Belliveau Blog: May 2004 Archives

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May 25, 2004

Sex, politics and the Mideast

I've blogged recently about the links between sexual repression and terrorism in the Middle East.

A column today on National Review Online looks at a related aspect of the sexual politics of the Middle East -- how Islam and tribalism reinforce the second-class (at best) status of women in Iraq.

Steven Vincent writes of unpleasant incidents during the course of traveling with a female Iraqi friend, where even teen-aged boys feel free to glare and monitor the behavior of a grown woman:

Something frightening lies at the heart of this nation, I've come to understand, something dark, irrational, thuggish, especially among the "ignorant men" of its lower classes. In public, it often takes the forms of a weaponized stare that glowers at an unescorted woman — or a woman accompanied by a foreigner — as if yearning to see her disgrace herself, do something scandalous or un-Islamic, in order to fuel invidious gossip and innuendo. In private, it manifests itself in the threat, and frequently the reality, of violence to restrain and subjugate females. To accommodate and placate this malevolence, Iraqi females learn to repress their own behavior and instincts, while safeguarding their most important social possession — reputation.

As I examine in my forthcoming book Romance on the Road, Iraq itself is the source of veiling laws brought by the Assyrians 3,000 years ago to distinguish between virtuous, married women (who had to wear the veil) and prostitutes (who did not). Gradually this Assyrian restriction on female sexuality spread throughout the Fertile Crescent and Eastern Mediterranean.

Much later (after 700 A.D.) Islam arrived, allowing men under the guise of religious fervor to further control their daughters, sisters -- and, as Vincent describes, even complete strangers.

My chapter in Romance on the Road on the Middle East examines conflicts for the Arab man between a strong sexuality that steers him to the more uninhibited Western tourist and a religion that reels him back to his own -- sexually naive -- women, seen especially in Egypt. Vincent's column reveals that in Iraq, local women are not just sheltered --- they are actively humiliated, and the dating war takes a dark, nasty turn.

posted by jbelliveau at 11:57 AM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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May 19, 2004

Maryland and multiculturalism

My most recent blogs have looked at media coverage of the remarks on immigration and assimilation by Maryland's current Gov. Robert Ehrlich and former Gov. William Donald Schaefer.

Eight days after I noted the reckless inability of liberal critics to distinguish between the words multiethnic and multicultural, we finally have a catch-up op-ed in the Baltimore Sun, The 'multicultural' lie by H. George Hahn:

Rushing to dilute the curriculum further with "multicultural" course requirements, colleges across the country, like many of those outraged by Mr. Ehrlich's and Mr. Schaefer's remarks, fail to understand that American culture is English. Seeing America as a diverse nation, they conclude that diversity is its most important truth. And then, seeing diversity as multiethnic, they conclude that America is multicultural.
It is not, of course, for a culture means far more than eating ethnic foods, celebrating ethnic holidays, singing in ethnic bands and donning ethnic costumes to dance at ethnic festivals. Are not the most important cultural truths about America crystallized in its Western heritage as transmitted by the English experience?

That experience is sixfold, as Russell Kirk says in his book, America's British Culture: first and crucially, the English language; a history evolving from Britain; a legal system based on English common law; political ideas and structures patterned on the British model; a literary heritage that's British to the core; and social ideals rooted in Britain.

Of course, I broadly agree with Hahn's point that the United States is multiethnic but not multicultural.

But I think his article oversimplifies matters.

As someone who has lived in England, grew up in Maryland (part of the Crescent of New Africa, as discussed in my first book, Amateur An Amateur's Guide to the Planet), and traveled much of the world, one of the points stressed in An Amateur's Guide to the Planet is how ancestral memories play roles even after many generations in several of the world's diasporas, including Greater China, Greater Indonesia and Greater Africa.

Cultural survivals brought to the New World by Africans (generosity, forgiveness and a belief in redemption, see p. 97), the Irish (a reverence for books, reading and academic excellence, see p. 54), Germans (a love of recreation and weekends) and the Chinese (mercantile talent), among many others, make the United States hugely different from Britain.

