May I Please Have Your Job? Because, Unlike You, I Would Not Suck At It, And I'm Also Not A Total Sexist Asshole?

It's not possible. It is just not possible that, twice in one week, Maureen Dowd has used the best piece of op-ed real estate in the nation to spread a bunch of sexist nonsense about democratic candidates. And yet, hard on the heels of the "John Edwards is a metrosexual because he gets good haircuts" article, she's done it again. Today's steaming pile of misogynistic crap -- and brace yourself, because it's really something -- is that Michelle Obama needs to stop deflating her husband by pointing out that he is merely human. This is, Dowd tells us, emasculating. And, to reiterate her prescient argument from the Edwards article, Americans want a very, very manly president. Americans, apparently, demand as their electoral right a candidate who gets cheap, crappy haircuts and whose wife never jokes around that he's not very good in the kitchen. How helpful. I cannot imagine how I would have navigated the long and confusing primary season without the aid of such clarifying analysis.

There are a lot of ways I could go with this one, including the Bob Somerby line that the so-called liberals in the so-called liberal media do as much harm as right wingers, precisely by picking up right wing stances and arguments, and spinning them from a supposed left wing vantage point of "I hate to have to tell you this, but...". I could go that line, but Somerby's got it well in hand. And really, that's only half of what drives me nuts about Dowd.

I've said this before, but it really cannot be said enough. There is one, ONE, female columnist on the Times op-ed page on a bi-weekly basis. Krugman, Kristof, Brooks, Rich, Herbert.... and Dowd. It lands with an appropriate thud, no? So if there's going to be one, ONE, woman in such a position, and allegedly holding down the liberal end of things, is it too much to ask that it not be a woman who so obviously hates women?

Reader K describes Dowd, concisely, as a Rules Girl. I describe her as a person on thin ice criticizing other people for the obvious over-expense of their haircuts. But either way, she is a pernicious example of the ways that women who learn to hate themselves for being women will sooner or later turn that self-hatred outward, and sling it around the wider world. Seriously -- her pieces are glorified gossip columns, spinning some small incident into a referendum on a candidate's chances (always in the mode of "I'm not saying I care, but voters will"). This is self-feminization -- there's no reason she can't actually, you know, be serious in those column inches. And then, to use that gossip column to slam male candidates for not, I don't know, shooting enough people in the face, or wearing big enough cod-pieces while being dropped onto the decks of aircraft carriers, just reiterates the basic self-loathing initiated by the very format of the column.

For the record, John Edwards has to have good haircuts; he's on TV roughly 39 hours per day. How, exactly, he's supposed to get such a haircut cheaply, without breaking a bunch of campaign finance rules, is a mystery to me. Barack Obama's wife is no one's concern, and if you insist on making her your concern, it should be for the purpose of pointing out that she is obviously a smart and accomplished woman. And finally, anyone at this point who hasn't figured out that George Bush's Deadly Testosterone Buildup is pretty much an advertisement for getting over our sad national obsession with masculinity clearly has priorities other than the country's actual political health.

Dowd began the Edwards column by saying that, whether America is ready for a woman president or a black president, it certainly is not ready for a metrosexual president. Since "metrosexual" is code for gay, the effect was to turn Edwards into the gay candidate. In her next column, she turned the black candidate into a woman by spending line after line describing the way his wife has her leg over him. So, you might want to read her column later in the week, in which, by my calculations, she is almost certain to call Hillary Clinton a lesbian.

Recommended Reading

I've been wanting to write about this ridiculous right wing conceit that by mentioning the fact that the war is going badly, we critics of the administration "embolden our enemies." That particular phrasing aggravates me no end, because it implies that there's some portion of boldness currently lacking in the giant hate cocktail that is Iraq. How much bolder, exactly, can these people get? What's on the far side of really goddamn seriously motherfucking ass-kicking take-no-prisoners simultaneous-car-bombs-at-Parliament bold?

But anyway, now I don't have to talk about it, because Brian Beutler did, really well. He has my new favorite blog, and I love it. You should, too. He's not talking specifically about the enemy-emboldening formulation, but it's the same exact idea -- to whit, that by talking about losing the war, Reid (and you, and I) are making the violence worse.

And he's doing it by going after The Corner at the National Review, my favorite target. Sic 'em, Brian! I'm gonna put my feet up, and take the night off.

I Regret To Inform You That From Now On I Will Be Packing Heat, Though I Have No Aim and Less Sense

I've been resisting weighing in on the Virginia Tech incident, mostly because it doesn't seem to me to be at all about politics. It's a tragedy, in the purest sense, and there's not much to do about it except express horror, and condolences.

