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.

Via Chris Bodenner

(Click on the image for a bigger size).

Johnson’s ex-girlfriend told the NYPD and a Family Court referee that she was injured, afraid and subject to intimidation.

“He’s like a government official, and I have problems with even calling the police because the state troopers kept calling and harassing me to drop the charges, and I wouldn’t,” she told the referee in November.

After which, it appears, nobody lifted a finger to help the accuser. City cops, tasked with serving an order of protection on Johnson, proved unable to do so, even though the towering 6-foot-7 aide was by the governor’s side at every public appearance.

The governor’s schedule is public information. Anybody could have served the papers.

The judge does not appear to have passed along the report that men with guns from a state agency were supposedly harassing a victim who appeared in her court.

The state police appear to have acted more like a private intimidation force than a professional law enforcement agency. And members of Paterson’s immediate political staff - and, perhaps, the governor - may have known all of what was going on, but tried to spin or dissolve the complaint rather than face it head-on.

Bad business all around.

In a city where attacks between family members or intimate partners are an epidemic - the NYPD responds to some 650 domestic violence calls every day - it chills the blood to read about how one high-profile encounter was botched.

It does, and not just because this one woman was failed. It chills the blood because it begs the question, how many more victims of domestic violence are being failed?

Obviously, most victims of domestic abuse are not going to be harassed by the Governor of their state. But the other failures — the lack of follow-through, the judge who was silent, the general nonchalance about serving papers — these are failures that are systemic, and general. If city police can’t be bothered to serve papers on a man traveling with the Governor, whose schedule is public, how many other abusers is the NYPD failing to serve?

Moreover, this case is precisely why so many victims of domestic violence choose not to come forward. No, most women who are abused are not going to be visited by state troopers. But many will be pressured by family and friends who are eager to minimize the deeds of the abuser, and eager to get all the unpleasantness behind them. While this is a case of that writ large, Paterson’s actions in this are simply the actions of someone with power trying to get all the unpleasantness swept away, so that his friend can move on with his life — because hey, the guy just made a mistake. Why wreck his life, right?

MRA types are fond of saying that orders of protection are given freely and capriciously. And no doubt, cases can be found where that is true. But this case shows the reality of orders of protection — the fact that victims all too often struggle just to get that piece of paper that maybe, maybe, will help them avoid further abuse. Questionable orders of protection can be quashed. Abuse cannot be so easily undone. And so I’d much rather a system that makes a mistake that can be remedied than one that refuses to take domestic violence seriously. Unfortunately, the latter appears to be the system in place in New York.

I’ve put the entire speech after the break (it’s not long). So what do folks think?

My view is that this is a long, long way from what I’d really like, which is a French-style health care system. But that wasn’t an option on the table. Neither was “Medicare for all,” aka single-payer health care, which is what most of the lefties I know want.

But even though it’s not what we want, it’s a large improvement over the status quo. It would set up systems that could “bend the cost curve” down; it would get a hell of a lot more people covered; and it would make it possible for nearly all Americans, including those with pre-existing conditions, to get health insurance coverage.

So if the Democrats do pass this plan, that will do a lot to make them seem other than worthless. On the other hand, if the Democrats don’t manage to pass health care reform, then I barely see any point in supporting them at all. It’ll be time to rejoin the Green Party, I guess.

President Obama’s speech:

Good afternoon. We began our push to reform health insurance last March with the doctors and nurses who know the system best, and so it is fitting to be joined by all of you as we bring this journey to a close.

Last Thursday, I spent seven hours at a summit where Democrats and Republicans engaged in a public and substantive discussion about health care. This meeting capped off a debate that began with a similar summit nearly one year ago. Since then, every idea has been put on the table. Every argument has been made. Everything there is to say about health care has been said and just about everyone has said it. So now is the time to make a decision about how to finally reform health care so that it works, not just for the insurance companies, but for America’s families and businesses.

Where both sides say they agree is that the status quo is not working for the American people. Health insurance is becoming more expensive by the day. Families can’t afford it. Businesses can’t afford it. The federal government can’t afford it. Smaller businesses and individuals who don’t get coverage at work are squeezed especially hard. And insurance companies freely ration health care based on who’s sick and who’s healthy; who can pay and who can’t.

