Author: Ophelia Benson

Some more bottom.

Belatedly reading the comments on Michael’s piece on Bush’s swell money-saving plan I see that I’m not the only one who experienced genre-confusion. I thought it was all sarcasm, other people thought it was all news. One commenter objected to the mix and to the sarcasm, saying the news is so disgusting that jokes don’t quite play. Michael’s answer is interesting.

OK. I’m sorry to be so expository, but here’s the deal. First: I don’t think this post is funny. It wasn’t meant to be funny, and I honestly didn’t imagine that anyone would laugh at it. I did not laugh while I was writing it, for what that’s worth; I wrote it in a cold gray fury. Second: the reason I embedded real quotes in the second, “satirical” half of this post – George Bush’s, Barbara Bush’s, Tom DeLay’s – is that I think the (obviously) racialized subtext of those remarks is worth calling attention to in precisely this way. Third: the suspension of Davis-Bacon is obscene. And in the context of the Gulf Coast, it goes well beyond the ordinary screw-the-unions policy of the Bush GOP. It verges on a kind of local/national colonialism which, I think, has everything to do with race, poverty, and the question of who gets to sit on Trent Lott’s porch. I hoped that would be clear.

For the record, I don’t think humans have yet invented a prose genre adequate to this moment in US history.

Just so. I certainly went into a hot red fury when I read the real news stories. I would not have thought it possible. Which just shows what a chump I am. I find it hard to believe I could think any worse of the rodent in the White House than I already did, and yet I would not have thought it possible. How wrong can you be.

And he’ll get away with it. A serious tone and some Biblical-sounding language (this city shall rise again – the word ‘shall’ goes a long way, you know) and he’ll get away with further impoverishing people who’ve already been quite impoverished enough, one would have thought. While he and his friends get richer than ever. In full view of everyone. It’s unbelievable – but there it is.

From the CNN Money story Michael linked to.

President Bush issued an executive order Thursday allowing federal contractors rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to pay below the prevailing wage…The Davis-Bacon law requires federal contractors to pay workers at least the prevailing wages in the area where the work is conducted. It applies to federally funded construction projects such as highways and bridges. Bush’s executive order suspends the requirements of the Davis-Bacon law for designated areas hit by the storm…”The administration is using the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to cut the wages of people desperately trying to rebuild their lives and their communities,” [California Rep. George] Miller said. “President Bush should immediately realize the colossal mistake he has made in signing this order and rescind it and ensure that America puts its people back to work in the wake of Katrina at wages that will get them and their families back on their feet,” Miller said.

No, see, because if they were responsible people they would have jumped in the SUV on August 28 and driven like a bat out of hell to Idaho or someplace like that. If they’re still in the area, that means they were irresponsible and shif’less and dependent on the federal gummint and expecting a handout and feeling a sense of entitlement. Some nice healthy outdoor work for substandard wages is just the ticket for people like that – teaches them to quit messing around and get jobs managing federal agencies so they can buy an SUV to get out of town in whenever there’s a big storm. See? It all works out. God planned it that way. And Barbara Bush is pleased for them.

There’s an interesting news article at Michael Bérubé’s place.

The President’s mother, Barbara Bush, pointed out that no-wage contracts can be extremely popular for people devastated by Hurricane Katrina: “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary,” she remarked on National Public Radio, “is that some of them are singing with happiness. And many of them were idle anyway, so this could work out very well for them.”

President Bush did not say which industries would be eligible for the contracts, but one White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, remarked that the affected areas were ideal for growing cotton, and “cotton is a really great fabric in all kinds of weather—light, comfortable, versatile. I think we’ll need a lot of it in the next few years, particularly in the regions most vulnerable to hurricanes.”

Tom DeLay (R- Tx.) agreed, quickly rounding up a group of evacuees for emergency planting. With the help of law enforcement officials from Gretna, Louisiana, who surrounded the evacuees and began to march them to the fields at gunpoint, DeLay pulled aside three of them and asked, “Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?”

