In a sad recycling of historical patterns, a statement that Philip K. Hitti made regarding the Christian-Muslim exchange during the period of the crusades resonates with today’s events: “The Christian military venture left Islam more militant, less tolerant, and more self-centered.” Ironic that, at a time when some members of the American government are pooh-poohing Islam as retrograde and anti-democratic, it is precisely the religious rhetoric and religio-political discourse of “evil,” that is Christianizing the American-led venture into Iraq and is creating such strong and popular Islamist responses and retaliations that are at least couched in religious terms.
  
When we speak about an Islamist — or somehow Islamically oriented — movement, it is important to note that it would be a mischaracterization to necessarily absorb an Islamist movement exclusively into the religious sphere. It would be incorrect to understand a movement such as al-Qaeda, for example, as a strictly or even primarily religious movement. While al-Qaeda recruitment tapes are couched in religious language and utilize religious sympathies, the primary argument of al-Qaeda is a political one. Al-Qaeda makes an internationalist jihadist argument; an excellent source for information on this topic is the project that was undertaken by the Columbia International Affairs Online site that provides excerpts from and analyses of the Osama bin Laden recruitment tapes.  

In so adamantly adding a religious glaze to political topics and by consistently employing  religious and moral language — such as the “axis of evil,” and the consistent description of the insurgency movements in Iraq as “evil,” — the current administration, the media, commentators, and ordinary citizens who utilize such language are, it seems, making Christians more Christian, Muslims more Muslim, and all parties involved more extreme and uncompromising. Language is being actualized in politics and pushing religion to its extremes. In Hitti’s terms, “The Christian military venture left Islam more militant, less tolerant, and more self-centered.”  

The horrendous acts we have seen in the media lately — the brutal and inhumane beheading of an American civilian recorded on videotape, the naked Iraqi prisoners of Abu Ghraib jail being taunted and dehumanized — are shocking, vile, and horrifying. There is no question that what has been done is wrong. The question is, rather, is there anything positive to be gained by posing political questions in the religious and moral language of good versus evil?

We must understand the current state of affairs in Iraq as a situation that is beyond good and evil; to transpose political questions into the religious and moral sphere is to make all camps involved “more militant, less tolerant, and more self-centered.”

Mimi Hanaoka

On Monday morning, when municipal buildings across Massachusetts open at nine o’clock, hundreds of couples will already be standing in line with blood tests, state identification, and 50 bucks in cash. Despite conservative efforts to petition the Supreme Court for intervention, on May 17, the pilgrims’ state will become the first in the nation to marry same-sex couples.

We learned in elementary school that the pilgrims founded Massachusetts in order to find religious freedom, and so in a way it’s fitting that the former colony now resume its position as a civil liberties trailblazer. Its governor is not so happy with this honor. Mitt Romney’s orders for municipal employees to block out-of-state residents from marrying surely pleases the protestors who line up outside Faneuil Hall to protest sexual sin.

But do those protestors support a constitutional amendment to protect marriage? As Sunday’s New York Times reports, maybe not. The amendment, now dead in Congress, isn’t gaining the kind of support hoped for among conservative Christians. Groups such as the Alliance for Marriage are getting nervous and hoping that the sight of the Massachusetts marriages prompts a greater outcry.

When President Bush called for the amendment back in February, he stated that ”On a matter of such importance, the voice of the people must be heard.“ But perhaps Bush and Romney and their fellow conservatives are mishearing. Perhaps the people are more concerned with other issues. It’s hard to believe that the sight of men and women in wedding dresses will stir up greater wrath or sorrow than the pictures we’ve seen these past weeks in our newspapers. To condemn commitments made out of love seems almost petty in comparison. The conservative mission to stop gay marriage is far from over, but maybe it’s getting old, and a little hard of hearing.

llouison

Can an attempt to promote tolerance actually be based on intolerance? This is the question many people must be asking after the Vatican warned Catholic women not to marry Muslim men because such men don’t respect women.