In fact, older editions of the Encyclopeda Encyclopedia Britannica argue that Irish (not English) immigration to the United States provided the momentum that made our nation English- rather than German-speaking. So although English is our national language, our American identity is something to my mind a grander achievement, for it merrily rejected many negative aspects of Britain and in fact Europe, and added good bits of string from wherever in the world they could be found.

The differences between the United States and Britain make for huge and unanticipated culture shock for tourists and expatriates alike, and the comparative ease of the tourist in, say, Ireland or the Netherlands demonstrates the more relaxed aspects of American culture compared to Britain's.

American culture is a work in progress, and will no doubt continue its inexorable sifting of additional worthy elements of Hispanic and South and Southeast Asian cultures brought by the newest immigrants. However, U.S.'s newest arrivals may have to learn that the United States, much as it rejected King George III's Upper Class Twit arrogance, will also have little patience for wholescale attempts to force an abandonment of its common language and its principles. American culture has always been free to change organically, but its precious idealistic core needs to be defended. As Hahn notes:

Though some multiculturalists would actually exchange courses in Shakespeare for ones in healing chants, few would replace automobiles with rickshaws or computers with signaling drums. And none would visit a witch doctor for coronary care, countenance female infanticide or clitorectomies, cast themselves on their husband's funeral pyre, applaud bloody coups and despots, be tolerant of cruel and unusual punishment, laudatory about theocracies and open-minded about slavery.
Yet many multiculturalists teach, in the cause of liberal open-mindedness, as if they would grant cultures still practicing such customs a moral equity with - if not superiority to - Western ways. And having themselves studied Western civilization not so long ago in college, they would deny that privilege to their own students. Their ethical compass spins wildly.

The American compass points steadily to the classical West, via England. Our national culture believes in equality before the law, due process, civil rights, freedom to speak, to worship, to keep arms and defend ourselves, to own property, to vote, to move about freely.

P.S. Here's a funny line from Michelle Malkin on Schaefer's and Ehrlich's remarks: "Befuddled professors and reporters view the controversy as some kind of calculated political maneuver by Ehrlich, instead of a rare outbreak of common sense." As I noted earlier, The Sun published an article, "Ehrlich has no apology as immigrants protest" that portrayed the discussion of a matter crucial to the future identity of the United States as some sort of political grab by the governor toward the whiter suburban counties.

posted by jbelliveau at 12:49 PM in Culture
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May 16, 2004

Immigration, multiculturalism and the media

Maryland's current Gov. Robert Ehrlich and former Gov. William Donald Schaefer have inspired a lively reaction for their remarks supporting immigrants learning English and becoming part of a unified American culture.

It is fascinating to observe how various political camps choose various media to publicize these reactions.

Conservatives own talk radio, while liberals control print media. We already know this. Web forums are split and thus contentious but often united by anti-print media sentiment. What is amusing to me is the speed with which the populist Web forums denounce the elitist print media.

Let's start with some background.

Ehrlich's remark that "I reject the idea of multiculturalism" occurred during his weekly chat two Thursdays ago with Ron Smith on WBAL-AM radio. Essentially he made an "in house" remark safely away from the thought police in the print media.

By Saturday, May 8, the story had jumped the moat, landing in the print media, such as the Washington Post. While the Post and the Sun didn't go quite as overboard as the New York Times did in making the non-story of the Augusta National into a media crusade, there are echoes of overkill here — and well as a truly remarkable level of distortion, hyperbole, recklessness and condescension.

The first Post story brought this revealing remark:

Del. Ana Sol Gutierrez (D-Montgomery), a first-generation immigrant from El Salvador, said she believes the governor and comptroller need diversity training.
"I think what the governor said absolutely is offensive," Gutierrez said. "It's also a dangerous comment. What I am sensing is that these kinds of comments from leadership, from people who are in high-level positions, are really fueling an environment that is very dangerous and negative. It says it is okay to consider people who are different as something less."

Right off the bat, Gutierrez mischaracterizes the governor's remarks as "dangerous" and as implying inferiority of non-English speakers. She comes up with the typical liberal's totalitarian solution to anyone she disagrees with: a good brain scrubbing at the local Diversity Training lobotomy center.