I thought the whole article was a surrealistic joke, until I looked at the first link and realized it was to an actual news story. Uhhhh – wait. What was all that bullshit on Thursday then? That had conservative commentators in such a panic that Bush might actually decide gross inequality is not such a good idea? Was that all just camouflage? Well what a fucking stupid question – of course it damn well was.

That miserable loathsome overpaid his entire talentless privileged cronyist life bastard. There’s just no low too low, is there.

Excellent article on sharia in Ontario in the Toronto Star. Lynda Hurst corrects one widespread misapprehension (I certainly shared it):

The decision means there will be no domestic tribunals in this province based on Orthodox Jewish, or Islamic sharia, laws. No other faiths come into it. None ever did. Contrary to government comments in past media reports and current statements by Jewish and Muslim activists, no known Christian church has made use of Ontario’s 1991 Arbitration Act to settle marital breakdown or child custody disputes. “I’ve consulted fairly widely and no one is aware of any such thing,” says lawyer Janet Buckingham of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. “Of course, churches mediate and counsel if people request it, but arbitrating legal matters? No.”

It was all smoke and mirrors. How about that.

But that was just one of the many distortions and red herrings that flourished in this rancorous controversy. Time and again, in letters and columns, sharia advocates accused opponents of spreading propaganda, of claiming sharia courts would see women in Ontario stoned to death for conjugal infractions: How paranoid of these bigots, right? In fact, no one involved on the anti side ever said that, or anything close. Time and again, and with breathtaking arrogance, advocates dismissed the Muslim women who led the no-sharia fight as a Westernized elite, an educated minority who demeaned other, more recently arrived women in the guise of protecting them.

They should have sent Madeleine Bunting an invitation, she would have come over and helped with that last line of ‘argument’.

Most unsettling of all was the ease with which sharia advocates played the religion card, accusing Muslim opponents – and thousands of other objectors across Canada and a nervous world – of Islamophobia.

That’s a popular card. What a good thing that tactic failed.

When the consultations turned to sharia, dozens of Muslim women and men told Boyd that sharia, in all its myriad forms, is inherently and uniformly biased against women. They explained that it is not religious doctrine, but a cultural “code for living,” a man-made series of laws written after the death of Muhammad in 632 that’s now been politicized in many countries…Escaping sharia’s pervasive presence is the very reason many Muslims have immigrated to Canada. They assumed that, if not officially secular, Canada did, at least, keep religion and the state separate and apart. Many, such as the tireless no-sharia campaign leader Homa Arjomand, an Iranian refugee, were stunned to learn sharia had followed them.

Good on her for crediting Homa. Tireless indeed. She led this whole campaign, and what a lot she accomplished. I know I said it before, but – well done, Homa.

Boyd, however, green-lighted the continued use of “faith-based” arbitration, including sharia, albeit with costly and impractical safeguards in place. Her report, ironically, was subtitled Protecting Choice, Promoting Inclusion. It would have done neither. Had the province allowed its female Muslim citizens to be pressured into accepting the dictates of sharia tribunals or face community ostracism, or worse, their exclusion from the Canadian mainstream would have been sealed. Since when was that the aim of multiculturalism? It took months of relentless speeches, petitions, panels and protests to counter Boyd’s naïve recommendations and stop the province from setting a dangerous precedent. After unanimous objections by female Liberal MPs and ultimately all three parties*, McGuinty finally overcame his fear of acting.

*And international demonstrations three days before McGuinty acted, and an open letter from Margaret Atwood, Maud Barlow and a long list of journalists, writers and the like, a few hours before McGuinty acted.

There’s a party to celebrate this evening – in fact it must be going on right now, since it started at 7 and it’s either 9 or 10 there now. (What zone is Toronto in? Eastern, or central? Central, probably – but I’m not sure. How ignorant.) Have fun, all!

Galloway tried to rebuke Toronto over the sharia matter yesterday, a Harry’s Place reader reports. But it didn’t win him many friends. Bastard!

Galloway only lost the crowd at one point, when he criticized the NDP’s stand against Sharia law in Ontario. He told the audience that this was catering to the right-wing and risked dividing the anti-war movement.

