News Round-Up: Health & Feminism

Email is a distraction from work, blogging from email, newspapers from blogging. I read dozens of newspaper articles a day. I've decided to combine these various distractions by sharing some of these news stories in the form of a “news round-up.” Over the last month or so, I’ve collected enough links to sort these stories by theme. Welcome to the health & feminism edition.

Almost two million children in the U.S. don’t have health insurance.

The U.S. will make it easier for children of illegal immigrants to get Medicaid.

South Carolina officially banned gay marriage with a constitutional amendment. Sigh.

There’s more to sex-ed than putting a condom on a banana. There’s communication and consent and dynamics of power, too. High school and college students ought to learn about it.

Circumcision limits transmission of HIV. But a few words of caution are in order.

People who sell fake drugs to developing countries should be prosecuted for murder.

Strange as it sounds, approximately 46% of rural women of India haven't even heard of HIV/AIDS. Nationwide, only 57% of women and 80% of men have heard of the disease. Illiteracy is a big cause of this ignorance, seeing how only 54% of women and 76% of men in India can read. So far, HIV/AIDS prevention efforts have focused on commercial sex workers, injection drug users, and other high-risk groups; but the government says the general population is next on the list.

Facing a looming gender imbalance crisis, the government of India has proposed that couples put their unwanted female children in government-funded orphanages, rather than aborting them in utero. In some areas, the imbalance is now as skewed as 800 girls per 1000 boys. I’m glad the government is concerned about the demographic problem, but this proposal just "solves" one problem by creating another. Now India will have lots of girls without parents.

A Colorado court ruled against “Ladies’ Night,” a practice where clubs charge women lower entrance fees and drink prices. The court’s rationale – that Ladies’ Night discriminates against men – generated lots of sarcastic commentary on feminist blogs, which tended to fault the practice of “Ladies’ Night” for encouraging women to drink and increasing the incidence of rape.

I was floored by the hypocrisy of Newt Gingrich, who pursued Clinton over the immorality of his affair with Monica Lewinsky, while Gingrich himself was cheating on his wife. Yuck.

It seems that many presidential contenders have slept around... Among the three Republican front-runners — thrice-married former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani, twice-married Sen. John McCain, and Gingrich — there are eight current and past wives. The point was underlined by the wife of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who said, “The biggest difference between Mitt Romney and the other candidates,” is that the Mormon candidate has “only had one wife.”

Get over yourselves

Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, turns out to be the sort of Zionist who believes that Israel - with its system of checkpoints and roadblocks and West Bank settlements - is the real victim in the MidEast conflict. In a letter to the editor today, he wrote that the Palestinian leadership is bent on "the destruction of Israel by flooding it with returning refugees." Huh? Something is seriously wrong when a country can be destroyed by the immigration of people of a different ethnic identity. Kushner also manages to squeeze a dose of historical revisionism into his brief letter: that when the West Bank was administered by Jordan between 1948 and 1967, "a Palestinian state could have been established at the stroke of a pen." Yeah right.

Next, Rafael Medoff, who directs the Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in DC, tells us that all comparisons between the Israeli occupation and the Nazi regime, and perhaps all comparisons with the Nazi regime ever, "are unacceptable." He doesn't say why, but thanks to the success of the Holocaust industry, he doesn't have to. I once heard Elie Wiesel, the industry's eloquent CEO, tell an audience in 2002 that "on September 11th, the whole world became Jews." So maybe that's the answer to the nefarious, noxious "who is a Jew" debate - anybody who's been a victim. Over the past two millennia, and especially since the Holocaust, many Jewish people have internalized a sense of victimhood. Palestinians aren't Jews, they figure, so it's simple: Palestinians can't be victims.

Paradise Now

I recently saw the Golden Globe-winning film Paradise Now (2005). It follows the relationship of two Palestinian men, best friends Said and Khaled of Nablus, over a tough two days as they decided whether to carry out a joint suicide attack in Tel Aviv. We see them drinking tea, smoking hookah, jesting with their families, and discussing life under occupation.