Democrats and Republicans agree that this is a serious problem for America. And we agree that if we do nothing – if we throw up our hands and walk away – it’s a problem that will only grow worse. More Americans will lose their family’s health insurance if they switch jobs or lose their job. More small businesses will be forced to choose between health care and hiring. More insurance companies will deny people coverage who have preexisting conditions, or drop people’s coverage when they get sick and need it most. And the rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid will sink our government deeper and deeper into debt. On all of this we agree.

So the question is, what do we do about it?

On one end of the spectrum, there are some who have suggested scrapping our system of private insurance and replacing it with government-run health care. Though many other countries have such a system, in America it would be neither practical nor realistic.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are those, including most Republicans in Congress, who believe the answer is to loosen regulations on the insurance industry – whether it’s state consumer protections or minimum standards for the kind of insurance they can sell. I disagree with that approach. I’m concerned that this would only give the insurance industry even freer rein to raise premiums and deny care.

I don’t believe we should give government bureaucrats or insurance company bureaucrats more control over health care in America. I believe it’s time to give the American people more control over their own health insurance. I don’t believe we can afford to leave life-and-death decisions about health care to the discretion of insurance company executives alone. I believe that doctors and nurses like the ones in this room should be free to decide what’s best for their patients.

The proposal I’ve put forward gives Americans more control over their health care by holding insurance companies more accountable. It builds on the current system where most Americans get their health insurance from their employer. If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Because I can tell you that as the father of two young girls, I wouldn’t want any plan that interferes with the relationship between a family and their doctor.

Essentially, my proposal would change three things about the current health care system:

First, it would end the worst practices of insurance companies. No longer would they be able to deny your coverage because of a pre-existing condition. No longer would they be able to drop your coverage because you got sick. No longer would they be able to force you to pay unlimited amounts of money out of your own pocket. No longer would they be able to arbitrarily and massively raise premiums like Anthem Blue Cross recently tried to do in California. Those practices would end.

Second, my proposal would give uninsured individuals and small business owners the same kind of choice of private health insurance that Members of Congress get for themselves. Because if it’s good enough for Members of Congress, it’s good enough for the people who pay their salaries. The reason federal employees get a good deal on health insurance is that we all participate in an insurance marketplace where insurance companies give better rates and coverage because we give them more customers. This is an idea that many Republicans have embraced in the past. And my proposal says that if you still can’t afford the insurance in this new marketplace, we will offer you tax credits to do so – tax credits that add up to the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history. After all, the wealthiest among us can already buy the best insurance there is, and the least well-off are able to get coverage through Medicaid. But it’s the middle-class that gets squeezed, and that’s who we have to help.

Now, it’s true that all of this will cost money – about $100 billion per year. But most of this comes from the nearly $2 trillion a year that America already spends on health care. It’s just that right now, a lot of that money is being wasted or spent badly. With this plan, we’re going to make sure the dollars we spend go toward making insurance more affordable and more secure. We’re also going to eliminate wasteful taxpayer subsidies that currently go to insurance and pharmaceutical companies, set a new fee on insurance companies that stand to gain as millions of Americans are able to buy insurance, and make sure the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share of Medicare.

The bottom line is, our proposal is paid for. And all new money generated in this plan would go back to small businesses and middle-class families who can’t afford health insurance. It would lower prescription drug prices for seniors. And it would help train new doctors and nurses to provide care for American families.

Finally, my proposal would bring down the cost of health care for millions – families, businesses, and the federal government. We have now incorporated most of the serious ideas from across the political spectrum about how to contain the rising cost of health care – ideas that go after the waste and abuse in our system, especially in programs like Medicare. But we do this while protecting Medicare benefits, and extending the financial stability of the program by nearly a decade.

Our cost-cutting measures mirror most of the proposals in the current Senate bill, which reduces most people’s premiums and brings down our deficit by up to $1 trillion over the next two decades. And those aren’t my numbers – they are the savings determined by the CBO, which is the Washington acronym for the nonpartisan, independent referee of Congress.