Catering to the right wing is it. Unlike fawning on tyrants. Gah.

I have to listen to the debate one of these days. I’m dreading it. I heard excerpts on Today, and listening to Galloway bellow and shout and rant is not my idea of a good time.

Just a few items. They’re hard to find now, so I feel like stashing two or three.

Thinking Makes It So. Actually, my colleague published this one on B&W when B&W was brand-new – but after awhile I deleted it. But just putting up a link to it back here off the front page isn’t so bad.

Gustave and Dawn

Other Minds

Mutability

Do I Wake or Sleep

Okay five. Not two or three, five. So sue me.

There’s this article by Timothy Garton-Ash in yesterday’s Guardian, titled ‘What we call Islam is a mirror in which we see ourselves’. Well, yes, no doubt – but one could say that of anything. What we call anything is a mirror in which we see ourselves, but what of that? Does that get us much of anywhere? It could, but it could also not. In other words, calling something [whatever we do call it] could indicate that we are [rational/irrational/misanthropic/empathetic] and be true or untrue all the same. The two can be quite independent. A person can be malevolent or loony and still get things right, and a person can be caring and understanding and still get things wrong.

Garton-Ash offers six examples of possible things to say about Islam. First:

The fundamental problem is not just Islam but religion itself, which is superstition, false consciousness, the abrogation of reason. In principle, Christianity or Judaism are little better, particularly in the versions embraced by the American right. The world would be a much better place if everyone understood the truths revealed by science, had confidence in human reason and embraced secular humanism. If we must have a framed image of a bearded old man on the wall, let it be a photograph of Charles Darwin. What we need is not just a secular state but a secular society.

Then he comments on it.

This is a view held by many highly educated people in the post-Christian west, especially in western Europe, including some of my closest friends. If translated directly into a political prescription, it has the minor drawback of requiring that some 3 billion to 5 billion men and women abandon their fundamental beliefs.

But what is the point of saying that? What’s he talking about, ‘If translated directly into a political prescription’? What does he mean? Apparently something like people saying: ‘”The world would be a much better place” should be translated to “Let us enact laws that would force people (how?) to have confidence in human reason and embrace secular humanism.”‘ That seems to be the political prescription he has in mind. But who does suggest political prescriptions like that? Who does make the leap from saying religion is superstition to saying that people should be forced to abjure it? No one. Damn well no one. So why do people insist on saying or implying that the first entails the second? It’s a form of moral blackmail, it’s a way of ring-fencing (as Rushdie calls it) religion and making critical discussion of it more difficult, and it’s not based on reality.

This kind of thing is especially irritating coming from professional intellectuals and opinion-purveyors. I might as well tell Timothy Garton-Ash that he shouldn’t write for the Guardian because that equates to ‘requiring’ me to agree to whatever it is that he says. It’s ridiculous! People criticising religion does not equate to summoning an army to force people to ‘abandon their fundamental beliefs’! Can we for once get clear on that so that we can discuss the subject honestly?

The second example:

The fundamental problem is not religion itself, but the particular religion of Islam. Islam, unlike western Christianity, does not allow the separation of church and state, religion and politics. The fact that my Iranian newspaper gives the year as 1384 points to a larger truth. With its systematic discrimination against women, its barbaric punishments for homosexuality and its militant intolerance, Islam is stuck in the middle ages. What it needs is its Reformation.

And the comment.

A very widespread view. Two objections are that such a view encourages a monolithic, essentialist understanding of Islam, and tries to understand its history too much in western terms (middle ages, Reformation). If we mean by Islam “what people calling themselves Muslim actually think, say and do”, there is a huge spectrum of different realities.

But monolithic, essentialist understandings of systems of ideas are not necessarily unreasonable or silly or wrong in the way that monolithic, essentialist understandings of groups of people are, because systems of ideas can be and often are monolithic and essentialist. That’s rather the point of them. Systems of ideas have particular content, which is different from other systems of ideas. It’s not even coherent to criticise an account of a system of ideas for being monolithic and essentialist. And the primary meaning of Islam (as it is with Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism) is not ‘what people calling themselves Muslim actually think, say and do’ but the doctrines of the religion itself. There are interpretations and schools, yes, but that’s not the same as no core doctrine at all.