For others, though, the whole thing is actually a test of gun control laws, and their efficacy, in a university petri dish. This is unsurprising -- any spectacular episode of gun violence will lead to the classic "take away the goddamn guns" versus "if only every American would carry a concealed weapon" dichotomy. But then there's John Derbyshire, and it is he who has sent me over the edge.

You've met Derbyshire before. I discussed him in an earlier post, in the context of his courageous assertion that, if faced with torture by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, he'd spit in their face. Now, evidently, he thinks he's also capable of taking out an armed madman. The post is worth quoting in full:

As NRO's designated chickenhawk, let me be the one to ask: Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn't anyone rush the guy? It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness' sake—one of them reportedly a .22.

At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren't very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can't hit squat. I doubt this guy was any better than I am. And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren't bad.

Yes, yes, I know it's easy to say these things: but didn't the heroes of Flight 93 teach us anything? As the cliche goes—and like most cliches. It's true—none of us knows what he'd do in a dire situation like that. I hope, however, that if I thought I was going to die anyway, I'd at least take a run at the guy.

Where to begin with this? Counting rounds? If I hold a gun to your head, right now, can you tell me how many rounds in a .22? Given that they are modifiable with attachments? Quick, now -- remember, your life depends on it -- how many? And there is also the bizarre logic of the "handguns aren't accurate" ranged against the clear success of this particular handgun artist.

But it's so much worse; because, if handguns aren't accurate, what good, exactly, is a concealed weapon? Of all the bullshit being slung this week about the VT tragedy, this to me is the worst: the notion that, if concealed handguns weren't forbidden on campus, this tragedy could have been prevented. I'm not interested in taking up the obvious other side of this debate, in the form of arguing against gun ownership in general. I don't like guns, and don't want them near me, but that's not really the point. The point is that of course colleges have anti-concealed weapon laws, and of course changing those laws wouldn't prevent tragedies like this.

I found myself wondering, reading Derbyshire's post, if he'd ever actually been to college. Well, let me tell you, not only have I been to college, I teach in one. A large public university, on the scale of Virginia Tech. And I am here to tell you that the notion that faculty should be walking into class with concealed weapons on their person is about as daft as it gets. Can you imagine? I stand at the front of the room, facing 65 eager students. I'm wearing natty black pants, high-heeled boots, a pink scoop neck top, and....a fucking holster???? Come on! How often, on average, will something freaky enough occur that I need to pull out my piece and wave it around? If I accidentally shoot a student, because I'm just so damn vigilant, what's the university's position on that? If a gunman walks into my classroom, and starts shooting (and believe me, he'll shoot me first), I'm supposed to increase the chaos by taking my (by Derbyshire's account, highly inaccurate) handgun out of my holster and spraying that motherfucker down? Seriously??? This is where higher education is heading? Could we please, for one second, GET SERIOUS???

All right, I'll get serious. Universities are, at their core, about trust. The fact that this trust is constantly violated doesn't change the fact that it is the basis of the contract between students and faculty. We make them show up, sit still, talk when we tell them, write what we tell them, and scribble out exams on our cue. In return, we promise to give them accurate information and interpretive skills that, we hope, will prove advantageous to them throughout their lives. It works because it is a simple, and beautiful, contract -- and every person involved believes deeply in this contract. Believe me, we're not here for the money. The idea that I am supposed to interject the idea of violent force into that contract is obscene. The notion that I am supposed to tolerate the legalized possibility of my students' choosing to interject violent force into that contract is downright dangerous. The fact that the rules against the presence of instruments of violent force on campus may well be violated does not mitigate the basic social contract that underlies those very rules. In short, I cannot go to class thinking that the university will tolerate the means of my getting shot if I give out a bad grade, even if it is true that I may get shot for giving out a bad grade.

But Derbyshire fails to understand colleges at an even more basic level. Why, he wonders, did no one do anything, as the shooter went from class to class? Let me tell you something about classes. They are little islands, isolated from the world. Because my field of expertise is largely visual, I teach in subterranean classrooms, which are blacked out. We turn down the lights, and I start talking. There is silence, and a sense of total concentration. I am oblivious to the outside world, and, for the most part, so are the students, who are busy taking notes, because I talk fast. Often, there are noises outside. Classes overlap with mine, and doors bang, and people shout in the hall. As a more dramatic example, I should say that the building I teach in has a wide variety of sirens. They go off occasionally, and no one budges. I typically wait and see if the thing shuts off after a couple of minutes. Once I told the class that it was entirely possible that a nuclear holocaust was taking place up at ground level, and that if so we would never know about it down in the bowels of the building. "You will have to single-handedly repopulate the earth," I said, "so take a good look at your classmates." Last semester, a persistent alarm began going off in the hall. No one left the neighboring classrooms, so I kept teaching. After several minutes, I stepped out and went across the hall to where the department chair was teaching, figuring I'd follow his lead. He was carrying on as usual, so I went back, closed my classroom door, and ignored the alarm.