Next up: Montgomery County Exec Doug Duncan, who again misquotes the governor and appears to make -- but who knows? -- the common error of confusing multiethnicity with multiculturalism:

"People from different backgrounds, different religions, and different parts of the world are what make this country strong," said Duncan, who is considering a challenge to Ehrlich in the 2006 election. "It is troubling to hear anyone degrade our diversity and multiculturalism."

By Wednesday's Post we have the headline "Immigrant Remarks By Ehrlich Still Burn" -- hmmm, could it be because the print media are fanning the flames -- and an the unchallenged implication by Latin leaders that crude unreconstructed racists lead opposition to multiculturalism:

Del. Ana Sol Gutierrez (D-Montgomery), who spoke out against Ehrlich's comments last week, said she has received five "nasty messages," including some telling her and her "people to go back home."
CASA de Maryland, a Latino advocacy group, received two similar voice-mail messages, including one that insisted Schaefer "had it right" and they should "ship us to Iraq so we can be bombed on the front lines," CASA's Kimberly Propeack said.

The Sun next published an article, "Ehrlich has no apology as immigrants protest" that portrayed the discussion of a matter crucial to the future identity of the United States as some sort of political grab by the governor toward the whiter suburban counties. Erhlich won comparison with Adolf Hitler and Newt Gingrich from two persons quoted.

After this wave of so-called news articles, come Sun columnists Dan Rodricks and Michael Olesker to lecture the ignorant masses on the error of their thoughts. Rodricks dismisses the governor sarcastically as a "lettered historian" in league with "angry white males:"

... any time he wants, [Ehrlich] can sound like just another Joe Sixpack, letting off steam about America being overrun with people who no speaky the English.

Well, the print media had their say, and the people responded. On the Baltimore Sun's own Web forum page, in a thread entitled Topic: Rodricks pulls the Hitler analogy, readers found Rodricks' column wearying (as did callers throughout the day to more than one of WBAL's shows). From a poster on the Sun's forum page:

People who believe that residents of this country should speak English when they are in public and who also believe that the teaching of English and U.S. history and culture should take precedence over the teaching of any other country's language, history and culture are often falsely accused of being against the immigrants themselves. This tactic allows the multicultural crowd to divert attention away from the real issue.
The irony is that by citing the success of past immigrants, who attended schools where the teaching of English and U.S. history and culture took precedence over the teaching of any other country's language, history and culture, they are in fact validating the point of the folks who oppose multiculturalism.

The "If it ain't broke let's fix it until it is" crowd never bothers to contemplate how past generations of immigrants contributed to the building of the greatest country the world has ever known without the so called benefits of the multiculturalism they espouse.

Dear Mr. Idiot, I Mean Olesker rounds up more disgust, including a post that:

the sun keeps reporting this story over and over again. i think they're just amazed that no one really gives a crap. they can't believe we are not "sophisticated" enough to be as angry as them.

The merry-go-round continues today, as the Sunattempts to drag the inert non-story forward in Multiculturalism is in their roots; Heritage: Ehrlich's, Schaefer's German ancestors struggled with assimilation in Maryland -- again, note sloppy use of the term multiculturalism.

Readers immediately dismissed the article as liberal propaganda, with a muddled message to boot.

Sun forum posters also jumped over Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley for his rebuttal, in Spanish, of Schaefer's remarks, in a thread entitled O'Malley blasts Ehrlich and Schaefer:

Martin O'Malley has made the transition from promising, rising star to pandering incompetent dolt in just three years. His latest effort to represent Victims, Inc. was even more pathetic then previous cheap shots at the Ehrlich administration. He reminds me of a man living in a falling down house who spends his days whining about his neighbor's crabgrass.

The rest of the country and the world got to sound off on the controversy at the Internet discussion site Fark.com, in threads here and here. What you will see here, quite at odds with the print media depiction, is a lively and at times good-humored debate dominated by common sense views of the necessity of a nation having a common language and culture.

What is the bottom line here?

The unity against the print media on Web forums should be worrisome to newspaper managers. Readers are now a click away -- especially on newspapers' own reader forum sites -- from tearing liberal propaganda to pieces.

