linkery

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.

Quick Hit: Transparency Corps

A while back I posted about a project I highly approve of, the Obameter.

Current Obameter stats:

Obameter Stats as of 2009-06-30

Obameter Stats as of 2009-06-30

(Hooray for Google Charts!)

Along similar lines, but more participatory, is the Sunlight Foundation’s Transparency Corps project, which aims to enlist internet users en masse (I refuse to use the term “crowdsource”) the tedious work of scrutinizing public, but dense, records to ensure more, well, transparency.  As of this writing, they have only two projects — one to read earmarks and one to exhort Congresspeople to read bills before signing them — but I hope it takes off.  It’s a very good idea.

(Other noteworthy efforts along these lines: the indispensible OpenCongress (also a Sunlight Foundation project); for those of us in Massachusetts, the OpenCongress-inspired OpenMass, run by BMG‘s own Jim Caralis; Filibusted, which as you might guess tracks who filibusters what, how often and for how long; and the unfortunately-named — hey y’all, you might want to notice that they ain’t all men no more — but very handy Know Thy Congressman.  The latter two were the first- and tied-for-third-place winners, respectively, in the Sunlight Foundation’s Apps for America contest, which is also a great idea.)

Silence is the Enemy

I am lucky: I was born male in a society that values male persons more than female persons, and, arbitrarily, accords the former undeserved privileges while unjustly denying the latter their full equal rights as human beings.  I am lucky: because of that undeserved privilege, and the way our misogynist culture works, and some measure of random chance, I have not been a target of sexual assault.  I am lucky: I live in a society which, though misogynist, has a relatively effective system of laws, the application of which, even over my three decades of life, has been, on the whole, more closely (if slowly) approaching justice.  The people I know, in my real-world, meat-space life, are lucky: disproportionately few of the women I know are survivors of sexual assault or rape — or at least, as far as I know; but it’s also not unlikely that I simply don’t know about many cases, because our misogynist culture teaches women to be ashamed of, and silent about, having been the victim of crime.

Sheril Kirshenbaum at The Intersection, along with Isis the Scientist, Aetiology, Bioephemera, Neurotopia and The Questionable Authority, has launched a project, inspired by a Nick Kristof column, to bring attention and pressure to bear to try to end the epidemic of mass rape around the world.

Kirshenbaum, taking seriously the idea that silence is the enemy, opens her post by describing her experience with sexual assault.  She’s right: if survivors refuse to be silent and ashamed, it becomes harder and harder for people who’d prefer not to upset the apple cart to pretend the status quo is tenable.

It’s important, however, not to misunderstand this (which I don’t think Kirshenbaum does; she’s just picked a particular focus) as a problem of Darfur, or the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Liberia, or West Africa, or “elsewhere.”  There are certain places in the world — generally, places where a state of war or lawlessness has lasted a long time: mass rape has long been used as a weapon of war, even by our own soldiers — where these things happen in such numbers, and with such brutality, that it can be hard to believe.  The roots of these problems are deep, and are intertwined with histories of colonization and exploitation, and of war, and of poverty.

But we should not believe that we in the “West1” are so much better.  We have, in the United States for example, a functioning government, and relatively fair laws, and no war is being fought on our soil.  But even so, by the most widely accepted estimate, at least one in six women will be sexually assaulted or raped at least once in her lifetime.

Let me rephrase that, actually, because it’s important that we do not linguistically hide the criminals.  Men2 will sexually assault or rape at least one in six women. It’s not just something that happens, it’s something people do.  And like the women of Congo, the women of Darfur, the women of Liberia, like Sheril Kirshenbaum, silence is also the enemy of these women.  Silence is the enemy of the one in six who have been assaulted, and the enemy of the five in six who have not, but who are also in danger.  Silence is the enemy of the men who have been victims of sexual assault, because the weight of culturally-imposed shame falls heavily on them as well.  Silence is the enemy of the men, too, who have never harmed anyone, many of whom simply do not know, because our misogynist culture of shame and silence is not set up for them to know, the true extent and impact of sexual assault and rape.

Two months ago, Melissa McEwan opened a thread at Shakesville to try to help break that silence: the more we understand the extent of this horror, the less excuse we have not to fight to end it.  Silence is the enemy; these stories need to be heard.

1 “West”?  West of what?  We are “the West” only insofar as we are west of “the East” — but it is “the East” only insofar as it is east of us.  Neither, as Edward Said wrote, has any ontological stability.
2 No, not only men; women commit sexual assualt and rape as well.  But the vast majority of such crimes are committed by men, and the problem is inextricably intertwined with our conceptions of “masculinity.”

