Author: Ophelia Benson

Check out this interview with Jane Kramer in the New Yorker. She says some things that it would be good to see said more often, by more people, more forthrightly.

But in France, with all its freedoms, so many young women seem to be capitulating to Islamist pressure. It usually starts with the young men who are recruited, and the symbols of successful recruitment are the women in the family. In other words, the women are the symbol of the new identity of the man. When you see a twelve-year-old girl coming to school in a chador, where for two or three generations no one had worn one, you have to look at this as the expression of an enormous pressure from the men in the girl’s family. You’re really dealing with a born-again movement, and the girls get the short end of the stick, because the boys don’t have to change what they study, how they dress, and so forth. The girls are the proof of the new purity of the family.

Just so. The boys get to go right on dressing as they like, the girls have to turn themslves into symbols. As usual – yawn yawn, same old same old. Men are people, women are things; men get to have autonomy, women don’t; men apply pressure, women become symbols.

Homa Arjomand is in Victoria today to give a speech against the introduction of Sharia law in Ontario. I hope she gets a huge turnout and a lot of press coverage.

On the other hand. One letter to the Independent on the ‘Charles tells lower orders to stay in their places’ matter makes an interesting point.

How ironic that on the same day that Charles Clarke says that Prince Charles is out of touch for commenting that children want to be pop stars and the like without having to do anything to earn it, he chooses to announce that “every school must take its fair share of unruly pupils”. As a supply teacher in this country for the past two years, I think that, at least in this instance, it is Mr Clarke who seems more out of touch than the Prince. When was the last time Mr Clarke was in a classroom? There are many disruptive students who ruin it for the good children. From my experience, these disruptive ones fit the description given by the Prince, thinking that they don’t need an education as they will make it as pop stars or footballers in their teens and early twenties.

The letter-writer then suggests that disruptive students should be isolated so that no school would have to deal with them in their disruptive state, and he points out the burden those disruptive students are to both teachers and students who want to learn. Which is true. That’s a conversation I’ve had more than once with various friends who are teachers – the fact that they often have to spend more time being a cop than being a teacher, and how bad that is for the students who don’t need policing and would rather learn something, as well as for the teachers themselves. Teaching is teaching, not crowd control, not prison guarding, not military basic training. Teachers should be able to devote their energies to teaching their subject matter, not struggling to establish dominance. It’s a waste of everyone’s time and energy to make teachers do that, plus it’s a hell of a good way to discourage people from being teachers at all. If I ran the world, students would either act like students or leave.

However, Charles was talking about his adult secretary, not school children, and he’s still a prat.

Oh dear, oh dear. One shouldn’t. One really shouldn’t. It’s most unkind. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. One feels frightful about it, one feels almost tempted to leave it alone, to do the decent thing. And yet when one sees a barrel with a lot of lazy fish swimming around in it, one shoots at them. One can’t help it. And anyway, what’s the matter with fish today, why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their capabilities? Horrible jumped-up little bastards – where’s one’s gun?

No seriously the hell with all that. The hell with pacifism towards that particular easy fish. I mean – if Charles Windsor, of all the people in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, really thinks he is in a position to rag on other people for wanting to do jobs without qualifications or natural abilities – well I mean to say. I mean to say he is literally the one person in the entire country with the least right to say such a thing. Bar none. His saying it is the exact equivalent of George W Bush and his handlers having the almighty gall to call other people ‘elitist’ when he would be doing well to be a part-time security guard if he had not been born into the shrubbery.

Oh dear, oh dear. It is funny though. Funnier than Bush, because of course Charles is so powerless, despite all the ridiculous sucking up and deference and bowing and Sirring and the bales and bales and bales of money. And it’s so funny that he apparently thinks he himself has natural abilities, at least compared with all these horrible striving proles he’s surrounded with, not to mention all these terrifying PC black women lusting after promotions. It’s always been funny. It was funny that he thought he was so clever compared to Diana because he read (wait for it) boooooks by Laurens van der Post. Oh very deep. Mind you Diana was funny that way too. Katharine Graham once told her she might enjoy going to university and Diana was very amused, saying she’d had plenty of education from life. Uh…right. Perhaps all toffs are like that. It’s a toff thing, apparently, to scorn education. One doesn’t need that sort of thing, thank you very much, that’s for the lower orders who have to do something, aristocrats have only to Be.