The trailer calls the film “a bold new call for peace,” and in many ways, it is. But the message is never explicit. Khaled’s view, that “the occupation defines the resistance,” features prominently in the film. But Suha, in love with Said for reasons never made clear, has an alternate view, especially regarding her father, a well-known “martyr”: “I'd rather he'd still be alive than be proud of him.” In fact, she’s not proud of him at all. I left the theater hearing the admonition of the film’s moderates: that the Palestinians must wage a moral resistance to the wrongs of the occupation. But the film also brings across the humanity of the radicals. I remember how Khaled interrupts his suicide video, with an AK-47 in one hand, to tell his mother, whom he clearly loves, where we she can get a good price on dish detergent. He’s thinking about the future. And the future is his ultimate aim: He somehow believes that blowing himself up on a Tel Aviv bus will benefit the Palestinian cause.

The film has some weaknesses. All interactions – in auto shops, on street corners, even with little kids in the house – are sad and mournful, as if everyone knows what's going to happen, which is a bit tacky. The film's span of just a day and a half is not long enough to meet Said and Khaled, or to understand why living under occupation makes them think, in Khaled's words, that they are “already dead.” More explanation could help, because checkpoints, unemployment, and dirt roads won’t convince a viewer that the Israeli occupation is a terrible crime. We get a deep sense of Palestinian exasperation, but not much of Palestinian identity. Even with its Palestinian director, the film may cheapen the Palestinian struggle, as if it were all about work permits and road blocks.

In showing disagreements between Said, Khaled, Sula, and others, Paradise Now leaves itself open to interpretation, or perhaps vulnerable to interpretation. I, for example, was utterly disgusted by the terrorist motivations of the protagonists. To me, the message was: Those who fight violence with violence are cowards. But others intent on proving the misery of the occupation may see a very different morale. And that, perhaps, is the genius of the film: its capacity to reflect a spiraling, narrative-ridden conflict where the "facts on the ground" imply no single conclusion.

The end of the world

This poem caught my eye.

When It Happens

Sometimes when I watch
the rusty leaves
blowing in the wind,
and the grey clouds
hurry by the darkening,
evening-blue sky,
I pray to God that I am still around
to see the world end
because nothing
will ever look more beautiful.

--F.W. Deavia (in Verbal Seduction, vol. v, issue 8, Autumn 2006)

The World According to Garp

Since somebody asked...

I read John Irving's The World According to Garp last summer, on my second-story porch, in a wicker chair, watching the sun set. It was Hollywood-esque, out of a commerical, the perfect setting for a celebrated book whose great wisdom sometimes succumbed to cliché. Take as an example, Irving's description of an awkward attempt at flirting between young Garp and young Cushie Percy: “‘You’re nice,’ Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. ‘And you’re my oldest friend.’ But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends” (105).

I loved this book. It fit the genre I tend to favor: novels that stretch across generations, with winding plot lines unforeseen from the beginning chapters. As the book moves from Jenny Field's younger years, through the birth of her son, affectionately named T.S. Garp, through his adolescence, his marriage, his children, his affairs, his career, and eventually his death, The World According to Garp sometimes resembles East of Eden or A Hundred Years of Solitude, just slightly more accessible and without a Nobel Prize. I read a tattered old copy – at least twenty years old, priced at 75 cents, held together by tape – that I found on my parents’ shelf before I left home for my first real job. So again, the generational theme. As I read this book out on my own in a city I didn't know, I felt like I was growing up with Garp: Garp the wrestler, the writer, the scared lover, the traveler; Garp the chronically unsatisfied, overly ambitious, compulsive, self-doubting, tragic hero. Take this passage:

“But sports did not feel like recreation to Garp. Nothing felt like recreation to Garp. From the beginning, he appeared to believe there was something strenuous to achieve. (‘Writers do not read for fun,’ Garp would write, later, speaking for himself.) Even before young Garp knew he was going to be a writer, or knew what he wanted to be, it appears he did nothing ‘for fun’” (73).

In advanced literary circles, it’s seen as terribly immature to “identify” with the protagonist, but with some exceptions, that’s exactly what I did. I'm not sure that the book would be so memorable if I read it again. The timing of a book in one's life is as important as its content. Ya know, that's exactly the sort of profound platitude I'd expect from John Irving's pen. So who knows, maybe I would like it again. If I'm ever looking for fun - as much fun as I can handle - this book might be it.

