Thursday, December 18, 2008 - Posts
-
sponsorship
So Rick Warren is going to give the inaugural prayer? Rick Warren, Jerry Falwell in sheep’s clothing, the leader of the Saddleback Church (megachurch, actually, with satellite campuses and broadcast sermons and services), who, as Michelle Goldberg puts it so pleasantly in The Guardian:
He is a man who compares legal abortion to the Holocaust and gay marriage to incest and paedophilia. He believes that Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and other non-Christians are going to spend eternity burning in hell. He doesn't believe in evolution. He recently the social gospel—the late 19th- and early 20th-century Protestant movement that led a religious crusade against poverty and inequality—as "Marxism in Christian clothing.
Or as Linda Hirshman noted on the WAM listserv (I’m posting this with her permission):
Rick Warren’s site for educating preachers, Pastor.com, has a long essay on why women should submit to their husbands. Here’s the money line: "The Greek word for 'submit' is hupotasso. Hupo means "under" and tasso means "to place in order." The compound word hupotasso means "to place under or in an orderly fashion." Paul didn't dislike women, he liked order! He advocated order in the church, order in government, order in business, and, yes, order in the home.
There have been a lot of heartbroken comments about this on change.gov.
Barack, please, say you respect women—and nonevangelicals—more than this. Please?
-
sponsorship
Today at the deli while waiting for my egg-and-cheese I found myself speaking in affectionate tones to the obese white cat that resides by the cleaning products. It was a strange moment, because for the first thirty years of my life I had a sort of borderline autism (Catberger syndrome?) regarding my relationship with pets. I've lived with many, but never, I am not proud to report, really loved them, even during the three years I didn't eat meat (for environmental reasons, but mostly because of a boyfriend.) Reading today's Washington Post story on the Chinese protests over the cat meat smuggling trade it finally dawned on me why that was:
"Cats have a strong flavor. Dogs taste much better, but if you really want cat meat, I can have it delivered by tomorrow," said the butcher, who gave only her surname, Huang.
It was just this attitude that outraged about 40 cat lovers who unfurled banners in a tearful protest outside the Guangdong government office in Beijing. Many were retirees who care for stray felines they said were being rounded up by dealers.
It is not uncommon for people (like myself) who once lived in China to read news stories about modern-day China that describes a nation that strikes them as thoroughly unrecognizable, but still: when I lived in Guangzhou as a kid in the early nineties I lived next door to a cat restaurant. We knew it was a cat restaurant because the window was adorned with a large cartoon of a cat in a frying pan. I found this kind of gross at first, but having never had pets (allergies) the idea of eating cats did not bother me on a level much more visceral than the idea of eating bird vomit or tripe, especially once I started learning about the innumerable tragedies (see, for instance, here) that had befallen the Chinese people. Well…
The protest was the latest clash between age-old traditions and the new sensibilities made possible by China's growing affluence. Pet ownership was once rare because the Communist Party condemned it as bourgeois and most people simply couldn't afford a cat or dog.
Well what do you know? I guess the Chinese Communist Party succeeded in indoctrinating at least one expatriate kid with the notion that pets were for the bourgeois. (Admittedly at ten I was, myself, a little bourgeois.) Because it still mystifies me a little to know that the cat protest story will drive a few hundred times more internet traffic than, say, Tuesday's story about the much larger (and um, arguably more important?) protest movement in China targeted at getting the government to rein in exploitative employers and crippling inflation.
Although, to be sure, I suppose their concerns are pretty bourgeois as well:
Drivers shared plans for the strike by text message and word of mouth. Taxi driver Liu Mingsheng said the purpose of the strike "spoke to my heart."
"With my salary, I can have an ordinary life. I can buy books, toys and have medical treatment when I need it. But I can no longer have money to pay the bills and to go to dinner and drinks with friends," said Liu, 38, who used to work as a chauffeur for a state-owned company.
Break my bourgeois heart! You know how I feel about drinking with friends. And come to think of it, the last time I got really drunk I ended the night practically spooning a friend's dog. There's a bestseller in there somewhere.
-
sponsorship
Emily Y., Emily B., and Melinda, you all make very important and good points about Caroline Kennedy's possible anointment/appointment to Hillary Clinton's Senate seat. The level of nepotism in Congress is unseemly and does send a negative message to those young people—heck, to adults, too—who are not from rich or famous families and are not politically connected, that they should not even consider going into politics because they have little chance of breaching that increasingly elite wall that separates members of Congress from Average Joe peasants. But I beg to differ a bit with Emily B, who liked the idea of a woman taking over Clinton's seat but wondered if it was right to "overlook Kennedy's lack of most of the usual qualifications, like holding public office?"
Kennedy would not be the first member of Congress to lack that particular qualification. Hillary Clinton had not held public office before becoming a senator either. Even though during the presidential primaries she counted her time as first lady of Arkansas and of the United States as political experience, no one actually elected her to those positions. Using Clinton's logic, if her stints as first lady are to be considered as political experience, then why shouldn't Caroline's membership in a political dynasty be counted, too? After all, she did live for a time in the White House, albeit as a little girl. Other political wives have been similarly appointed to Congress (to fill the seats of their dead spouses) and then went on to win, or lose, re-election. (U.S. Rep. Mary Bono, widow of Sony Bono, and former Sen. Jean Carnahan, wife of the late Sen. Mel Carnahan, come to mind.) Wouldn't it be nice, though, if more members of Congress were like U.S. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy and got there by dint of their own hard work?