While there is much to be said for encouraging other religions to be more tolerant of their own people, the Vatican’s proclamation is indeed troubling. Not only is the Pope’s announcement based on a stereotype that isn’t true of all Muslim men, but by universalizing what it means to be Muslim (and male), the Vatican risks widening the rift between Judeo-Christian ethics and those of other religions. In fact, the Vatican’s proclamation sounds an awful lot like the rhetoric we heard the Bush administration use immediately after 9/11 as it sought to justify the invasion of Afghanistan in the name of liberation of, amongst other things, Afghani women from their “backward” traditions.

Am I saying that oppression of women is a good thing, or that no Muslim sects (or Jewish sects, or Christian sects, or almost every other religion imaginable) do oppress women? No. But you wouldn’t know that by listening to the Vatican’s proclamation, and that is what is so frightening about it.

Remember the intense ethnic profiling experienced by Arabs in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001? Remember the hate crimes that befell men and women with brown skin — regardless of their beliefs and origins — because the media and American politicans somehow convinced many people that it was in fact Islam that led 19 (or was it 21?) men to fly planes into the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and a field in Pennsylvania? The logic was remarkably similar for it too was a logic based on stereotyping an entire religion based on the actions of a small group of men who did indeed claim to be Muslim, but whose beliefs were not consistent with or representative of all — or even most — people of the Muslim faith.

I also find the Vatican’s paternalism toward women in this statement to be a bit intriguing. If the Vatican does in fact believe that Islam is an oppressive religion and that its followers are raised to be intolerant, then why just instruct Catholic women not to marry Muslim men? Sure, the Vatican may assert that if a Catholic man were to marry a Muslim woman, he would afford her the respect that men of her own religion don’t. But he would still be marrying into her family, which likely includes Muslim men. And if he and she were to have children together, how would they raise them so that they wouldn’t practice alleged intolerance? In other words, why is it that Catholic men can “save” Muslim women, while Catholic women need to be “saved” by the Vatican? And who is to say that someone of the Muslim faith couldn’t provide a stable relationship, a sense of belonging even, for a Catholic woman?

Finally, what is also intriguing about the Vatican’s statement is that it relies on the assumption that Catholicism doesn’t oppress women and that Catholicism is tolerant of difference. But I’ve had friends who couldn’t be married by a Catholic priest unless they vowed not to ever use birth control, which many — even most — progressives consider a product of the cultural revolution of the 1960s that was essential to women’s liberation. Do all Catholics favor abstinence and oppose abortion? No. But by the same rationale, perhaps the Vatican should recognize that tolerance cannot be bred by stereotyping the beliefs and practices of an entire class of people based upon the beliefs and practices of a mere segment of that population.

Laura Nathan-Garner

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She had on one of those ironic, hipster t-shirts, whose invocation to “D.A.R.E to Keep Your Kids off Drugs” vied with her breasts for attention. I pressed my lips against hers and inhaled deeply, too deeply for my virgin lungs. I turned red from equal parts coughing and embarrassment. It wasn’t my idea to build a water pipe out of a mannequin clad in an anti-drug slogan, but it seemed funny at the time. And though I never became and don’t plan on becoming a pothead, I still find it funny.

In this month’s issue of In These Times, Ana Marie Cox (editor of the blog Wonkette!) turns her inventive prose towards a series of similarly misguided efforts to market civic virtue. In “Pimping the Vote”, she examines the recent brouhaha over the Urban Outfitters t-shirt that declared, “Voting is for old people.” “It’s funny,” she explains, “because it’s true. If anything, the mere existence of the shirt — to say nothing of its sales — suggests a level of acknowledgement of the democratic process one wouldn’t expect from a demographic more likely to vote for an American Idol than an American president.” Where most see alienated youth culture, Cox sees a new brand of civic engagement. She then contrasts this with the myriad get out the youth vote efforts, which have emerged this election cycle. After a series of cheap, though entertaining, shots at Smackdow Your Vote, Declare Yourself, Hip-Hop Action Summit Network and Rock the Vote, she cuts to the chase and asks, “Is there a way to make voting appeal to 18-year-olds that doesn’t depend on making voting seem cool?” Must we endure perrenial visits from Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No” ghost?    