So this is our proposal. This is where we’ve ended up. It’s an approach that has been debated and changed and I believe improved over the last year. It incorporates the best ideas from Democrats and Republicans – including some of the ideas that Republicans offered during the health care summit, like funding state grants on medical malpractice reform and curbing waste, fraud, and abuse in the health care system. My proposal also gets rid of many of the provisions that had no place in health care reform – provisions that were more about winning individual votes in Congress than improving health care for all Americans.

Now, despite all that we agree on and all the Republican ideas we’ve incorporated, many Republicans in Congress just have a fundamental disagreement over whether we should have more or less oversight of insurance companies. And if they truly believe that less regulation would lead to higher quality, more affordable health insurance, then they should vote against the proposal I’ve put forward.

Some also believe that we should instead pursue a piecemeal approach to health insurance reform, where we just tinker around the edges of this challenge for the next few years. Even those who acknowledge the problem of the uninsured say that we can’t afford to help them – which is why the Republican proposal only covers three million uninsured Americans while we cover over 31 million. But the problem with that approach is that unless everyone has access to affordable coverage, you can’t prevent insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions; you can’t limit the amount families are forced to pay out of their own pockets; and you don’t do anything about the fact that taxpayers end up subsidizing the uninsured when they’re forced to go to the Emergency Room for care. The fact is, health reform only works if you take care of all these problems at once.

Both during and after last week’s summit, Republicans in Congress insisted that the only acceptable course on health care reform is to start over. But given these honest and substantial differences between the parties about the need to regulate the insurance industry and the need to help millions of middle-class families get insurance, I do not see how another year of negotiations would help. Moreover, the insurance companies aren’t starting over. They are continuing to raise premiums and deny coverage as we speak. For us to start over now could simply lead to delay that could last for another decade or even more. The American people, and the U.S. economy, just can’t wait that long.

So, no matter which approach you favor, I believe the United States Congress owes the American people a final vote on health care reform. We have debated this issue thoroughly, not just for a year, but for decades. Reform has already passed the House with a majority. It has already passed the Senate with a supermajority of sixty votes. And now it deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote that was cast on welfare reform, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, COBRA health coverage for the unemployed, and both Bush tax cuts – all of which had to pass Congress with nothing more than a simple majority.

I have therefore asked leaders in both of Houses of Congress to finish their work and schedule a vote in the next few weeks. From now until then, I will do everything in my power to make the case for reform. And I urge every American who wants this reform to make their voice heard as well – every family, every business owner, every patient, every doctor, every nurse.

This has been a long and wrenching debate. It has stoked great passions among the American people and their representatives. And that is because health care is a difficult issue. It is a complicated issue. As all of you know from experience, health care can literally be an issue of life or death. As a result, it easily lends itself to demagoguery and political gamesmanship; misrepresentation and misunderstanding.

But that’s not an excuse for those of us who were sent here to lead to just walk away. We can’t just give up because the politics are hard. I know there’s a fascination, bordering on obsession, in the media and in this town about what passing health insurance reform would mean for the next election and the one after that. Well, I’ll leave others to sift through the politics. Because that’s not what this is about. That’s not why we’re here.

This is about what reform would mean for the mother with breast cancer whose insurance company will finally have to pay for her chemotherapy. This is about what reform would mean for the small business owner who will no longer have to choose between hiring more workers or offering coverage to the employees she has. This is about what reform would mean for the middle-class family who will be able to afford health insurance for the very first time in their lives.

And this is about what reform would mean for all those men and women I’ve met over the last few years who’ve been brave enough to share their stories. When we started our push for reform last year, I talked about a young mother in Wisconsin named Laura Klitzka [KLITZ kah]. She has two young children. She thought she had beaten her breast cancer but then later discovered it spread to her bones. She and her husband were working – and had insurance – but their medical bills still landed them in debt. And now she spends time worrying about that debt when all she wants to do is spend time with her children and focus on getting well.

This should not happen in the United States of America. And it doesn’t have to. In the end, that’s what this debate is about – it’s about the kind of country we want to be. It’s about the millions of lives that would be touched and in some cases saved by making private health insurance more secure and more affordable.

