Yet Another Post About Roman Polanski

First of all, let’s get this part out of the way.  Any and all claims that Roman Polanski should not be extradited to face both sentencing for the 1978 statutory rape charge he pled guilty to and trial for fleeing to France to avoid that sentence are absurd and without merit, and serve to encourage rapists and support rape culture.  And no, that the victim has said she forgives him and doesn’t want the prosecution to continue does not settle the matter.

Second, see Scott Lemieux and C.L. Minou, respectively, on the currently popular (among establishment pundits and conservatives, that is) meme that liberals and the French are supporting Polanski.  It’s true that many people in professional circles that intersect with Polanski’s are demanding his release (though some are not), and some of those people are liberals, but their liberalism has nothing to do with their support of a child rapist: indeed, they’re supporting Polanski despite being liberals, because their loyalty to “one of us” trumps their political, philosophical, and moral beliefs (which I give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they have) that drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl is wrong.  In short, the idea that “free Roman!” is a liberal cause is a fiction, and its primary proponents are the people who have an interest in seeing liberalism delegitimized: right-wing bloggers and pundits, and mainstream Village types.

Third, expanding on some of what I said above, I think it’s interesting and possibly useful to examine why they’re supporting Polanski, because I think it reveals a number of important things about structural problems in our society.  To that end, I’m reproducing a couple of comments I left at Shakesville:

Damn Hollywood fools—what kind of hold does Roman Polanski have on you?

I’ve been thinking about this, and my theory is that the major components are the deeply internalized misogyny that comes with belonging to patriarchal societies (of course); reflexive defense of “one of us”; relatedly, the classist view that rapists are bad, low-class people, so by definition a charming, perhaps slightly debauched rake like Polanski couldn’t possibly be one of them; the common misconstruction of rape as being a kind of bad sex, which allows them to equate Polanski’s case with, say, Lawrence v. Texas; and a perverse kind of self-defense by which, rather than admit to the remotest possibility that they were wrong to hold Polanski in esteem as an artist and a person, they double down on their insistence that he’s the real victim here. This last was the piece that really made it click for me, when I remembered something Amanda wrote at Pandagon a good while back (though she was talking about climate change denialism):

Some people will get so defensive that they’ll actually double down to prove the nay-sayers wrong—they’ll marry that bad boyfriend or put more money into the bad investment. They will, rather than risk the chance that they might get proven wrong and open themselves to a chorus of “I told you sos”, will live in denial about their bad decisions until the last possible moment when it’s becoming clear that they cannot sustain this bad decision any longer.

You know, I think my theory a bit upthread left out something else that’s important. Probably another major component of the mental process that leads all these people — who no doubt think of themselves as good people! — to sign on in support of a fugitive child rapist is that they believe in what I’ve called the myth of the individual, or put another way, are bad (as are many people) at thinking systemically, seeing things as parts of systems. So (along with all the other parts) to them this is purely a matter of something one person did to another, a long time ago, which the one has suffered for (in some rather dubious sense of the word “suffer”) and the other has forgiven, and so that should be the end of it; they don’t, or can’t, or refuse to see that it’s an act which affects more than just Polanski and his victim.

I think a lot of these same elements — “one of us,” the idea that by definition only low-class, bad people can be rapists, the misconstruction of rape as sex, the unwillingness to admit to a mistaken judgment of character, and the mistaken idea that a crime (especially mistaken in the case of a hate crime like rape) is a matter solely between the victim and the perpetrator and has no external ramifications — can also be seen in another recent example of rape culture at work.

Another Note on Kennedy: Politicization

Atrios and Amanda Marcotte have this exactly right, of course.  And more generally, as Aimai notes, using a major figure’s death to try to galvanize support for the causes that person believed in is a perfectly normal, reasonable thing to do, and it would really be nice if we’d all stop pretending that there’s something wrong with saying: Ted Kennedy is no longer with us, but let us honor his memory by fighting harder, by doubling our efforts, to achieve those goals to which he dedicated his life.  Health care for all.  A living wage for all.  Equality under the law.  The principle that human rights do not end where citizenship does.  A better world.

After all, on the one hand Kennedy was a master politician.  He loved politics, he lived and breathed politics, he believed — as I believe — that politics is not only a necessary, inherent part of human life but has the potential to be used for great good.  To suggest that we would do him best honor by refraining from politics seems odd, at best.  And on the other hand, it’s not as though conservatives are going to scrupulously avoid “politicizing” his death, though they’ll mainly do it under cover of pretending to decry liberal “politicization.”  Indeed, digby points out that Limbaugh is already doing this.

Actually, Limbaugh is a little bit right, here, though I’m pretty sure it’s by accident.  Attaching Kennedy’s name to the bill most likely to pass — some watered-down compromise with no public option and a lot of giveaways to insurance companies — would be an insult to his memory.  Senator Kennedy was a pragmatic incrementalist, as also am I, but he always fought to get as much as he thought he could each time.  Incrementalism ceases to be pragmatic if you seek only the tiniest improvement even when a greater leap is feasible, and health care, now, is surely such a case.  Nearly four in five Americans supports a public option. To fail to take advantage of that opportunity, and especially to embrace such failure as a fitting tribute to Senator Kennedy’s legacy, would truly be an insult.