Irfan Khawaja talked about this subject in an article a year or two ago.

“Belief in an Islamic essence that supercedes [sic] the behavior of actual Muslims,” we are blithely told, “leads people to making sloppy generalizations about Islam.” So the criterion of “the Islamic” is “the behavior of actual Muslims.” The absurdity of this claim is almost mind-boggling. For one thing, it ignores the fact that Muslims themselves believe that Islam has an essence that supersedes the behavior of actual Muslims. It ignores the fact that the Qur’an states that Islam is a “perfect” religion whose essence is contained within the Qur’an itself. It ignores the fact that according to Islam, the Sunnah takes precedence over and regulates “the behavior of actual Muslims.”…What Staerk is telling us is that it’s easier to generalize rigorously about the behavior of 1.25 billion existing Muslims plus all the Muslims who have ever existed in the 1400 years of the existence of Islam – than it is to generalize about the claims of a handful of Islamic texts!

And so on. Garton-Ash’s argument isn’t a very good one.

All righty, now let’s all pull up our chairs to our desks and place our pens and pencils neatly at the top and get ready to pay attention. Remember the other day we had a little disagreement about whether or not Feng Shui is woo-woo or, in the technical language, nonsense? It started because I linked to an article by Nick Cohen who referred to Feng Shui (as I did in the headline) as fashionable nonsense – a phrase that has a certain resonance for the proprietors of B&W. But a reader took exception to that headline, and to Nick’s article, on the grounds that Feng Shui isn’t nonsense at all, but just sensible environmental design. Well, I don’t think so. It does include sensible environmental design, but it also includes real nonsense. I’ve been investigating, and I have yet to find any nonsense-free Feng Shui. Now, granted, it’s possible that like the black swan, nonsense-free Feng Shui just hasn’t turned up on the radar yet…But so far, it seems safe (and fair) to say that Feng Shui is well over in the woo-woo camp.

Here’s something from the first Google hit. It’s about kitchens.

The kitchen represents the manifestation of the family’s well-being and wealth. It is useful for pressing down bad luck caused by bad flying star number or personalized directions of bad fortune. According to the Eight Mansions and Flying Star formulas, certain sectors of the house are deemed to be unlucky. If your kitchen is located in an unlucky sector this is a good thing…The mouth of the stove should face one of the best directions of the father of the family. This energises the stove, making the food cooked in it auspicious for the family…Good feng shui kitchens should take the orientation of the stove, oven and rice cooker into account. When auspiciously oriented, the stove can bring enormous good fortune to a family. The kitchen stove should not be in the northwest sector. This is called “Fire at Heaven’s Gate” and brings bad luck to the breadwinner, causing the head of the household to lose their job and money.

Here is a basic course in the principles of FS from a UK site:

Four evenings of giving a good basic foundation in Feng Shui principles for the absolute beginner and basic knowledge to go on to further training. The course will cover: Form School, Chi Energy, the five elements, ying and yang, I Ching and the trigrams, Geopathic Stress, Electro magnetic fields, Feng Shui cures, artwork and symbolism, Clutter and space clearing.

And finally there is this from yet another site.

In Chinese philosophy, the concept of “Wu Xing” has a prominent standing. In Chinese Medicine, Astrology and Fengshui, the idea of Wu Xing is used extensively. This term has been conveniently translated as “five elements” or “five phases”. The word “Wu” means “five”. To single out the word “Xing” and try to explain what it means is futile effort…Water dominates in winter, wood in spring, fire in summer, metal in autumn. At the intersection between two seasons, the transitional period is dominated by earth…The names “water”, “wood”, “fire”, “metal” and “earth” are only substances whose properties resemble the respective chi in the closest possible way. They do help us understand the properties of the five types of chi but they also mislead us if we take everything in the literal sense.

Right.

So is there any completely nonsense-free Feng Shui anywhere? If so, it’s pretty hard to find!