At stake right now is not just our ability to solve this problem, but our ability to solve any problem. The American people want to know if it’s still possible for Washington to look out for their interests and their future. They are waiting for us to act. They are waiting for us to lead. And as long as I hold this office, I intend to provide that leadership. I don’t know how this plays politically, but I know it’s right. And so I ask Congress to finish its work, and I look forward to signing this reform into law. Thank you.

1. I say “Democrats” because it’s clear that not one Republican will vote for the bill.

The writer behind Swift was Al Weisel. And sadly, Al Weisel has died:

Al was on his way to his father’s funeral in VA when he suffered 2 aortic aneurysms, a leaky aortic valve and an aortic artery dissection from his heart to his pelvis. He had 3 major surgeries within 24 hours and sometime during those surgeries also suffered a severe stroke.

I didn’t know Al personally, only through his writing. But his writing was superlative, the sort of satire his cognomen’s namesake would have heartily approved. My heart and thoughts are with the Weisel family, which is having to face far too much loss in too short a time.

• A Tough Patron and an Old Ideology Give Women a Lift in Bulgarian Politics, by Dan Bilefsky, The New York Times: What’s most interesting in this article about how Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko M. Borisov has been appointing women to political offices are the explanations people give for why he is doing so and why women are needed in politics. Boiko says, for example, “Women are more diligent than men, and they don’t take long lunches or got to the bar,” and also, “Women have stronger characters than men because when they say no they mean no, and they are less corruptible.” Others suggest that women are less corruptible because they have more to lose, and others talk about the fact that while Bulgaria “never had a feminist movement” but that during “Communism women in Bulgaria were represented in almost every walk of life, from plant managers to medicine.”
• An interesting piece in The Lede about the politics behind Iran’s capture and the televised confession of Abdolmalek Rigi, leader of Jundallah, a militant group that claims to be defending Sunni Muslims in Iran’s southeast and has killed hundreds of Iranian soldiers and civilians since 2003. For some related articles in the news try here, here and here.
• In I Was the One Reading Andrew Marvell. You Were . . ., also in the Times, Alan Feuer turns some of the “Missed Connections” postings on newyork.craigslist.org into found poems.
• I appreciated “Thoughts on the ‘hookup culture,’ or what I learned from my high school diary, a guest post on Feministe by Nona Willis Aronowitz. One of my favorite bits: “We need to admit as a culture that teens are sexual beings, and that more often than not, sexual maturity has a completely different timeline than emotional maturity.”
• Before I became a translator, I was working on what might have become a book exploring male heterosexuality and pornography, of course, was one of the things I was researching. At the time, I was very disappointed at the narrowness and often impoverished nature of the discourse I found not only about the representation of men in heterosexual video pornography (which was what I was looking at) but also in pornography that was touted as progressive and even feminist. Perhaps one day I will return to that project, but in the mean time I have been enjoying Male Submission Art, the mission of which is to “showcase beautiful imagery where men and other male-identified people are submissive subjects. We aim to challenge stereotypes of the ‘pathetic’ submissive man.” The images are often very cool, and what I like about the analysis is that its core tenet seems to be that for a man to “submit” (whatever that word might mean in any given context) is not, by definition, for him to unman himself or to be unmanned by the one he is submitting to (whatever to “unman” might mean in any given context). Leaving aside the question of whether the particular sexuality expressed by the site is one’s cup of tea or not, it is–for me, anyway–a new, interesting and interestingly subversive way of trying to transform what we mean when we say the words “manhood” or “masculinity.”
• It’s odd, and maybe a bit arrogant sounding, to include something that I’ve written in this list, but I’ve recently been putting together my application for promotion to full professor, which involved going through the two books of translations that I’ve published. As I did so, I was reminded of how wonderful a poet Saadi was. (One of these days I have to add my work to the Wikipdedia entry on him.) So these words may be mine, but they are someone else’s work. It’s from Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan:

The best thing for an ignorant man is to be silent, and if he understands that, and practices it, he will no longer be ignorant.