While I’m with her for every step of her diagnostic, she loses me with her remedy. “Maybe we should stop trying to make voting cool,” argues Cox. “We should just show kids what happens when they don’t. In other words, we need to get them to watch the news.” I agree that it’s important for us to do a better job showing young people the opportunity costs of not voting. But increased news watching is a vague solution to say the least. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that more news watching would not help. What’s the vision here? A society of bloggers? A world where “Meet the Press” has higher ratings than 10-year-old “Friends” reruns?

Watching the news is not enough; we need to make the news. Rather than focusing on voting every four years, which panders as much as any stump speech, we need to focus on civic participation in the non-election years and at all levels of government, not just the White House. Its not just about whether the medium is cool or not, its a question of targeting the problem at a scale to which young citizens can relate. Perhaps this sounds counterintuitive, but the most direct route to the voting booth may be miles from the polling station. I’m right there with Cox, yearning for civic marketing that doesn’t feel the need to be cool, but her lack of solutions makes me empathize with all the less-than-perfect GOTV efforts. Though misguided, at least they’re trying.    

Benjamin Helphand

Rush Limbaugh should probably consider himself lucky that he isn’t running for office and isn’t a contestant on some reality show. If he was, I’m pretty sure that he couldn’t even get a vote of support from his own constituents on the right. For it’s difficult — I’d venture to say nearly unfathomable — to imagine anyone with half a conscience could compare the torture in Iraq with Sex and the City, Britney Spears, and Madonna. But Rush did it. And this was no slip of the tongue that the guy now regrets. As  he told his radio show audience:

Folks, these torture pictures with the women torturers, I mean Marv Albert looking at those pictures would say, “Hey, that doesn’t look so bad.” You know, if you really look at these pictures, I mean I don’t know if it’s just me but it looks like anything you’d see Madonna or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe you can get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean this is something you can see at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City: the Movie. I mean, it’s just me.

I’m all for free speech, but this guy definitely needs to be voted off the island for his unique combination of ignorance and lack of empathy. I can only hope that the vote would be unanimous on this count …

Laura Nathan-Garner

It’s been said that a picture tells a thousand words. But what does the image do for those on the receiving end of those thousand words?

The media has been flooded with stories about images lately. First, there were the photographs of the coffins draped with American flags and  filled with the bodies of American soldiers killed in combat in Iraq. Then, last week, the world saw the painful phographs of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of American soldiers (and rest assured that there will almost certainly be more photographs where those came from in the coming weeks). And yesterday, when the Justice Department announced that it was reopening the Emmett Till murder case, a case that sparked the civil rights movement 50 years ago and brought international attention to the United States’ treatment of blacks, the media harkened back to the power of an image. That is, Till’s murder arguably prompted so much attention at the time because images of his mangled body were shown to the world as he lay in his coffin. Now some are saying that the power of the image in sparking a movement for justice 50 years ago should serve as a reminder of the power of an image to produce change today.

This raises some interesting questions, however. Certainly, action is already being taken by the government to “clean house” in Iraq and to stop future instances of torture. But this is at least partially an attempt for the government to, as some would say, “cover its own ass” and ensure that it looks like it is doing something to take care of the problem.

But whether the torture will end permanently in Iraq and elsewhere as a result of these political endeavors and pressure by human rights advocates is questionable, perhaps even unlikely. For if political tides have taught us anything, it’s that images can hold our attention for only a brief while. They can motivate us to take action, but can they ensure that this action is sustainable?

Fifty years ago, images of Till’s mangled body jump-started the civil rights movement, which produced change but still has a ways to go. For now when we see images of suffering of and violence against minorities in our own country — images of people living in desolate poverty on the street or inhumane treatment of prisoners in U.S. prisons — we often consider those to be the “facts of life,” perhaps feeling sorry for those people, perhaps even giving some spare change to the person standing on the corner or even getting involved with some activist organization until it conflicts with our own schedules or until we find another cause to champion.