I say these things not as an advertisement for oblivion -- written out like this, they actually look quite irresponsible -- but to point out that, when you are teaching, the class has its own internal life, one that is relatively impervious to the outside world. I don't doubt for a second that classes were rolling on at VT while the shooter was doing his bloody work, with people dutifully tuning out an unnamed, unidentified, and, had this been an ordinary day, benign distraction. And I have no doubt that, when the classroom door was flung open and a madman with a gun was standing there, the last thing anyone thought was, "Jump him!"

The first lesson of the Holocaust, as every Jew knows, is that virtue and courage did not divide the dead from the living. This is also the gist of the Fundamental Attribution Error, which is our tendency as a species to overly attribute the causes of behavior to personality differences, rather than to their actual source, namely the pressures exerted by particular situations. The fact is, if a gunman burst into Derbyshire's classroom -- should he ever choose to experience the pleasures of higher education -- he would do what you would do, and what I know for a fact I would do: stand frozen in shock, petrified by the sudden rupture of the membrane between the dream of the classroom, and the shock of the real.

Strong Words

Wednesday morning, after several hours of sleep riven by violent dreams, I finally gave it up at 4:30 AM and planted myself on the sofa to channel surf. As you can imagine, the pickings were slim, and so I found myself watching, for the first and apparently last time, the Imus show on MSNBC. And within five minutes, I was saying to myself, "Oh, he is so getting cancelled."

When people colossally fuck up, you think you'd like to see them grovel. Turns out, not so much. The spectacle of Imus, in somber mode on an obscenely bright set, self-flagellating in slow motion -- playing the video of the Rutgers team's press conference, describing his intentions of telling them "who I am and where I'm coming from," all occasionally punctuated by drippy country music -- well, you could see it couldn't last. Even given that it was 4:30 in the morning and it was Imus or reruns of Full House, I still wouldn't tune in for a second dose. Apologies make for very poor TV.

So it's no surprise that MSNBC and now CBS have shut down the whole operation, TV and radio alike. But it's not over yet. Because there are a couple of things that need clearing up.

First of all, people really need to stop saying that Imus "crossed the line." This is ridiculous. He said something bad, but he's been saying bad things for decades. When I was a teenager in upstate NY, I used to occasionally listen to Imus in the mornings because we had, like, 2 radio stations, and he was on one of them. And you know what? He was fucking offensive. That was his thing. "Nappy-headed ho's" is not a nice thing to say, but it's not empirically worse than many of the other things he said, and people should stop pretending it is. Sure, it involves both race and gender, but so did calling Gwen Ifill the cleaning lady, and that one flew past. The truth is, there is no line. There is occasional hype, and the need to take someone down, to prove to ourselves that we care deeply about race and gender, and to re-affirm to ourselves a fundamental untruth: that there is a line.

But it isn't true. Anyone who has listened to Michael Savage advocate outright violence against gays knows that there is no line. Ever heard Tom Leykis? His entire show -- the whole premise -- is hatred for women. Listening to it alone in my car one night, I felt I was getting a shade of what Rwandan state radio sounded like during the genocide. With any luck, one of these days Savage's or Leykis' number will come up, and they'll go down in flames for a similarly ill-judged comment. And when they do (please God), they will no doubt, like Imus, be thinking, "What the hell? Why this time? Why now???"

The fact is, no one knows why some of these incidents blow up, and others slip by unnoticed. But trying to pretend that it's because this is a specifically more egregious instance than myriad others is genuinely naive. It is also naive for opinionators to suggest, as I have heard some of them doing this week, that the public airwaves should be policed for this kind of thing, and that penalizing it ought to be taken care of, not by the market, but by government. That is a truly dangerous notion. The reason there is, as I believe I've mentioned, no line, is that we are talking about language. Any effort to contain it always comes to no good. You can ban "fuck"; but "nappy-headed"? Seriously? That's an actual plan?

One more thing. Please, stop blaming this on rap music. It's just stupid. I listen to rap. I can quote Snoop Dogg at length, and I enjoy both NWA and the solo stylings of Eazy-E. But I couldn't have come up with "nappy-headed ho's" if I'd worked on with both hands for a week, and if presented with the phrase, would damn well know better than to say it. This is because I have a sense of decorum. Decorum dictates, for instance, that while I may swear like a sailor on my blog, I swear only very occasionally in lecture, and then precisely for the purpose of impact. Decorum dictates that, while I may turn to T-Cro and say, "God, you're such a Jew," I'll kick the ass of any Christian who tries to say the same to me. There is certain language to which you are entitled, and certain audiences with which you are entitled to use it. And then there's everything else. The fact that 50-Cent (Fitty!) can talk with a certain, um, rich vocabulary, doesn't mean it's ok for me to use it. If you don't know that, then you have much bigger problems than a coarsening of the culture around you. If you don't know that, you don't know the very first thing about human society, the world over.

