I had my doubts. Even deep doubts. Frankly, I couldn’t quite imagine any venture requiring trust with Arabs turning out especially well. This is, you will say, my prejudice. But some prejudices are built on real facts, and history generally proves me right. Go ahead, prove me wrong.

There are racist bigots who have argued that Jews cannot be trusted, because they’re inherently deceitful people. These racist bigots are rightly called anti-Semites, and they are despised by anyone with a functioning brain.

Marty Peretz just argued that Arabs can’t be trusted, because they’re inherently deceitful people. He’s a racist bigot, and he should be despised by anyone with a functioning brain.

This is not new. And it should not be ignored. Marty Peretz is a flaming racist douchebag. He views Arabs as less human than the rest of humanity. He is not merely prejudiced. He is proudly so.

His opinions are of no more merit than those of David Duke. And no decent human should think otherwise.