Am I dismissing these images of Iraqi suffering or even American suffering at the hands of more powerful people? Certainly not. Rather, I’m questioning the power of images to maintain a sustained interest and a sustained action on the behalf of the suffering — action that is not merely guided by pity or sympathy, but one that is rooted in empathy. This question may be more relevant today than it was 50 years ago given how saturated the media is with images and given the proliferation of media outlets. It’s easy to get distracted — and not necessarily with just lighthearted fare. In a time when it is often difficult to find much good in the world, a time when we seem to be learning about some new atrocity every week — while also living our own, arguably much more comfortable lives — it’s all too easy to get distracted and far too difficult to genuinely understand what the people in those images are going through, to experience the inhumanity of their suffering. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Laura Nathan-Garner

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Under the tentative and decidedly uncatchy header “Self-Censorship in Broadcasting Seen as Rising,” The New York Times today reports that radio and television companies are operating at an increasingly paranoid level of self-censorship in the post-Janet Jackson breast era. At a time when we are seeing photos of American soldiers posing in their memento photos with naked and tortured Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib jail, we can ask the question: What sort of damages are the television and radio stations avoiding in their vigilant self-censorship?  

This is not to say that it may be inappropriate for a young child to be unexpectedly exposed to Janet Jackson’s increasingly gimmicky and breasty attempts to salvage her career. It is also of the utmost importance that the media report and investigate the horrendous abuses that have occurred perhaps systematically and most certainly at Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. Given this curious and unfortunate juxtaposition, we can certainly explore the question of what is possibly being gained by the increased level of self-censorship in radio and television.

Self-imposed censorship is clearly preferable to external restrictions imposed by a potentially stalinistic Federal Communications Commission. However, when we put the petty offenses — titles such as Elton John’s “The Bitch Is Back,” the contents of “Masterpiece Theater,” which is surely one of the least prurient programs on television, and the word “urinate,” which an Indianapolis radio station bleeped out of Rush Limbaugh’s talk show — into their appropriate context, we can appreciate that what is censored out of radio and television is innocuous and benign when compared with the honest truth regarding the coalition soldiery in Iraq.  

Mimi Hanaoka

A pair of teenagers suing McDonald’s for their staggering obesity is both alarming and laughable; equally shocking and heart-breakingly funny is Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock’s documentary about his self-imposed and meticulously monitored month-long McDonald’s binge.  

Super Size Me certainly explores the question of where corporate responsibility bleeds into personal accountability, but the film focuses on the more gruesome results of a McDonald’s-only diet and on a culture of a fast food nation. For 30 increasingly pudgy days, Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald’s, three times a day, and mimicked the average exercise pattern of an American by walking no more than a few thousand steps a day.

Spurlock traveled around the country — we see him shoveling down McDonald’s in cities in California, Texas, West Virginia, Illinois, and Massachusetts, in addition to his home base of New York City — and we see him exploring the lunch rooms of public schools where children happily eat lunches of French fries and cookies while the teachers’ eyes — usually so beady and watchful — callously and irresponsibly turn blind during lunch hour.  

One of the more alarming scenes of the documentary features some first graders at a school in Massachusetts identifying the people and characters in the pictures that Spurlock presents to them. The children generally manage to identify George Washington, though they seem to have little idea of why they manage to recognize him; one child identifies a very typical depiction of Jesus — pale skin, shoulder length hair, a compassionate gaze and a sacred glow warming his visage — as George W. Bush; all children successfully identify Ronald McDonald. One child claims that Ronald McDonald helps operate the cashier, while another child states that Ronald brings all of his friends to McDonald’s (presumably to have a roaringly good and wholesome time in the enclosed McDonald’s playground), but all children demonstrate a remarkable level of brand recognition.  

Aspects of Super Size Me resonate with Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, a piece of investigative journalism with judiciously used research by Eric Schlosser. Spurlock’s condemnation of McDonald’s is evident, well-argued, and humorously articulated. But the underlying argument is far more compelling; far from scape-goating McDonald’s and the McDonaldization of America as the pure source of American obesity, we as individuals are ultimately the most important and powerful custodians of our health.  