Further, the role of newspaper managers in overseeing columnists deserves some scrutiny. Right now we see journalists getting essentially columnist-for-life jobs (see earlier blog on Mary McGrory) and an attendant problem as the evolution of political thought maroons these once-mainstream liberals.

Do Olesker and Rodricks have any remaining audience (or at least, an audience that finds them informative rather than kneejerk) outside the newsroom itself?

An even better question: What should the media's role be in informing the debate on immigration? If I were an editor, I would argue that Samuel Huntington's Who Are We : The Challenges to America's National Identity asks important questions about the U.S.'s national identity, the role of immigration, and how Mexican immigration due to proximity, scale and concentration may be far different from anything previously seen in our national history.

If you would like to learn more about what this Harvard historian thinks, try ParaPundit. It seems as though Schaefer and Ehrlich come far closer to examining immigration based on recent scholarship and common sense than do Rodricks and Olesker.

posted by jbelliveau at 4:47 PM in Media
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May 12, 2004

The beheading of Nick Berg

Admiral Yamamoto warned his Japanese colleagues against attacking Pearl Harbor. Hollywood has him saying in two movies, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."

With similar prescience, Yamamoto could have warned Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi against putting the video of his preening enjoyment of the butchering of Pa. resident Nick Berg on the Internet.

For Zarqawi has blundered terribly with his merry display of barbarism. Pearl Harbor girded the U.S. for war. Nick Berg's beheading reveals Islam's extremists as savages. With clearer eyes, the West can see what it is up against in the Middle East.

I cannot recall ever sobbing at any photos in career as a journalist spanning four decades (starting with my high school paper) until seeing the few stills of Nick Berg's exceptionally cruel slaughter on the Drudge Report today.

On Fark.com yesterday, posters made it clear that watching the full video was an exercise that might shake the viewer for hours, days or longer:

Everyone taking comfort in a quick painless death afforded a beheading need[s] to take a gander at the video. He screams. Beheaded people don't have time to scream. His head was sawed off from the adams apple back to the spine.

Multiculturalism is 'bunk'

Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich is more correct than he knows when he states (from the Baltimore Sun):

Once you get into this multicultural crap, this bunk, that some folks are teaching in our college campuses and other places, you run into a problem. There is no such thing as a multicultural society that can sustain itself, in my view, and I think history teaches us this lesson.

Much of the kneejerk criticism of the governor's statement (and Comptroller William Donald Schaefer's defense of speaking English) comes from fuzzy-thinking people who don't understand the simple difference between the words multiethnic (good) and multicultural (bad).

Our multiethnicity is a national strength.

Multiculturalism, however, holds that Americans need share nothing greater than physical proximity -- not language, not shared ideals, not the cultural agreement that makes for a social contract, only competing grievances.

I addressed this topic in my first book, Amateur An Amateur's Guide to the Planet, which in a chapter on Greece looks at the matter of national greatness and decline. How does a nation like the United States, which resembles in its multiethnic makeup the Roman Empire, achieve and maintain its status as a World Power?

In a nutshell: The United States needs to insist on assimilation, including that its immigrants speak English. Ehrlich has a sense of history and a leader's willingness not to bow to today's fad of catering to advocacy groups that insist on splintering a great people into little identity-riddled factions.

From An Amateur's Guide (pages 164-65):

Rome’s approach to minorities: sharing power and insisting on cultural assimilation
The length of time a Great Power gets to stay at the top may hinge upon how much it ensures that its diverse population shares a stake in national success.

My husband, artist and historian Lamont W. Harvey, notes that Great Powers such as the United States, China or the former Soviet Union cover large areas and comprise more than one ethnic group. (The exception is comparatively homogeneous Japan.)

Thus Great Powers need a policy to prevent instability among differing peoples. History reveals some widely divergent approaches taken by Great Powers toward minorities (defined in the sociological sense, as persons subjected to different treatment, rather than groups smaller in numbers).

In the Greek colonies and British Empire, for example, no one could hope to join the ruling classes except by birth. The Greeks in their cities and colonies simply considered themselves innately superior to barbarians outside and saw no purpose in trying to civilize their neighbors. Thus virtually all citizens of Athens came only from married Athenian parents.