Peace out, mothafuckas.

Welcome Home! Now we're totally putting electrodes on your dick until you confess to being an Iranian double agent!

The British soldiers are on their way home, essentially unharmed, and an international incident has been successfully defused. But to some, this does not end the matter. As far as wingnuts are concerned, the problem was the soldiers themselves, who totally pussed out by going on Iranian television, wearing the hijab and confessing to paddling around in other people's bits of ocean. According to John Derbyshire at the National Review's blog, The Corner, the Brits should thoroughly shun their returning marines:

It is the job of a Royal Marine to fight, and if necessary suffer and die, for his country. They know that when they go in. It's what they are told! I nurse a quiet hope that if put to the test, I would stand up as well as any Marine. Whether or not I would, however, is irrelevant. Whether or not I could stand up well to torture, I expect Marines to.

And in any case, there was no evidence of torture or mistreatment in any of the filmed cases I have seen. They look just fine. You can't fake that. The girl sailor had that headscarf on within hours. From what I've heard of torture, even weaker cases can hold out for a few days.

Isn't that nice? But let's parse this a little, shall we? Because the depths of wingnuttery are here revealed. They are, in fact, thrice revealed. Permit me to enumerate:

1.) The Derb, were he not a fool, would see the trap into which his own tolerance of torture has placed him. Since we torture bad guys, and make them crack and confess to shit -- and, crucially, since we treat those confessions as truthful -- well, then, by wingnut logic, it is difficult to prove one's honor without withstanding some torture onesself. None of which changes the actual truth, which is that torturing people is very, very bad, and leads to the speaking of an endless sequence of untruths on the part of the torturee -- a fact which the British marine example demonstrates, and which right wingers, hating that demonstration, thus fling back on the demonstrators.

2.) He "nurses a quiet hope". This small phrase is emblematic of the entire experience of reading the Corner. It leaves a kind of film on your skin. There is a kind of puerile sentimentality and overly impassioned credulity (which, oddly, often is voiced as scorn -- but only in the sense that intense love of self necessarily implies hatred of others) that comes through nearly every post -- especially any post that mentions soldiers, the United States, or fetuses. It gives one the very real sense that these people aren't adults. They're sorority girls.

3.) It should be readily apparent from the thorough ass-pounding we're getting in the Middle East these days that right wingers don't really grasp the whole concept of diplomacy. But think it over -- if the Iranians actually had tortured those Brits, and pulled their arms out with vises, and beat them about the head and neck with those severed arms, what would the reaction have been in Britain? How would this have helped avoid a precipitous and disastrous confrontation?

As it was, the Brits went on TV unharmed, which was a hell of a lot better than seeing them bleeding and broken, both from the point of view of keeping the collective English head from exploding and from the point of view of making the Iranians look like bullies. The Brits then told the world that no one is fooled by this silliness of parading people on TV saying they love Islam or whatever, and the Iranians looked like they'd been scolded by their father. And, finally, Ahmadinejad was able to defuse the situation himself by simply backing away and giving the (unharmed) soldiers back to the Brits, a process that would be rather more difficult if they had been reduced to armless, legless, headless torsos. All of these outcomes were essentially good for Britain, and all of them would have been lost had anyone's balls been put in a vise.

I can only assume that the British are capable of hunting down their own terrorist attackers, and defusing their own international incidents, because they lack the essential factor in all of our screw-ups: sentimental, uncomprehending, torture-endorsing wingnuts.

Update!

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post on Hillary Clinton that I couldn't quite get to go where I wanted it to. So I saved it as a draft. Then tonight I decided that a blogger can't be so fussy, it's not a dissertation, just publish it! So I did. And, thanks to the strange wisdom of Blogger, it appears as though I'd published it on the date I wrote it. To read it, scroll down to March 12th, "In Defense of Hillary." That Blogger should do this -- retroactively add posts -- is interesting. For example, I could right now write drafts of a stack of posts firmly predicting the eventual victory of each current candidate in the 2008 election. Then, next November (dear God it's still so long til the election) I could hit "publish" on one of them and look like a political genius.

On the other hand, you might take that March 12th date as proof that I beat The American Prospect, Matt Yglesias, and a host of other bloggers to the punch on Hillary by a good couple of weeks. I was just too busy fussing over my prose to actually publish before them.

Lesson learned. From now on it all goes out in a thoroughly unfiltered state. Take cover.