-
sponsorship
So Barack Obama has chosen poet Elizabeth Alexander to read at this January's inauguration. Who is she, and why her? It's a choice that reflects his serious, pragmatic side. Alexander is an African-American, born in Harlem in 1962, who has published four books; the last, American Sublime, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A professor of African-American studies at Yale (from which she also matriculated), Alexander writes poems that are metaphorically and linguistically dense, layered, and subtle. Her work speaks about black experience (see the excerpt from The Venus Hottentot on her Web page). But she can't be said to privilege identity politics over aesthetics; her poems work more at being complex than didactic. In this sense, she's an analogue to Obama, who doesn't privilege identity politics over his strategy of inclusiveness. Her choice also reflects Obama's faith in the meritocracy: a poet with a Ph.D., Alexander comes across as methodical and hardworking. I saw her give a reading last fall at Princeton with the wonderful young poet Terrance Hayes, a witty former basketball player (whom I'd half-hoped Obama would choose; he would've reflected the president-elect's playful side). Alexander was businesslike: There was no quipping or flirting with the audience.
Though only four poets (I think) have ever read at inaugurations, Alexander won't actually be the first African-American woman to receive the honor —Bill Clinton asked Maya Angelou to read at his 1993 inauguration. Alexander doesn't have much else in common with Angelou, though; she's more like Robert Frost, who read at Kennedy's inauguration. Her best poems are imaginatively expansive as well as philosophical. Here's a representative poem, called "Stravinsky in L.A." You can imagine Obama liking the end:
Stravinsky in L.A.
In white pleated trousers, peering through green
sunshades, looking for the way the sun is red
noise, how locusts hiss to replicate the sun.
What is the visual equivalent
of syncopation? Rows of seared palms wrinkle
in the heat waves through green glass. Sprinklers
tick, tick, tick. The Watts Towers aim to split
the sky into chroma, spires tiled with rubble
nothing less than aspiration. I've left
minarets for sun and syncopation,
sixty-seven shades of green which I have
counted, beginning: palm leaves, front and back,
luncheon pickle, bottle glass, etcetera.
One day I will comprehend the different
grades of red. On that day I will comprehend
these people, rhythms, jazz, Simon Rodia,
Watts, Los Angeles, aspiration.
-
sponsorship
(Okay, Kim Kardashian would probably be a lot worse.)
So, I hope it doesn't violate any unofficial policy to discuss times certain of us XX Factorians have interacted "In Real Life" because I am going to mention the fact that some of us met Eliot Spitzer on Monday night at the Slate holiday party. Not because I care if he's sufficiently sorry for screwing prostitutes—I'm with you on that, Susannah—but because my brief conversation with the fellow speaks to a concern I have about the woman—and you won't be surprised I'm glad she's a woman!—Obama just appointed to helm the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mary Schapiro. Spitzer agreed with me that the campaign of incoming Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to oust FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair was worrisome, because it suggests Geithner is exactly what you'd fear of someone with Geithner's credentials (Clintonite, New York Fed, Council of Foreign Relations, Kissinger Associates)—an insider. Now we have Schapiro, current CEO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the supposed "self-regulator" of the financial services industry.
If any regulatory body involved in this disaster has been a more abysmal failure than the SEC, it's the "self-regulator" that was supposed to monitor all those concerns the real (i.e., paid slightly less than $2 million a year) regulators had so steadily deregulated out from under them over the past 10 years: mind-blowing overleverage and the attendant counterparty risk, unbridled short-selling, the over-the-counter derivatives that amplified the current crisis, etc., etc. What was Schapiro doing all that time? Cracking down on over-the-top Wall Street …
Parties! (What, you thought I was going to say "bonuses"?) Excuse me while I shoot myself in the face for a second. Would it have killed Obama to appoint someone with the perspective to understand that all those unseemly parties wouldn't have been possible if not for the phony "profits" Wall Street booked selling everyone on their mathematical model-supported certainty that everything would keep going up forever?
Schapiro also took credit in an October speech for pushing to regulate credit-default swaps, the "insurance" contracts on mortage-backed securities written with reckless abandon by many of the recipients of our trillion-dollar bailout. I'm no expert, but nowhere have I read that Wall Street's bank-funded self-regulatory trade group was a leading voice in favor of getting the government to regulate the financial instruments Wall Street claimed it could self-regulate. Even ickier, this smacks of the same sort of retroactive flip-flopping (flip-swapping!) Geithner's promoters have displayed in trying to advance the notion that Geithner, had he been "left to his own devices," would not have allowed Lehman Bros. to go bankrupt. We know who did advocate regulation of derivatives—Schapiro's successor at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born. By all accounts, Born was less "popular" in the post than Schapiro had been. Now more than ever, we need a few good unpopular people in these positions. Why not someone like Born or Bair? Or even less popular right now, a certain Slate columnist? A little exile can be an edifying thing, but no one seems more insider-y than Geithner and Schapiro. (And ugh, for that matter, Caroline Kennedy.)
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?