Mimi Hanaoka

What happens when disenfranchised people receive too many rights? Apparently, in Tennessee they get banned from the state for violating the laws of nature by virtue of their very existence…

Or at least that’s what officials in Rhea County, Tennessee, did to gays this past March — before the county commission’s decision was reversed two days later.

To read more, click here.

Laura Nathan-Garner

Thursday night marked the end of an era. If you somehow missed it, NBC’s hit show Friends finally came to a not-so-screeching halt. Whether you’re a fan of the show or not, you’ve likely noticed how uncannily undiverse the characters on the show were.

In a 10-year period, there was an Asian woman and an African American woman, each of whose characters are only on the show for a few episodes. I can’t even recall seeing any people of color sitting around as extras in Central Perk, the coffee shop frequented by the six friends.

Ross’ first wife turned out to be a lesbian, who later married another woman, but both women were as prissy and unlesbian as most of the show’s heterosexual characters.

Monica and Ross’ characters were Jewish — but only when it was convenient. Sure, Ross showed up dressed as the “Channukah armadillo” in his attempt to teach his son about Channukah, one of the most minor of Jewish holidays (though the commercial exploits surrounding Christmas might lead you to believe otherwise). But you might recall Monica and Chandler struggling to find a priest to marry them. A rabbi was never discussed or even mentioned. And Ross was married three times, but again, no reference to Jewish customs for the wedding ceremony to his British bride, Emily. In other words, Ross and Monica were Jewish when the show’s writers remembered that they hadn’t mentioned the lesbian ex-wife or Ross’ relationships with the Asian woman and the African American woman lately.

And all six of the main characters lived in large, extremely nice Manhattan apartments, despite working as a professor of paleontology (at a university that was neither NYU — save for a brief guest professorship — nor Columbia, and thus likely public and unable to pay its professors six-digit salaries), a chef, a masseuse, an assistant buyer for Ralph Lauren, an actor with little-to-no skills, and some kind of office job that is never really defined on the show. Perhaps if they were working constantly, they could afford the lifestyles they live, but they don’t. In fact, in the rare moments when these characters were shown at work, they were flirting or goofing off.

I know, I know. It is just television. It’s entertaining, and it’s no different than most anything you’d see on any other show. But I’m not sure that that is a sufficient excuse. I have never seen any statistics about the demographics of the sitcom’s audience, but from people I’ve spoken to, I definitely get the sense that the show appeals to white upper-middle-class youth and 20- and 30-somethings. And I’ve definitely spoken to more than one person who has said that he or she didn’t watch shows like Friends because he or she didn’t see anyone who looked like him- or herself on the show. That is, many people can’t identify with the show’s characters and exclude themselves from the show’s audience because the producers have excluded them and given them nothing and no one to relate to.

I know the same could be said of almost any sitcom, probably even The Cosby Show. I’m uncertain as to whether the same could be said of dramas since the only one I watch regularly is ER, which is likely an exceptional case which features doctors and other characters of all backgrounds, races, and ethnicities. But then again, they work at the county hospital, so people would probably start to wonder if all of the characters were white and well-to-do at a public hospital struggling to remain open.

Thanks to the rise of cable television, there are now networks that target particular groups of people. BET, for instance, targets African American audiences. The Oxygen Channel targets women. So there are attempts being made to appeal to diverse audiences, but it’s intriguing — even a bit disheartening — that this is occuring more as a separatist project outside the mainstream than as a way to address the lack of diversity and underrepresentation of certain demographics on mainstream television stations.

Laura Nathan-Garner

Words/concepts are defined through the context of their usage and their relation to/interaction with other words/concepts.  According to H.L. Goodall in Writing the New Ethnography (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) our “textual positions,” the “language choices you make to represent what you see,” provide clues to the way in which you “see” the world and how you act in it (134). The selection and arrangement of verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs; the usage of humor, sarcasm, irony, and inventive analogies/metaphors; and your level of emotional intensity are all signs of what you have lived through (experiences) and helps others to relate to you and your positions (or not). This is the position that making meaning is always a dialogic process. Allan Irving and Ken Moffatt state that:

“Dialogue in Bakhtin’s view is more than just two people talking; the more a word is used in our speech the more contexts and nuances it gathers and the word’s meanings proliferate with each encounter. Our utterances (another of Bakhtin’s words) do not forget but rather carry fragments from all our previous speech acts as well as the significance from the current context and this includes even forms of intonation. All utterances are double-voiced, bringing meanings with them, perhaps trailing them, but spoken into the here and now into the ongoing dialogues of our lives. ‘Every word,’ Bakhtin wrote, ‘gives off the scent of a profession, a genre, a current, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an era, a day, and an hour. Every word smells of the context and contexts in which it has lived its intense social life.’”

