Mid-winter doldrums
Political Waves
Well, les’see … Santorum leads, Iran looms, mortgage settlement looks too thin, genocide in Syria and California put another nail in gender bias. You know — just another day in paradise!
Meanwhile, for you … the punchiest reads to get your blood moving: Greg Palast, Mark Morford and George Monboit.
Breath easy, dearhearts, we’re just gettin’ started …
Jude
Queen of Angels’ Condoms
Greg Palast, HuffPo
02/ 8/2012
I arrived into this world at the Queen of Angels hospital in Los Angeles into the hands of Dr. Sidney Kolodny.
Queen of Angels, judging by the number of nun-nurses running about, is a Catholic hospital.
Dr. Kolodny was Jewish.
Last night, I heard Senator Rick Santorum tell us that President Obama has attacked Catholics and freedom of religion by barring church-controlled businesses from excluding contraception care in their employees’ health plans.
Joining the shriek-fest against the president’s decision, the sanctimonious little ex-senator prattled on about big bad government crushing religious freedom.
That’s just arse-backwards.
Obama’s decision is a defense of religious freedom.
Religious freedom is a right of people, not their bosses.
The Queen of Angels hospital, church-owned though it may be, has no right to tell its Jewish doctors and employees to wear crucifixes. Nor should the Church’s managers be allowed to tell their employees that the health care they receive by law should be dictated by the religious views of their employer.
A question for you, Mr. Santorum: should Catholic reporters working at the Christian Science Monitor be told they can’t have blood transfusions because the Church-owner doesn’t sanction surgery?
It makes me furious that the Obama Administration does not defend itself and the religious rights of workers. No damn employer should be allowed to tell an employee what medicine may be prescribed by their doctor based on the business owner’s beliefs.
What’s Santorum worried about? I guess he believes that, without the force of law to restrain them, the nuns at Queen of Angels will dash off to get prescriptions for birth control pills.
If a religious organization abjures condoms or The Pill or blood transfusions, that’s their right. It should not be their management’s right, even if the managers wear vestments, to impose those religions strictures on the bodies of their workers.
It’s about freedom of the worker from the religious dictates of her employer.
I’ll say it even if, for some reason, Obama can’t. ++
How to be outraged in America
Mark Morford, SF Gate
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
So, what’s it going to be? What flavor of revolt and indignation do you prefer as we dance like drunken angels into the wilds of 2012? Choose wisely, and you can become electrified and alive, a full and informed participant in the culture. Choose poorly, and the world is bleak and joyless as bible study in Rick Santorum’s shame dungeon.
Option one: Slap yourself and three or four equally sunlight-deprived compatriots into a frothy lather over an insignificant nothingness that affects no one and about which no one really cares in the slightest — except, of course, for you and your tiny band of miserable misfits who think you have some sort of lock on morality and behavior, when all you really have is a fatal case of outrage myopia, far too much spare time and (I’m just guessing) some very unhappy children of your own.
Greetings, Parents Television Council! You are like a mutant version of Punxsutawney Phil, waiting and festering for months at a time in a cold, solitary hole, longing to emerge once a year just so you can wail and spit about some tiny indiscretion no one really cares about. You are like a strangely recurring rash that appears after any major national telecast to irritate the armpit of the nation by stirring controversy where none actually exists.
What was it this time? Right. Rapper M.I.A.’s 1.5 seconds of a middle finger, raised pseudo-defiantly during Madonna’s completely ridiculous, lip-synced Super Bowl halftime show. A middle finger! Heads will roll! Punishment must be doled! Who, pray who, will save the children from this frightening woman’s vile extremity, given how everyone knows hysterical middle fingers lead straight to unchecked lesbianism, Obamacare and dancing for seven straight days at Burning Man? What’s next, Starbucks teaming up with Satan? Oh wait.
Parents Television Council! I have a question for all four of you, along with your 19 cats: Do you plan in advance? Do you sit around in your drafty conference room in the back of the strip mall fabric store, praying for the most minute Super Bowl transgression so you can fire off an outraged letter to various newspapers, TV networks and the billion-dollar hellbeast known as the NFL itself? Don’t worry, I already know the answer.