If the learning you possess is less than perfect,
keep your tongue tucked safely in your mouth.
Empty words disgrace the one who speaks them,
like serving a walnut shell without a nut.
A fool was trying hard to teach his ass
to talk. A wise man watching him observed,
“Aren’t you afraid of what they’ll say
when they find out what you’re doing? This beast
will never learn the trick of human speech.
Better you should learn the gift of silence.”
A man who does not think before he speaks
will almost always use the words foolishly.
If you will not take the time a wise man takes
to speak wisely, practice an animal’s silence.

• The Year of the Drone: A blog with an interactive map and analysis of US drone attacks in Pakistan.
• Ethics and Aesthetics: An brief, interesting post by Malachi Black on The Best American Poetry.

First, we had former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a rising star in the Democratic Party nationally who ended up having to resign when it turned out he was soliciting prostitutes the way some people order pizza. That might have been forgivable, had 1) Prostitution been legal, 2) Spitzer not made his mark as a prosecutor by going after prostitution, or 3) Spitzer not been caught moving enough money around to spend on prostitutes that it drew the attention of bank regulators.

Spitzer ultimately wasn’t prosecuted, but he was forced from office ignominiously, and in his place New Yorkers got Gov. David Paterson, who immediately announced that he had had affairs in his lifetime. Okay, well, that’s not good. But points for honesty. And surely, surely, Paterson would keep himself on the straight-and-narrow after seeing what happened to his predecessor.

Or, you know, he might decide instead to obstruct justice in a domestic violence case:

Gov. David A. Paterson personally directed two state employees to contact the woman who had accused his close aide of assaulting her, according to two people with direct knowledge of the governor’s actions.

Mr. Paterson instructed his press secretary, Marissa Shorenstein, to ask the woman to publicly describe the episode as nonviolent, according to a third person, who was briefed on the matter. That description would contradict the woman’s accounts to the police and in court.

Mr. Paterson also enlisted another state employee, Deneane Brown, a friend of both the governor and the accuser, to make contact with the woman before she was due in court to finalize an order of protection against the aide, David W. Johnson, the two people with direct knowledge said. Ms. Brown, an employee of the Division of Housing and Community Renewal, reached out to the woman on more than one occasion over a period of several days and arranged a phone call between the governor and the woman, Mr. Johnson’s companion.

After the calls from Ms. Brown and the conversation with the governor, the woman failed to appear for the court hearing on Feb. 8, and the case was dropped.

It was probably a minor issue, though. MRAs are always telling me that you can get an order of protection for any reason at all. I’m sure she was just mad that the stunning floral bouquet that her charming boyfriend gave her had only seventeen roses in it. I mean, surely, she didn’t have a good reason to get this order, right?

Mr. Johnson’s girlfriend had accused him of choking her, smashing her into a mirrored dresser and preventing her from calling for help during a Halloween altercation in the Bronx apartment they shared.

Oh. Um…well. That’s…a pretty damn good reason, actually.

So to recap: a woman is assaulted, goes to the police, and begins the work of getting an order of protection. The Governor of New York — the Governor of New York — uses his aides to put pressure on her to drop the case, because the assailant is on his staff.

Frankly, as someone who cares about women’s rights, I’d rather have the guy who just liked sex with prostitutes.

But of course, Paterson is blameless in this. I mean, he didn’t know that the attack was as severe as it was.

Mr. Paterson has stated that he was unaware of the details of the case until The Times reported them, and has said he did nothing improper.

See? He had no way of knowing that the case involved someone slamming someone’s face into a dresser. And no way of finding out. Which is why he immediately got mixed up in the case, because…uh…the woman was probably lying.

Okay, actually, that’s not a very good excuse.

Paterson has already announced he won’t stand for election in the fall. If today’s allegations are true, then that doesn’t go far enough. Like his predecessor, Paterson should resign, before the day is out. Paterson injected himself into a criminal case on the side of an assailant. At best, he did so recklessly, assuming that the — again — criminal case was not so serious as it really was. At worst, he did so with malice, seeking to get the exact result he did — a woman who, faced with pressure from the office of the governor, gave up on her criminal case because she saw more pain going forward with it than any relief justice could give her.

Either way, Paterson has demonstrated that he is unfit to serve as Governor of New York. Maybe Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch can do better than the two moral lightweights to precede him this term. He certainly can’t do much worse.