There are a lot of good letters on the subject here. And there is an interesting side point in this article –

Mr Clarke’s comments were seized upon by opponents as evidence of a breach of the convention whereby ministers do not criticise the Royal Family.

Well…excuse me, I’m just a Yank and a Republican and I don’t properly understand these things, but that does seem like a stupid convention. Why should the Royal Family be immune from criticism by ministers? I realize it has something to do with separation of government and crown, with keeping the muck of politics out of the more transcendent realm of the monarchy, and that that’s supposed to be good for continuity and the monarchy’s ceremonial role and all that. But still. It just does seem a ridiculous way to go about it. Choose this one person and treat it as if it’s magic, and then make the resulting oddity your head of state.

Since it’s such an odd system, I do wish we could stop trying to mimic it in the US.

An example, of the kind of thing I was talking about yesterday and a few days before that – of this matter of the complexity and arbitrariness of political categories, and of the idea that sometimes it’s just not particularly helpful or interesting to attach labels of liberal or conservative, left or right, to any and every idea that comes along. The example is from an interview with Barack Obama in the October Progressive – unfortunately not online. The interviewer, Barbara Ransby, said, ‘You also said something to the effect that you are open to ideas from both the right and the left. Now, you know this kind of talk makes progressives a little nervous. Can you elaborate on what you meant by that?’ and Obama answered,

Yes, certain factions of the left have bought into an either/or argument about how we solve our problems, and I contend that all our solutions do not have to do with money. They have to do with attitudes, values, and morals. As I said in my speech at the convention, for example, we have to recognize academic achievement as parents. Now some may label that a ‘rightwing’ or ‘conservative’ position, but you go into any place in the community, you will hear the same thing.

Obama’s not kidding when he says that some may label that a ‘rightwing’ position – in fact he’s understating it drastically (no doubt being polite to the interviewer and The Progressive). There’s very little ‘may’ about it – some do emphatically label that a ‘rightwing’ position before the sentence is even finished. I noticed such a bit of labeling just the other day in an article in the New York Review of Books –

Along with other black conservatives —John McWhorter, Shelby Steele, and Thomas Sowell—Ogbu places the blame for ongoing inequality on black communities. He recommends a variety of self-help strategies to raise black students’ achievement, such as publicizing black students’ academic successes, reinforcing parents’ commitment to monitoring their children, and so on.

I think it’s very debatable to call McWhorter a conservative, and I think it’s even more debatable to assume (as that quotation does assume) that the idea that some factors internal to ‘black communities’ play a part in educational inequality (which is not the same thing as ‘blaming’ those communities, which is a silly, loaded, and manipulative way of stating the idea) is necessarily a ‘conservative’ idea. It can be, and it can be useful to conservative agendas, but it doesn’t have to be. But it is (in some circles, or factions, as Obama puts it) assumed to be. It is in fact a kind of litmus test – it’s one of those things that people avoid saying for fear of being put into a box they don’t want to be put into. The good old hegemonic discourse is full of minefields like that – things it’s risky to say unless you want friends to think you’ve suddenly become Krusty the Konservative.

And it’s understandable in a way. Understandable and not malevolent. We have heard enough about ‘blaming the victim’ to be very wary of seeming to do that ourselves, especially when we are not in the same victim box ourselves. It is a very queasy position to be, say, a white person worrying about anti-intellectualism among black people; we worry that we don’t know enough, that it’s easy for us to say, that we have unpleasant motives we’re not entirely aware of, that we are indeed shifting the problem from institutionalized injustices to the naughty behavior of the victims themselves. Understandable. But the trouble is – what if it’s true? What if it really is true that, for instance, black students shame each other for doing well in school or liking to read, label that ‘acting white,’ apply peer pressure to make their friends stop it? Then that sqeamishness and reluctance to talk about it doesn’t look like such a good idea, does it. Because if it really is true, then it’s a bad thing, and everyone ought to make every effort to change it, and that’s a good deal harder to do if the subject is taboo.

And that’s just one example. Which is not to say that nothing should be labeled left or right; I’m not a fan of ‘bipartisanship’; but it is to say that not everything should be labeled that way. That some issues are factual rather than ideological, is rather than ought; that an empirical, inquiring, analytic approach works a good deal better for many problems than a political or even moral one. The issue Obama is talking about isn’t one about blame, it’s one about what to do. But entrenched positions make people unwilling to think about some avenues of inquiry. That doesn’t seem particularly useful.