One final question, PTC: Did you happen to notice the hordes of giant, sweaty gladiators furiously bashing each others’ skulls in for three straight hours and calling it a sport? Did you notice the adorable homoerotics of it all, or perhaps the millions of very drunk fans, or the mountains of garbage food, or the onslaught of $4 million TV ads hawking beer and trucks and sex and beer, all pummeling the hell out of your kids’ small, impressionable minds? Do you have any idea what real, healthy outrage even looks like?
Let me answer that for you: It looks like what we have right over here in option two, thanks to the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s extremely unfortunate (but then again, maybe not) decision to slam women everywhere by way of yanking funding for the good folks at Planned Parenthood. Who knew?
Who knew Komen’s pink-clad army was run by such anti-choice, right-wing hand-wringers? Who knew that their founder and CEO, Nancy G. Brinker, voted for Bush and their former VP of Policy, Karen Handel (who just resigned in a huff over the flap), was a failed Republican gubernatorial anti-choice crusader from Georgia? Who knew that it’s possible to separate the cause of supporting women who have cancer from the cause of supporting women’s health and empowerment overall?
Maybe we should have seen it coming. Maybe when Komen partnered with Kentucky Fried Chicken last year to sell pink buckets of deep-fried grease, we should have seen the warning sign. You think?
Let’s call the kind of outrage Komen’s decision ignited the healthy kind of outrage, in diametric opposition of PTC’s childish pseudo-indignation, an informed and electrifying kind of reaction that had the wonderful consequence of alerting tens of thousands, even millions of people to the fact that not only is one of the nation’s leading charities violently lopsided, fundamentally misguided and not so deserving of your dollars, but that Planned Parenthood is, well, just the opposite.
Note to Komen Foundation executives (and the GOP at large): Here’s your final spank of delicious irony. Do you really want to reduce the number of abortions in America? You want to help Planned Parenthood get out of the abortion business once and for all? Don’t yank their funding. Do what William Saleten over at Slate so rightly suggests: Donate more to them.
It’s very simple: The more money PP has, the more they can offer birth control and contraception to needful women, and the fewer abortions they will ever need perform. Isn’t that amazing? More education and contraception equals fewer abortions. Someone alert the GOP! And the Catholic church!
Of course, such simple math assumes you understand that women actually have, and enjoy, sex. It presumes you know that contraception is healthy and smart, that sex isn’t merely for procreation (praise Jesus), that woman should be in full and complete control over their bodies and their lives. Which of course leaves out the GOP. And the church. And, sadly, the Susan G. Komen Foundation for Republican Women Who Can Afford Health Insurance and Don’t Like Sex.
So there you go. Two opposing options, two wildly diverse approaches to outrage. Which did you choose? At which end of the spectrum — insipid and pointless on one end, helpful and hugely necessary on the other — do you land?
Are you furious, for example, that Microsoft — and hell, all of Washington State — now officially endorse gay marriage? Are you outraged that yet another appeals court deemed hateful ol’ Prop 8 unconstitutional? Are you an outraged religious group, furious that Obama might make you step into the 20th century? Or are you upset, like the clearly brilliant GOP Rep. John Fleming of Louisiana, that Planned Parenthood is opening an $8 billion “abortionplex” in Kansas, replete with a climbing wall, noiseless incinerator and gift shop? I’m so sorry for you. The crushing roar of imminent doom (and rampant idiocy) must be deafening.
Conversely, perhaps you’re just a little furious and saddened that state of Virginia, after defeating similar hateful bills three separate times, was finally punched in the gut by right wing nutballs and will now force all women seeking an abortion to first submit to a needless ultrasound? Aha. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Look, I’m merely trying to help. Please feel free, going forward, to use the two primary examples explicated in this column as your litmus test, your filter for what’s worthy of your time, money and informed outrage. It’s a long election year, my loves; there will certainly be no shortage of opportunities, news stories, rude insults to your intelligence. Filter wisely. Ignite beautifully. Oh, and send a few bucks to Planned Parenthood, won’t you? It’s what Komen would have wanted. ++
The Right’s Stupidity Spreads, Enabled by a Too-Polite Left
George Monbiot, Guardian UK
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Self-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today’s progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop. Doing so requires an act of interruption, of presumption, for which they no longer possess a vocabulary.