The color green

The snow's been here for months now. I'm used to it. I know that in snow storms, visibility stops at 20 feet, that even car alarms are easily drowned out by the howling of the wind. I try to remember the summer, when the sky, now white as the ground, used to be blue. Certainly there are things I appreciate about the winter: the crispy air, the snowball fights, the hot chocolate. The fresh snow is elegant, endearing. But today, against this regular backdrop...

I stopped walking. I froze. I stared.

A patch of grass.

An involuntary smile.

This is how Noah must have felt when the waters receded.

Why be ethical?

I would bet that most unethical acts occur not because people can't figure out that money laundering, tax evasion, adultery, etc. are wrong, but because they don't care. The question is not "what is ethical?" but rather, "why be ethical?" - not "what should we do?" but "why should we do it?" Now I don't want to overstate the case. Certainly there are many issues still up for debate (e.g., how to distribute wealth or say, transplantable organs). Even so, one salient and often overlooked question is: why bother? Why bother lobbying against genocide or animal cruelty or violence to women? Okay, those are easy cases: I care - nearly everyone cares - because these injustices "shock the conscience" - a phrase Michael Walzer uses to explain when humanitarian intervention is justified. The harder questions are cases of unethical behavior that don't shock the conscience: leaving chewing gum on the sidewalk, stealing a candy bar from WalMart, cheating on a girl/boyfriend, etc. It's the petty things that trouble me, the things that happen so often as to be hardly worth mentioning.

I'm going to suppose that most people who steal and bribe and evade their taxes know that their actions don't pass the "what would Jesus do" test. Sometimes they "rationalize" their unethical behavior, comparing themselves to Robin Hood as they steal from WalMart or telling themselves "that it doesn't count in a different state" as they cheat on their spouses. But most of time, they're fully aware that that stealing and bribery and adultery are plain-and-simple wrong. For adulterer, it's that s/he is too consumed by passion to put ethics on top. Or if it's not passion, then it's laziness (not recycling) or self-advancement (bribery, plagiarism) or greed (tax evasion, money laundering) and so on. The great challenge of ethics education is not teaching people to think through ethical dilemmas, but teaching them to prioritize the ethical choice. To do that, we'll need compelling answers to the question that leads off this post - answers that'll come when I have time for more than two paragraphs.

Blog against sexism day

To mark International Women's Day, the powers of the blogosphere have named today Blog Against Sexism Day. Here's my humble contribution: a look at the status of women's freedom across the globe.


From the United Nations (verbatim):

* Violence against women is the most common but least punished crime in the world.

* It is estimated that between 113 million and 200 million women are demographically "missing." They have been the victims of infanticide (boys are preferred to girls) or have not received the same amount of food and medical attention as their brothers and fathers.

* The number of women forced or sold into prostitution is estimated worldwide at anywhere between 700,000 and 4,000,000 per year. Profits from sex slavery are estimated at seven to twelve billion US dollars per year.

* Globally, women between the age of fifteen and forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die as a result of male violence than through cancer, malaria, traffic accidents or war combined.

* At least one out of every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime. Usually, the abuser is a member of her own family or someone known to her. Domestic violence is the largest form of abuse of women worldwide, irrespective of region, culture, ethnicity, education, class and religion.

* It is estimated that more than two million girls are genitally mutilated per year, a rate of one girl every fifteen seconds.

* Systematic rape is used as a weapon of terror in many of the world's conflicts. It is estimated that between 250,000 and 500,000 women in Rwanda were raped during the 1994 genocide.

* Studies show the increasing links between violence against women and HIV and demonstrate that HIV-infected women are more likely to have experienced violence, and that victims of violence are at higher risk of HIV infection.

Sources: Secretary-General's in-depth study on violence against women (2006). Vlachovà, Marie and Biason, Lea, Eds. (2004) Women in an Insecure World: Violence Against Women - Facts, Figures and Analysis. Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces. [The UN also provides this helpful background paper titled, "Ending Impunity for Violence against Women and Girls."]