Words/concepts go through a process of social accretion in which the more they are used, the more meanings attach themselves to our usage of these words/concepts. As these words become weighted down with multiple meanings, a paradoxical effect takes place that causes language-users to assume that these words are stable in their meaning, and these assumptions can easily lead to misunderstandings or manipulation. The poet Gary Snyder in “The Etiquette of Freedom” (The Practice of the Wild. North Point Press, 1990) reminds us that:

“Words are used as signs, as stand-ins, arbitrary and temporary, even as language reflects (and informs) the shifting values of the peoples whose minds it inhabits and glides through. We have faith in ‘meaning’ the way we might believe in wolverines — putting trust in the occasional reports of others or on the authority of once seeing a pelt. But it is sometimes worth tracking these tricksters back.” (8)

Of course, as we all know, a word like community, democracy, terrorist, home, love, place, freedom, identity, etc., does not have just ‘one’ meaning, and there are continuous struggles over what they do mean. It’s obvious, or is it … how can we sift through the noble lies?

Bill at Thoughts on the Eve of the Apocalypse points out a well-reasoned, passionate and reconstructive look at the language of the War on Terror:

It reminds me of the series of essays by the linguist George Lakoff at Alternet that looks at the metaphors of the War on Terror.

Dion Dennis over at CTheory has been similarly examining the imagistic language of the current regime.

Bill, after an earlier version of this musing, also suggested that the interested reader consult a pair of essays by Renana Brooks, PhD, who according to a Nation bio, is a “clinical psychologist practicing in Washington, D.C. She heads the Sommet Institute for the Study of Power and Persuasion and is completing a book on the virtue myth and the conservative culture of domination.” The essays, The Character Myth and A Nation of Victims, examine the carefully constructed myth of George Bush as the “moral” hero and Bush’s mastery of “emotional language as a political tool.”

This gross manipulation of language and symbols for political ends has become so blatant that many staunch defenders of America have abandoned the Bush cause because they realize that this position only further radicalizes groups of people to oppose the U.S.

Maybe we need to become poets in order to understand the political play of language and images. In an earlier dialogue with my wife, Melissa, she reminded me of a poem by Julia Alvarez.  It was written after the Bushes canceled a post-9/11 poetry reading at the White House because the poets were ‘political’ … with Laura Bush, the supposedly model teacher, mumbling something about poetry and art not being political. Immediately when I heard Laura Bush’s dismissal of these poets, two artistic statements popped into my head:

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
— Bertolt Brecht

“I’m just looking for one divine hammer … I’ll bang it all day long.”
— Breeders, “Divine Hammer” (1993)

Then, still reflecting about Laura Bush’s own willfull ignorance, I returned to two major statements of meaning-making, the first reminding us about the the politics of writing and the second of reading:

“Writing is [or can be] a transgression of boundaries, an exploration of new territory. It involves making public the events of our lives, wriggling free of the constraints of purely private and individual experiences. From a state of modest insignificance we enter a space in which we can take ourselves seriously. As an alternative to accepting everyday events mindlessly, we recall them in writing.”
— Frigga Haug, “Memory Work as Social Science Writing” (1987)

“The disobedient reader as writer is no longer a shadow on the text, but rather makes the text a shadow of her own.”
— Nancy Walker The Disobedient Writer (1995)

Once again, I returned to the poem by Julia Alvarez … for me, it has become a resounding questioning of the Bushes’ own politics in ignoring poetic thinking while abusing language for political ends and knowing that all meaning- making is political:

The White House Has Disinvited the Poets by Julia Alvarez

thivai