Category Archives: Politics

150 years ago

Americana, Politics

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Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863

Disney Princesses and the right of the insulted to decide if it is an insult

Current Affairs, Film, Politics, Psychological Musings, Uncategorized

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I am not an expert on Disney princesses, I don’t think that I have seen any of the princesses in a movie except for Cinderella (front row, second from the left). I am pretty sure that the redhead, second from the left in the top row, was originally a Pixar princess from Brave, and the princess on the far right might be Pocahontas. It is my understanding that at least some of the princesses – Cinderella and Snow White (where is she?) for sure – came from old  European fairy tales.

The European fairy tales, in turn, came from earlier folk tales that were rooted in the deep humus of the collective European past. According to Robert Bly, those classic fairy tales lay out stages of initiation into adulthood which we’ve entirely forgotten, that our ancestors apparently knew a lot about. However, the new Disney Princesses, and the fairy tales they are in, are not rooted in a deep wisdom, they are made to sell dolls or amusement park rides. Additionally, they do damage to susceptible little girls by setting an impossible standard of what a woman should look like (a Barbiesque caricature of European homogeny).

As a protest to this, an English artist, David Trumble, Disneyfied a group of women who he considered real feminist heroes. As I understand it, he thought that, by showing how the Disney treatment trivialized these very real, heroic, women, it showed how Disney trivialized all women by their depiction of Princesses. I drew this picture because I wanted to analyze how unnecessary it is to collapse a heroine into one specific mold, to give them all the same sparkly fashion, the same tiny figures, and the  same homogenized plastic smile.

David Trum Princesses

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But a funny thing happened, not everybody thought the Disneyifacation of real women was bad. Some women liked it, at Feminist Disney, one woman said Of course it’d be nice if there was more diversity (they have one less WOC than the actual disney princess lineup!), less western-centric, more modern women, and women who are not cis hetero, as well as disabled and/or fat women. But I thought it was a cool take. I am here for Princess Malala Yousafzai. One woman started complaining and then, sort of, turned around.  In an article in Women You Should Know, Marijayne Renny said, Sadly, (my daughter) was immediately drawn to the sparkly dresses, but on the flip side it made her ask questions about these women and she was genuinely excited to know each and every one of their back stories. 

I first ran into the Princesses in an article in Atlantic, Why Shouldn’t Gloria Steinem Be a Disney Princess?, whose title, more or less, is self explanatory. Disney Princesses are not something that I think about very much, but, when I do, they do seem somewhat pedophilic what with the big eyes and all. But I am not a woman and either is the artist who made these satirical images and that is the problem.

A couple of years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a blog post on the backhanded apology to an insult that is actually a new insult, Oh, I’m sorry if you feel insulted by the way I said what I said, I didn’t mean to insult you. The assumption here is that the  person feeling insulted is wrong because the insulter didn’t mean to be insulting and that, somehow, that makes the insult non-op. Coates argued, and I agree, that the insulted party should have the right to feel insulted. I think that the reverse is the case here, it seems that Trumble felt women should be insulted when alot of them were not.

His drawings, designed to show how insulting Disney is, turned out to not say that to many women who don’t necessarily  regard Disney as insulting. Answering that, Trumble said, I feel like good satire shouldn’t be understood by everybody. Some people were angry at me because they thought I was reducing the women, which was obviously the point. But if it gets children interested in these real women and what they do, is it so bad? Leaving aside that I agree that good satire should be close enough to the truth that some people don’t see it as satire and it is is great if these cartoons end up making children, especially little girls, want to know the back stories of these remarkable women, a man shouldn’t be deciding if the original Princesses are objectionable.

As a postscript to this, there are now drawings and cups of the Princesses available at søciety6 for only $15.oo. They seem to me that they would make a good gift, but what do I know?

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The horrific things we do to each other

Americana, Evolution, Obama, Politics, Psychological Musings

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I brought a biography of Clarence  Darrow – Attorney for the Damned – with me for the flight to Boston. I am not so sure that it was a great idea: I was still in Dayton, Tennessee – at the Monkey Trial – when the plane landed in Boston. And still in Tennessee on the bus ride to New Hampshire.

Darrow was in my family’s pantheon of civil heroes – or, at least, my dad’s pantheon, and by extension, mine – and I was enjoying reading about him in more detail than the stories that had been pretty much fixed in my DNA as a child. Darrow was a free-love-bohemian and I was a little taken back by how much free love and bohemianism there was back in the 1890s. He defended so many people that nobody else would touch, like Loeb and Leopold, the Western Federation of Miners who were in an industrial war with the Mine Owner’s Association in Idaho, or a black family that moved into a white neighborhood in Detroit.

The Mine Owner’s Association had the politicians backing them, and the police, and the Pinkerton’s who beat strikers to death under the banner of law and order. The miners struck back, bombing mines and buildings. The black family had everybody against them also, with the police protecting a crowd of whites who were trying to force the family out. It was a time of brutality and it was a time that resonates today, both financially and racially, although in a milder form.