Domestic Terrorism

A good man was murdered yesterday.

Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas was one of only a handful — perhaps two, or three, or four, there doesn’t appear to be a clear consensus — of doctors in the entire United States who perform late-term abortions.

Yesterday, as he was walking into church services, someone shot and killed him.

Tiller has been a major target of the anti-choice movement for a very long time.  He has lived with near-constant death threats, frequent vandalism, and other intimidation and demonization, for many years; in 1993, in an earlier attempt on his life, he was shot in both arms, but recovered and returned to practice.

Only a couple of months ago, he was acquitted of trumped-up misdemeanor charges brought in an attempt to prevent him from helping women.

He has been attacked by Bill O’Reilly, persecuted via the Kansas legal system and, now, murdered for doing his duty as a doctor as best he saw it to help women who, on top of being faced with terrible, heartbreaking decisions, were being bombarded from all sides by messages that they were bad, unworthy people who deserved no help.

They did deserve help, of course.  They do deserve help.  Dr. Tiller was one of very few people willing to help them; and now that number is smaller.

It’s important to understand this about late-term abortions: they are a procedure that is simply never performed except for reasons of medical necessity.  They are performed when the mother’s health is gravely imperiled by the pregnancy or the prospect of giving birth, or when the fetus suffers from congenital deformities or defects which will ensure its life is very brief and very painful, or when the fetus is already dead to save the mother the trauma of delivering a stillborn baby, or sometimes when the mother’s only chance to survive cancer is to enroll in an experimental treatment which doesn’t accept pregnant women.  No one ever, ever wants late-term abortions to be necessary; but sometimes they are.

Now that there is one fewer doctor who performs these procedures in the country, many women will be unable to have this necessary procedure performed.  Some will be bankrupted trying to pay for medical care for an infant which cannot survive.  Some will be plunged into depression over delivering a corpse or watching helplessly as their babies die.  Some — dozens? perhaps a hundred or more? — will die along with their fetuses, due to the birth complications that made the abortion a necessity.

The domestic terrorist who murdered Dr. Tiller has killed them too.

I was going to add links to this post, but so much has been written that I hardly know where to start.  Virtually every political blog on my blogroll has one or more posts about it, should any readers want more.

So I’ll just point to Jill Filipovic’s list of suggested organizations to donate money to in Dr. Tiller’s honor, to Sara Robinson’s explanation of how terrorism like this is a natural consequence — indeed, the goal — of decades of right-wing eliminationist rhetoric, and to Ann’s list of things we can do.

Quick Hit: It's Sotomayor

The Times is reporting that President Obama has selected Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee for the Supreme Court seat Justice David Souter will be vacating when he retires at the end of this term.  From what I’ve read this seems like an excellent choice, though I was also excited about the prospect of a couple of his other short-listers, Dean Elena Kagan or Judge Diane Wood, being picked.  I hope that I’m right in believing her record shows her to be more likely to side with the powerless than the powerful; it’s also very exciting to have the first Latino on the court.

Signal Boost: There Must Be Accountability

This is mainly me doing my paltry best to boost signal for Teh Portly Dyke’s post on the necessity of investigations and prosecutions for the war crimes committed by the US government over the past eight years (a subject I’ve mentioned before).

Launching a war of aggression is a war crime. Torturing prisoners is a war crime. Refusing to investigate and prosecute war crime is itself a war crime. And if the rule of law means anything, it means the mighty are bound by the same laws as the small, and president, ministers and CEOs may not be excused for their misconduct on grounds of expediency anymore than pickpockets or junkies.

PD has issued a pledge and a challenge to write letters weekly until investigations commence. I don’t know whether I will manage to do that — it often takes me months to write a single blog post — but I will try, and I encourage you to as well.

The Nicest Thing Anyone's Ever Done For Me*

So, a little while ago there was this thread over at Shakesville, where standard mockery of a wingnut’s absurd hyperbole quickly devolved into a barrage of our own absurd hyperbole.  Note that “quickly” here means “by the second comment.”

In the course of the thread, Jen said,

No fair. Scott’s got his hyperbole shield on. It’s like he wants to destroy us all with snappy comebacks while remaining immune himself. SCOTT MADIN IS THE EBOLA VIRUS OF THE INTERNET.

To which I responded, as anyone would, “I want that on a plaque.”

Reader, I did not have to wait long!

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