Perhaps it is in the same spirit of liberal constipation that, with the exception of Charlie Brooker, we have been too polite to mention the Canadian study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, which revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence. Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail that brought it to the attention of British readers last week. It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own. But this, the study suggests, is not unfounded generalization but empirical fact.
It is by no means the first such paper. There is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood. Open-mindedness, flexibility, trust in other people: all these require certain cognitive abilities. Understanding and accepting others – particularly “different” others – requires an enhanced capacity for abstract thinking.
But, drawing on a sample size of several thousand, correcting for both education and socioeconomic status, the new study looks embarrassingly robust. Importantly, it shows that prejudice tends not to arise directly from low intelligence but from the conservative ideologies to which people of low intelligence are drawn. Conservative ideology is the “critical pathway” from low intelligence to racism. Those with low cognitive abilities are attracted to “rightwing ideologies that promote coherence and order” and “emphasize the maintenance of the status quo”. Even for someone not yet renowned for liberal reticence, this feels hard to write.
This is not to suggest that all conservatives are stupid. There are some very clever people in government, advising politicians, running thinktanks and writing for newspapers, who have acquired power and influence by promoting rightwing ideologies.
But what we now see among their parties – however intelligent their guiding spirits may be – is the abandonment of any pretense of high-minded conservatism. On both sides of the Atlantic, conservative strategists have discovered that there is no pool so shallow that several million people won’t drown in it. Whether they are promoting the idea that Barack Obama was not born in the US, that man-made climate change is an eco-fascist-communist-anarchist conspiracy, or that the deficit results from the greed of the poor, they now appeal to the basest, stupidest impulses, and find that it does them no harm in the polls.
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to what two former Republican ideologues, David Frum and Mike Lofgren, have been saying. Frum warns that “conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics”. The result is a “shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology” which has “ominous real-world consequences for American society”.
Lofgren complains that “the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today”. The Republican party, with its “prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science” is appealing to what he calls the “low-information voter”, or the “misinformation voter”. While most office holders probably don’t believe the “reactionary and paranoid claptrap” they peddle, “they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base”.
The madness hasn’t gone as far in the UK, but the effects of the Conservative appeal to stupidity are making themselves felt. This week the Guardian reported that recipients of disability benefits, scapegoated by the government as scroungers, blamed for the deficit, now find themselves subject to a new level of hostility and threats from other people.
These are the perfect conditions for a billionaires’ feeding frenzy. Any party elected by misinformed, suggestible voters becomes a vehicle for undisclosed interests. A tax break for the 1% is dressed up as freedom for the 99%. The regulation that prevents big banks and corporations exploiting us becomes an assault on the working man and woman. Those of us who discuss man-made climate change are cast as elitists by people who happily embrace the claims of Lord Monckton, Lord Lawson or thinktanks funded by ExxonMobil or the Koch brothers: now the authentic voices of the working class.
But when I survey this wreckage I wonder who the real idiots are. Confronted with mass discontent, the once-progressive major parties, as Thomas Frank laments in his latest book Pity the Billionaire, triangulate and accommodate, hesitate and prevaricate, muzzled by what he calls “terminal niceness”. They fail to produce a coherent analysis of what has gone wrong and why, or to make an uncluttered case for social justice, redistribution and regulation. The conceptual stupidities of conservatism are matched by the strategic stupidities of liberalism.
Yes, conservatism thrives on low intelligence and poor information. But the liberals in politics on both sides of the Atlantic continue to back off, yielding to the supremacy of the stupid. It’s turkeys all the way down. ++
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”
~ The Reverand Martin Luther King
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