A couple of years later, William Jennings Bryan ran for president as a populist hero against the powerful, the police that protected them, the Pinkertons, and even President Cleveland, of his own party, who sent Federal troops in to back the rich. Much of what Bryan said then is still germane now: There are two great theories of government. One claimed that if you would only legislate to make the well to do prosperous, their prosperity would leak through to those below. But the Democratic idea is if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity would find its way up through every class that rests upon them.

The book was about the Darrow I had been taught, the defender of the powerless, but there was a Darrow I didn’t know. A Darrow who also defended people because he wanted money, people like a white bigot who brutally killed a Hawaiian and who Darrow knew was guilty. My dad was a defense lawyer for a while and he constantly pitched that a person is innocent until proven guilty. In the same manner as Darrow, my dad defended people like a bartender who killed his wife. Daddy knew he was guilty – even I knew he was guilty hearing the stories over the dinner table – but that didn’t seem to matter to Darrow or my dad. But sitting on the airplane,above it all, it mattered to me and left me in a melancholy funk.

I had brought a New Yorker book review of a couple of books about the partition of Pakistan into two countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh. I put down my Darrow book and read the book review to improve my mood. That was even worse. Nixon was a prick and while he and Kissinger congratulated themselves on their masculinity and pragmatism, the Pakistani generals, our allies, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Bengalis who were – as Nixon said – just a bunch of brown goddamn Moslems.

I thought of Obama and our drones and how our government seems to find killing people OK as long as it suits our political needs and my melancholy grew. I went back to Darrow, and, fortunately, I was able to cheer myself up with the Monkey Trail, The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, in Dayton, Tennessee, where the Courthouse had a banner that said Read your Bible.

Today, it is easy to laugh at Dayton and the trial but it was no laughing matter then and it still isn’t. Like the  Capital vs.Labor  fight, Ignorance vs. Science is a conflict that is still with us.

On the bus to New Hampshire, in Dayton, it was Darrow against Bryan and Darrow was at his best. You can close your eyes, Darrow said, But your life and my life and the life of every American citizen depends, after all, on tolerance and forbearance….If men are not tolerant, if men can not respect each other’s opinions, if men can not live and let live, then no man’s life is safe. If today you can take a thing, like evolution, and make it a crime to teach it in public schools….At the next session you can ban books and newspapers.

Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one, you can do another. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding…After awhile, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man,  and creed against creed until – with flying banners and beating drums – we are marching backwards to the glorious age of the 16th century, where bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

Getting off the bus in New Hampshire, the sun was out and people were taking family pictures.

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Kicking the can

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings


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The government is back up and running – using the running, very loosely – and nothing seems to have changed. In some ways, it seems like Congress has just kicked the can down the road. Maybe the road will look different next January when it will be closer to elections, maybe it will look different because the assessment of the players – on both sides – will be different going in, and maybe it won’t.

I started to write about an incident with a woman in a supermarket to make my point and then remembered that I told the same story in 2011 – it obviously made a big impression on me – so here it is Something like twenty-five years ago – I remember it like it was only five years ago – I was waiting in the ten items or less line, when I realized the person two or three people in front of me had an over-full cart being pushed by a crazy looking teenager. Just then, her mother came running over very embarrassed saying something like Oh! no, dear; it is not nice to put a full cart in this line. The crazy teenager just looked at us like somebody yelling in the street and said “They don’t care”. She probably wasn’t drooling but I do remember her looking slightly dangerous in a ready to go berserk way.  We all looked at our feet, including the checker, and she went ahead.1

It was a vivid demonstration of  how much power the craziest person in the room has and it has, obviously, stuck with me. I am going to define crazy person – here – as someone being willing to let the government collapse if they don’t get their way. Leading up to the shutdown, the right fringe of the Republican Party – who I am calling  the Tea Party, for brevity – gave every indication that they would be the only crazy person in the room. They constantly made statements indicating that they were willing to take the country down to get their way (and that the government was so bad, or so big, or so ineffectual, or so something, that taking it down wouldn’t matter or might, even, be good). The Tea Party power, however, rested on the belief that they were the only people crazy enough to actually take this government down.

Obama has a long history – as long as you can have in four and a half years of  being president – of compromising (sometimes it even seemed as if he was compromising before the settlement talks started).  This time however, Obama said he would not compromise, We’re not going to pay a ransom for America to pay its bills ….we can’t make extortion routine as part of our democracy. Like the Tea Party, his beliefs were strong enough, he was crazy enough, to let the government shutdown. Additionally, he seemed willing to not compromise to raise the debt ceiling, no matter how much damage it would do.

Obama bet that he could justify his motives for his crazy behavior better than the Tea Party could and the polls proved him right. He bet that, what Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker calls the Republican “survival caucus”, would vote for a compromise if there were two crazy people in the room. He was right. In the end,  just eighty-seven out of two hundred and thirty-two Republicans in the House of Representatives, changed their collective minds, but that was enough, along with the Democratic members who compromised on the timeline.

I am not sure that the Democrats had much of a choice in this except to compromise on the timeline. They had to compromise on something to make a deal and, with Obama refusing to give on Obamacare, all that was left was the time line (the did agree to means test reimbursable payments for low-income people buying insurance but that was, apparently, already in the bill). In the end, everybody agreed to kick the can down the road.

1. https://srstern.com/2011/in-defense-of-obama-or-the-advantage-of-being-crazy/