The Romans looked at things quite differently. Non-Romans during the imperial era could exercise power, particularly in their home provinces. For Rome’s subject peoples, who came to cherish the peace established under Roman rule, to become a Roman citizen was a high honor.

Stephen Neill, in Colonialism and Christian Missions, wrote that

Citizens in Spain who had never once seen the eternal city became more Roman than the Romans, and spoke and wrote the Latin tongue with an almost classical elegance. Rome seemed identical with the civilization and stability of the world.

Rome only permitted those who adopted its language and culture to become citizens. It tolerated but did not celebrate diversity, even as it absorbed elements of other cultures (especially Greece’s).

Rome allowed its subjects to continue to speak Celtic, Aramaic, Libyan and other languages. But officials, soldiers, traders and schoolchildren learned Latin, which became the official language of the Mediterranean. As John Matthews wrote in “Roman Life and Society: Distances and Diversity” (in
The Oxford History of the Classical World):

It was precisely the achievement of the Roman Empire to have assimilated in one political and administrative system the immense diversities of the Mediterranean, and much of the northern European, worlds.

Like modern U.S. conservatives, Rome also came to emphasize public safety and family values. People in the empire had to obey the law and allow free passage on the Roman roads. And Augustus Caesar introduced numerous social reforms designed to strengthen the family and the integrity of marriage. (Though his own family failed disastrously in this regard, as the BBC television series based on Robert Graves’s book I, Claudius amply demonstrated.)

posted by jbelliveau at 1:26 PM in Culture
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May 7, 2004

Speaking English at McDonald's

Maryland Comptroller William Donald Schaefer sounded off on Tuesday about McDonald's cashiers who cannot speak English.

Out in Averageville, U.S.A. (most precincts of the region not part of Mediaville), everyone recognizes this as an absurd disregard for what once used to be the pride of the U.S. economy, customer service. See some typical reactions at this Baltimore Sun forum, including HOORAY FOR SCHAEFER and
No Habla English at Mcdonalds, as well as an article reporting, "Reactions to Schaefer's 'English' comment is mostly favorable."

For some reason, we have moved as a society from having the hallmark of every society since the beginning of time -- namely, a language of our own, in this case, English:

to encouraging bilingualism,
to tolerating pockets of inner cities where most residents don't speak English,
to having major employers and a government that hire workers who can't speak English for jobs interacting with the public,
and finally, for liberal apologists to see no problem whatsoever in people serving customers but lacking the customers' language.

One can eagerly anticipate the ultimate logic of direction McDonald's is taking us -- that communication plays no role in, well, communication -- including air traffic controllers or brain surgeons or editors at Miriam-Webster's dictionary who can't comprehend English.

As a world traveler, I wrote of many of my communication struggles in my first book, An Amateur's Guide to the Planet, and Amateur accidentally became an intercultural communication textbook.

As any true traveler knows, a hallmark of respect for any place you are visiting is to try to learn basic words. I have on my bookshelf phrasebooks from my travels, including for one (or more) for Italian, Greek, French, Indonesian, Chinese, Spanish, Hawaiian, Arabic, Portuguese and Swahili -- even an American English-British English phrasebook.

My friend Sylvia just asked to borrow the Italian phrasebook for her upcoming seven days in Portofino. While Sylvia makes the requisite effort of the true traveler, for a one-week trip, can it be that we have immigrants who expect to live and work and sell to English-speaking customers in this country without learning our language?

I shake my head at Michael Olesker's reflex assertion, coming from the separate kingdom of Mediaville, that any criticism of an immigrant, no matter how justified, qualifies as bigotry:

Because what [Schaefer's] new outburst does is send a signal. It signals that small, dark place in the heart of bigots that it's all right to put down one group at the expense of another. That it's all right to call one group American and one group Not Quite American. And that it's all right to deny the very heart of the national experience, if it suits your mood of the moment.

No Mr. Olesker, Schaefer's view does not fly "in the face of the American way."

The tourist who wants to shout English in beatific ignorance at foreigners is a clod. The immigrant who wants to deal with English speakers in beatific ignorance is a clod, too.

