Author: Ophelia Benson

Oh, dear. I haven’t been to Michael Bérubé’s place in awhile – not on purpose, just because I haven’t gotten around to it. He was off on a vacation for awhile, I think, and I got out of the habit. Anyway I’m reading it now, and I keep bursting into laughter, so I thought I might as well share one or two of the shots. To set the scene for you – they have to do with Katrina and ass-covering. A major rescue operation:

“Operation Cover Our Asses was carried out with a combination of precision, speed and boldness the American people did not expect,” Bush told a select group of Gannons standing on the flight deck. “We set up an array of emergency photo ops and Potemkin villages with a can-do spirit that dazzled the world. I personally have hugged black people in the Gulf Coast, and the photos are now available on the White House website.”

Some comments on FEMA then and now:

Writing in Slate, Bruce Reed reminds us that thanks to Clinton and Gore’s wonky, do-good “reinventing government” initiative, FEMA was transformed from “a dumping ground for political hacks” to a competent, responsive agency.

But Bush had other ideas. He

appoints a campaign contributor/ horse whisperer to manage FEMA, thereby restoring to the agency the corruption and cronyism of his father’s era. (And not just any horse whisperer, mind you! An incompetent horse whisperer who was pushed out of his horse-whispering job because he was a “total disaster.” Give that guy a disaster-management position!)

Maybe that was it. Maybe the word ‘disaster’ gave someone the idea. I’m not sure I don’t believe it.

The question of which candidate would do a better job with FEMA just wasn’t important enough for most of our press to cover.

One more.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur. Chertoff, fielding questions from reporters, said government officials did not expect both lightning and thunder in the extreme weather that devastated the Gulf Coast over the past week…“We knew about the lightning,” Chertoff insisted. “We had all gathered to watch the lightning, which was really awesome. But then came the thunder, and before we knew it, most of us had dived under tables, chairs, desks, anything—anything to get away from the horrible booming noise no one could possibly have expected.”

Read the rest. Read the whole dang page.

The hijab ban a year later.

Twelve months on, the row has subsided and the law is being hailed by the Government as a success that has stemmed the Islamic fundamentalist tide and brought calm to the nation’s lycées. Fathima, who is 16, agrees. “In the end I really don’t think it was a bad law at all. I wear my voile until I get to the school gates and then I take it off. School is not a place for religion. It is a place where we are all French and we are all equal. After lessons, I put the scarf back on again. There’s no difficulty.”

That’s good – that seems a hopeful sign. Except…one hopes that after school Fathima doesn’t have to go someplace where we are not all equal. One hopes that school is not the only place in Fathima’s life where ‘we are all equal.’ But if it is – well then, what a good thing it is there, and let’s hope its influence spreads.

And in Kabul people get to see a Shakespeare play. ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ which would not be my first choice, nor my tenth or twentieth – but never mind that. After 27 years of no Shakespeare at all, LLL probably looks like Twelfth Night and Hamlet combined.

It was the finale to a four-night run that was enthusiastically received by the audiences but met some fierce criticism in the conservative press, which saw it as an imposition of western values.

That’s right. It’s multiculturalism. Enjoy!

One actress had to move out of her home: neighbours suspected her of adultery or prostitution because she was coming home after sunset owing to long rehearsals.

Well then obviously she’s out spreading her legs somewhere! The slut – what business do women have being away from home after sunset?! I ask you. If the good lord had wanted women to be away from home after sunset, he would have given them night vision. I rest my case.

The audience of about 400 included members of the Afghan royal family, the French ambassador, students and builders restoring the gardens. Miss Jaber said the cultural obstacles, particularly for the female actors, had been enormous. “At first the actors would not even look at each other,” she said. Faizal Azizi, who played a courtier, said the Taliban, which ruled for five years until the 2001 American invasion, would “never allow us to put on a play, to tell a story about love. Now we have a democracy and we can show these things to our people. I am so proud.”

And so you should be. Go, Faizal, go, students and builders. Live, breathe, fly kites, listen to music, go to plays, stay out after sunset. Live.

Everyone’s already seen this, but I just wanted to keep it for the record. I saw it in several places, but this one is from the Guardian on September 3.

At one point Friday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school buses rolled up so some 700 guests and employees from the Hyatt Hotel could move to the head of the evacuation line – much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the stinking Superdome since last Sunday. ‘How does this work? They (are) clean, they are dry, they get out ahead of us?’ exclaimed Howard Blue, 22, who tried to get in their line. The National Guard blocked him as other guardsmen helped the well-dressed guests with their luggage. The 700 had been trapped in the hotel, next to the Superdome, but conditions were considerably cleaner, even without running water, than the unsanitary crush inside the dome.

Impressive, isn’t it.

As is the perpetual cognitive dissonance.

President Bush, in his weekly radio address on Saturday, said: “In America, we do not abandon our fellow citizens in their hour of need.”

Well that’s a funny joke – since the entire world has been watching with its jaw dropped as we in America did exactly that – jumping into the SUV and hightailing it out of New Orleans while the SUVless stayed behind – well and truly abandoned. If we don’t abandon our fellow citizens in their hour of need, what was all that, exactly? An optical illusion?

This interview with Salman Rushdie is full of good observations. Packed with them.

I suppose I became more intellectually engaged in the subject of freedom. If you live in free countries you don’t have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.

It sure does. The more I hear of women not allowed to leave the house without a man’s permission – not allowed to live at all without being owned by a man – the more aware I become of my own freedom, and the more savage I feel at the thought of being any less so, and at the thought that most women in the world are a great deal less so.

Shikha Dalmia: Do you think freedom of speech is threatened by cultural relativism—by the idea that principles like free expression are not universal truths but simply local cultural constructs?

Rushdie: The idea of universal rights – the idea of rights that are universal to all people because they correspond to our natures as human beings, not to where we live or what our cultural background is – is an incredibly important one. This belief is being challenged by apostles of cultural relativism who refuse to accept that such rights exist. If you look at those who employ this idea, it turns out to be Robert Mugabe, the leaders of China, the leaders of Singapore, the Taliban, Ayatollah Khomeini.

Bingo.

Shikha Dalmia: Where does this leave us on the question of democratic reform in Islamic countries? Do you think that Islam lacks a crucial piece to build a foundation for freedom?

Rushdie: What it has is an extra piece that believes that religion can be the foundation for a state. It’s a question of removing that piece rather than adding something.

Brilliant. Apart from anything else – the accuracy, the explanatory power – it’s politically good, because the idea of lacking a crucial piece is obviously fairly pejorative, but having an extra piece is not.

I was very struck when Joe Lieberman was chosen as the vice-presidential candidate, and there was a certain amount of rubbish talked about whether Americans would vote for a Jewish candidate. I remember a big opinion poll taken by The New York Times in which people were asked whether they would accept as a presidential candidate a woman, a Jew, an African American, a homosexual, and an atheist. In four of those five measures, the result was resoundingly yes, by a gigantic majority, but for an atheist it was no better than 50-50. Somebody who overtly professes not to have religion can’t get elected dog catcher in this country. That’s a problem, because it creates a political discourse full of sanctimony.

Ya think?

There’s a lot more excellent stuff, read the whole thing if you haven’t already. I can’t quote the whole dang thing because it’s, you know, not mine – so read it.