RIP Ted Kennedy

We have lost one of the greatest public servants our country has ever known.

I can’t write anything else and stay coherent.  Goodbye, Senator.  Thank you.

Update: I still can’t stand to write much, but it’s worth noting that today is a year to the day from Senator Kennedy’s speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention where then-Senator Obama was nominated as the Democratic candidate for President; and that it is the 89th anniversary of the 19th Amendment taking effect, designated Women’s Equality Day in 1971.

Punishment, Revenge, Compassion and the Nature of Civilization

A little less than a week ago, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, a Libyan man convicted of the Pan-Am Flight 103 bombing which killed 270 people over Lockerbie, Scotland, was released from prison to return to Libya, under the authority of the Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill.  Probably the most succinct summary of events is the  BBC’s timeline, but there’s been much ink spilled over this, so by all means ask The Google if you need more information.

As I say, much ink has been spilled, virtually all of it in outrage as far as I can tell.  Al-Megrahi is dying of final-stage terminal prostate cancer, yet there are deafening cries from all over the US and the UK that to have released a dying man who could harm no one now, so that he might die, one hopes a bit more comfortable, at home, surrounded by family, and so that his family might have the comfort of seeing him again — that to have done this is monstrous, horrible, an affront to justice and rightness and an insult to the families of al-Megrahi’s victims.

What I would like to know is, how does it help the families of the victims, or serve the cause of justice, to inflict unnecessary suffering on a helpless, terminally ill person?  Don’t demand revenge and claim it’s justice you want: the two are incompatible.  Indeed, revenge and civilization are incompatible.

Societies have the right to punish people by imprisonment and confiscation of assets, to the extent that such punishment helps to deter future crime and is not disproportionate to what the criminal has done, and to the extent that confiscated assets can help to compensate the criminal’s victims; and societies have the right to imprison people who commit crimes, so long again as the duration of imprisonment is not disproportionate to the damage done to society by the criminal, to protect society from further damage.  No reasonable person could suggest that any of these purposes is served by keeping a terminally ill man in prison, without access to adequate medical care, for the last, painful months of his life.

To refuse to release al-Megrahi would have been to repay barbarism with barbarism.  Secretary MacAskill clearly made the right choice.

Grove Street Summer Wheat, Big IPA

I’m late posting about this, but waaaay back on June 28th, I brewed Grove Street Summer Wheat.  I finally got around to bottling it last Sunday, July 26th.  Oops.  It was my first foray into stovetop partial-mash brewing, which went surprisingly well.

This past Monday, 7/27, I tried it again, making Grove Street Big IPA, which I expect to be bottling in about another week and a half.

Both recipes used a mash of 4lbs grain, and I calculated the volume and temperature for the strike and sparge water with the very handy SpargePal app on my iPod.  The whole procedure required the use of all four pots in my 2/3/4/5-gallon stockpot set, and I’m sure that with a better sparging method I could get much clearer wort, but overall I’m very happy with the results so far (but ask me again once I’ve tried one of the beers!).

Hops!

I started trying to grow hops in my backyard last year.  Between being busy developing their root systems, and occasional run-ins with a weedwhacker, they never got very far, and only the Cascade (I had also planted Mt. Hood and Sunbeam) made it through the winter.  This year, though, I put up a proper wooden trellis and a little fence around the base of the bine to make sure it was clear that this is a thing that is supposed to be here. (more…)

(What Does It Take For CNN To) Fire Lou Dobbs

As folks like the indispensable Dave Neiwert have amply chronicled, CNN’s primetime star Lou Dobbs has long provided a mainstream loudspeaker for radical racist/xenophobic nativism, and contributed to the atmosphere of paranoia about “illegals” that leads to the murder of 9-year-old-girls.  His vicious, fact-free anti-immigrant ravings alone should have prevented him from ever being allowed a spot on a major news network.

But now he’s picked an additional target, and a new set of paranoid fantasies: President Obama and the Birther cause.  It’s hard to imagine how he could get any farther beyond the pale at this point.

Media Matters’ press release covers the essentials and links to a number of their other posts on the subject.  Ta-Nehisi and tristero are all over it too, and make very good points, as usual.

CNN needs to either fire Dobbs, or drop the “News” from their name and give similar amounts of coverage to every equally plausible conspiracy theory: the moon-landing-hoax theory, for example, and the Roswell coverup, and of course the 9/11 Truthers while we’re at it.  Maybe throw in a special on how no one really knows for sure whether the Freemasons secretly control all the governments of the world.  Rehire Glenn Beck, why not?  He’s no crazier than the Birthers.

Dobbs is an embarrassment, CNN.  Dump him: your credibility’s on the line.