The non-English speaker at McDonald's, for some reason, has decided to ignore the requirements of commerce since the mists of history.

Immigrants show disrespect by not learning even the basic vocabulary to buy and sell a simple set of goods, something the folks with their beads and pottery and ropes and chickens and salt in every port along the Mediterranean and East Africa-to-China trade routes mastered from the beginnings of human transport.

My next book, Romance on the Road, describes gigolos worldwide, such as those in Jamaica and Thailand, who niftily learn enough English, Japanese, German or whatever it takes to make money off tourist women.

In China, there are 250 million speakers of English as their second language, many self-taught from tapes. It's not difficult. It's certainly not impossible. And the Chinese learn quite acceptable English without being surrounded, as an immigrant is, with broadcast and print media and native speakers.

Here's what a conscientious traveler does: Learn enough of the local language to show respect and appreciation of the culture. If possible, learn enough to communicate well. Even if you grew up with English or another Romance language, and are struggling to learn Arabic, Thai or Chinese, which don't even use Romanized alphabet.

Here's what a conscientious immigrant does: Learn the host country's language, period.

It can be done.

posted by jbelliveau at 3:47 PM in Culture
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Naked prisoners and sex ... you heard it here first

It's not often that we are ahead of renowned columnist Charles Krauthammer by 48 hours, but it has happened!

Two days ago, I wrote that the hooded prisoner treatment in Iraq:

... speaks to the sexual politics of the Middle East, which comprise a chapter of my forthcoming book, Romance on the Road.
... What is the real problem here? The perception, a correct one, that female U.S. soldiers laughing at naked Muslim men is an especially humiliating insult -- to Muslim men. That having a woman be a soldier at all, yet alone a conqueror, and most of all a gloating conqueror -- making fun of a Muslim man's private anatomy -- is beyond the bearable for a Muslim. Women are demonstrably second class under sharia, Islamic law, and in the most traditional Islamic nations are barely allowed out in public, so we can readily imagine the extent to which a gloating female conqueror would be welcome in an Islamic society.

It almost makes one wonder if the U.S. command knew exactly what it was doing ... that they could break Iraqi prisoners without a single blow or harsh word. A few laughing soldier girls could do the trick.

Today, Krauthammer writes:

... the torture pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison could not have hit a more neuralgic point. We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake.
... What makes [jihadists] unique ... is their particular hatred of freedom for women. They prize their traditional prerogatives that allow them to keep their women barefoot in the kitchen as illiterate economic and sexual slaves. For the men, that is a pretty good deal -- one threatened by the West with its twin doctrines of equality and sexual liberation.

... Which is what made one aspect of the Abu Ghraib horrors even more incendiary -- the pictures of female U.S. soldiers mocking, humiliating and dominating naked and abused Arab men. One could not have designed a more symbolic representation of the Islamist warning about where Western freedom ultimately leads than yesterday's Washington Post photo of a uniformed American woman holding a naked Arab man on a leash.

I have posted a piece I wrote 17 days after Sept. 11. The nexus between terrorism and sexual frustration was immediately recognized by female travelers; now, nearly three years later, with the Abu Ghraib prison photographs, the big-name columnists are finally getting it.

posted by jbelliveau at 2:32 PM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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May 6, 2004

More on Abu Ghraib

The most distressing of the scandal photos is, to me, the one of an American woman, a GI, who is laughing, holding a cigarette and aiming her fingers as if comically shooting or aiming at a group of prisoners, presumably Iraqi. They are naked and hooded. She looks coarse, cruel, perhaps drunk. And as I looked at her I thought Oh, no. This is not equality but mutual degradation. Can anyone imagine a WAC of 1945, or a WAVE of 1965, acting in this manner? I can't. Because WACs and WAVEs were not only members of the American armed forces, which responsibility brought its own demands in terms of dignity and bearing; they were women. They apparently did not think they had to prove they were men, or men at their worst. I've never seen evidence to suggest the old-time WACs and WAVEs had to delve down into some coarse and vulgar part of their nature to fit in, to show they were one of the guys, as tough as the guys, as ugly at their ugliest.
But the young woman soldier in the scandal photo--she looked, shall we say, confused about these issues. It was chilling. Perhaps we should be worrying about that, too.

