Republicans issue Orange Alerts at the airports to prevent bottled-water bombs. Democrats pounce on an uninspiring and prefectly predictable National Intelligence Estimate. Yawn!

Manly Men - Note Stern Visages… and Guns

Cashing in on the fear factor

By Michael T Klare

Just six weeks ago, gasoline prices at the US pump were hovering at the $3-per-gallon (79 cents a liter) mark; now they’re inching toward $2 (53 cents a liter) - and some analysts predict even lower numbers before the November elections. The sharp drop in gasoline prices has been good news for US consumers, who now have more money in their pockets to spend on food and other necessities - and for President George W Bush, who has witnessed a sudden lift in his approval ratings.

Statue Fontaine des Jacobins

I was having a brief conversation yesterday morning at Berkeley, California. I have heard Berkeley called the “People’s Republic” before, but as long as it costs $400,000 for a two bedroom house with 1,500 feet of floor space and $3 for a cup of coffee, I’m going to have to challenge this “People’s Republic” claim.

Here is a link to Nicholas Guyatt’s review of the latest book by historian Gordon Wood. Since I was blessed with the male appendage, perhaps my critique of this critique will not be called “shrill.” A recent foray into critiquing the sexism of the left earned me the adjective “pussy-whipped” (in a very roundabout way), but shrill borders on hysterical (”Hysteria is a diagnostic label applied to a state of mind, one of unmanageable fear or emotional excesses” … from hyster, meaning the womb … a female disorder).

So be it.

I will ask readers to note that throughout this entire critique of Wood’s mythological version of the Founding Fathers, their whiteness is an issue, and their class. But the erasure of their gender goes so far as to refer to them further along as simply “The Founders.” So I am going to post a paraphrased rant from an earlier comment, with the encouragement to readrs to write The Nation and take Guyatt to task:

The reason that leftist men not getting patriarchy is simple, but not so simple, is that a dumb shit like me, who just has a stubborn streak, can get out of the army at 45, then do politics-and-study for ten years to hack through all this historical undergrowth to a point where what femininsts (unmodified) are saying is pretty damned obvious. It can’t be that friggin hard to understand. I am not particularly smart. I can hardly do algebra, fercrissake. It is NOT so simple, because if it IS that simple, then my own gut tells me, from my own experience, that the left’s resistance to fighting patriarchy is coming from someplace a lot deeper than the intellect, and that men’s attachment to man-shit, overt or covert, is motivated by some combination of a sense of entitlement and terrible fear.

That’s why my gut is telling me, more and more, that feminism is not just some aspect of the revolution; it IS the damned revolution. Nothing else is going to ever work without it. It’s like Celie’s curse on Mister in “The Color Purple,” where she tells him that nothing good will ever come to him until he does right by her.
***

Get hysterical.

My thanks to Avalon Carthew, from Ontario, a student in the Womens Studies program at the University of Toronto.

Avalon writes:

Today on the news here (Toronto, Canada) there is a story making the rounds. It is about groups that are being billed teenaged versions of ‘Fight Club’ because teens fight each other and film it.

Needless to say, all the teens are male! The ones that were interviewed are all white. Fingers are being pointed at different forms of media, violent films and all that. But gender has not been mentioned.

Note the language like ‘testosterone-soaked teens’…perhaps I am reading too much into that one phrase, but it seems like they are trying to say this is natural, in some way.

Another introduction from some very interesting thinking available on the web. Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner is an anthropologists from the Univesity of Sussex, and a specialist in Chinese cultural anthropology as well as being engaged with the implications of genomics. This is a very provocative piece on the nature of ideas, especially how the “science of genomics” has succeeded in new expressions of ideas… just as mystifying as those from the past.

Though reading is often considered a solitary pursuit, it is a profoundly social experience. This session will explore the social nature of reading, what librarians can learn about the reading experience from book groups both online and face-to-face, and will explore the role that popular fiction plays in the everyday lives of readers.

I was searching for a good representative piece by Melissa Hussain as a way of introducing readers to her, when I happened across this list of commentaries under the title above. Wow! Meet Melissa Hussian… AND Nuril Kabir, Ferida Akhter, Irum Shehreen Ali, Shuchi Karim, Dina M Siddiqi, Mashida R Haider, Tahmina Shafique, and Naila Zaman Khan.

As a resident of North Carolina where Black disfranchisement is still almost an art form in some counties, I very much welcome this film. For all those who speciously dismiss voting (nearly always white people), there were a lot of people who put their lives on the line for that vote, sometimes losing. Jim Crow ain’t dead.

…I look back, for the first time ever.

By Yolanda Carrington, from The Primary Contradiction