Peggy Noonan, welcome to today's Brave New World. Where nothing is scarier or tougher than a city girl, or a girl fight, or an enraged feminist. Ask any school administrator, or soccer referee, or university administrator. Or Iraqi prisoner.

Noonan's recollection of decency in the American public, including its women, is both touching and heartbreakingly dated. A coarsening culture can, yes, lower its women as much as its men. Masculinity found its revival in the implosion of the World Trade Center on strong, altruistic firemen chugging up stairs to rescue the weak.

What pivotal moment will bring back femininity? What will bring back the matriarch and her the moral authority, the woman neither coarse nor timid, who instead of posing like a goofball by naked Muslim men, says this is perverse and wrong, and needs to stop?

As I noted yesterday (see below), the big water-cooler (and talk radio) buzz is over the Iraqi prison photo showing West Va. Spc. Lynndie England. We would all like to learn more about Lynndie England. There is a story here, a big one that is resonating.

Donna M. Hughes, writing on National Review Online, indirectly echoes my point yesterday about the sexual tension and domination and politics underlying the activities at the Iraq prison, as well as Peggy Noonan's observation of our coarse culture:

Why are we shocked by these images from Abu Ghraib, but when the victims are women (or gay men) the images are called pornography or "adult entertainment"? Why can we easily see the violations of human beings in one set of images, but miss it in others? What if the Iraqi men had been forced to smile, could we be convinced that there was a newly formed "publishing and film production" company in Baghdad instead of sexual abuse and humiliation being perpetrated?
President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have condemned the acts and the abuse of the Iraqis. They said that these acts do not represent American values. I want to believe that is true. Yet, I see the common themes and methods used by other types of perpetrators on different victims. These similar images are what the young American soldiers from the Internet generation have grown up with and learned to call "adult entertainment." Did they become desensitized to the harm of doing such things to people by seeing multiple images of similar abuse to women? Did they learn how to violate someone by being a voyeur to abuse, and in Abu Ghraib they had the chance to become perpetrators — and pornographers? Did they fully comprehend the harm they were doing?

posted by jbelliveau at 12:07 PM in Culture
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May 5, 2004

Naked prisoners in Iraq

The hyberbolic criticism surrounding the photos of naked, hooded Iraqi prisoners really is a bit much, but at the same time, it speaks to the sexual politics of the Middle East, which comprise a chapter of my forthcoming book, Romance on the Road.

First, the hyperbole, as exemplified by this Washington Post op-ed piece, with the headline "Willing Torturers," and its inference that at some level, our culture is not immune to the sort of cruelty seen in Nazi Germany and the Cambodia and Rwanda genocides:

We've now seen the horrific evidence: American soldiers, brought up in an American culture, stripped and sexually humiliated Iraqi prisoners. They dressed them in black hoods and laughingly threatened them with electrocution.
They also took photographs of themselves, grinning and pretending to shoot at the genitals of their captives, even though the prisoners came from a society that values physical modesty, even though some of the guards were women.

Oh no!

As Rush Limbaugh said on Monday, the photos, say of naked men stacked in pyramids, aren't that far afield from what you might observe in a Britney Spears or Madonna video. Being stripped of one's clothes and forced to lie on top of another man, icky though that may be, is short of real torture, as in the Hanoi Hilton greeted our own airmen, many of whom were brutally broken and never recovered enough to live normally. It also falls well short of the desecration of bodies in Somalia and Fallujah.

Iraq

I hear that in at least one Baltimore office, water-cooler conversation centered on the fact that U.S. soldier women made goofy "I'm getting photographed" expressions as they paraded near the naked Iraqi men, who are apparently being forced to handle themselves. I have posted one sample photo, a frame grab from CBS's 60 Minutes, above.

What is the real problem here? The perception, a correct one, that female U.S. soldiers laughing at naked Muslim men is an especially humiliating insult -- to Muslim men. That having a woman be a soldier at all, yet alone a conqueror, and most of all a gloating conqueror -- making fun of a Muslim man's private anatomy -- is beyond the bearable for a Muslim. Women are demonstrably second class under sharia, Islamic law, and in the most traditional Islamic nations are barely allowed out in public, so we can readily imagine the extent to which a gloating female conqueror would be welcome in an Islamic society.

It almost makes one wonder if the U.S. command knew exactly what it was doing ... that they could break Iraqi prisoners without a single blow or harsh word. A few laughing soldier girls could do the trick.

You could almost make a feminist argument that Muslim men are better off getting used to Western women being a part of all facets of our society, including the military and even including military staff who get off on prisoner humiliation that after all, leaves the prisoner flustered and disoriented yet without a mark on his bodies.

Yet the West reacts as if the soldiers were kicked in the ribs, hung like slabs of beef from hooks, starved, shocked and starved -- because again, they correctly perceive the degree of insult.

That brings us to the sexual politics of the Middle East. To quote from part of my Middle East chapter in Romance on the Road:

Way back in 1966, a sociologist in Israel observed the budding relationships between shy, lonely Arab youths and visiting Scandinavian women and later produced the first social science report ever published on Western female sex adventurers. Erik Cohen ("Arab Boys and Tourist Girls" 232) presciently noted that tourist girls provided the youths with an alternative to "extreme activism (found in nationalism) and extreme passivity (found in drugs)." Decades before Sept. 11, he identified the life of the unmarried young Arab as a tense, unhappy, "pitiful and eventless," such that just to obtain a blonde visitor's home address offered a shining ray of hope for a decent life overseas (226, 227).

There is a nexus between terrorism and an entire region's sexual frustration, unemployment and cultural envy. Female Western soldiers enact in concrete form the teasing superiority of Scandinavian tourists, Hollywood actresses and music video temptresses that madden Islamic men, with few prospects for women or jobs, from Morocco to Indonesia.

posted by jbelliveau at 11:10 AM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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May 3, 2004

Hispanic-only housing grants

Remember that pesky budget crisis in Baltimore that spurred Mayor Martin O'Malley to propose increasing taxes for using our telephones and heating our homes?

Well apparently things aren't so bad, because the city has plenty of money to give Hispanics (regardless of income) to buy homes.

The Baltimore Sun reports (May 3, 2004) that 15 grants of $3,000 each are set aside for Latinos, regardless of income (what?!), to buy houses here.

If you want to understand the hilarious lack of accountability among liberals, read this article. We have the mayor's "Hispanic liaison", Jose O. Ruiz (salary not given), with this rationale for parting with taxpayer dollars:

"We're behind," Ruiz said. "Let's catch up. They haven't been able to take advantage of those programs. They've been living here. They're entitled to it but they never applied because nobody has ever reached out to them."

This is typical identity politics, note the flinging around of terms such as "they're entitled to it" and let's "reach out." If you are living in a Democratic parish, well hey, there must be some money you qualify for as a victim of something. Perish the thought of returning the money to the taxpayer, or (gasp) keeping police and recycling programs that the mayor claims are threatened by our budget crisis.

Glaring omission from this article: Are applicants legal immigrants?

And somebody cannot count. This assertion:

Less than 6 percent of Baltimore's population is foreign-born, about half the national figure. Census figures show the number of immigrants in Baltimore has been flat, at about 30,000, since 1970. In surrounding suburbs, the number has jumped fivefold, to 117,000, since then.

... cannot possibly be correct. In my 17 years in Upper Fells Point, we have gone from a handful of Hispanic residents (our Peruvian neighbors two blocks up) to hundreds and thousands of Latins. Hmmm, wonder if most of these new arrivals are uncounted and illegal?

Finally, we learn:

What Baltimore is trying to remedy is a half-century-old immigration pattern. The city that was once a magnet to the foreign-born has become a place they avoid, settling instead in other areas with more jobs, better schools and better public transportation.

Guess it would be too difficult to actually create a climate encouraging "more jobs, better schools and better public transportation." In the meantime, let's just create another cap-in-hand constituency and an identity-pimp liaison job.

posted by jbelliveau at 11:57 AM in
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