Separation of Church and State, and Women-Haters, Part 2

Photo: Todd Akin's official 109th Congress photo, from his Wikipedia page.


[This entry is the second half of the most recent one, below, posted a few days ago.  Look below, or click here.]

So, a few things:

According to his Wikipedia page, Akin graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a very good and prestigious school.  Bush graduated from Yale, but whatever.  Awhile after that, he worked for IBM selling supercomputers, which doesn't sound like something a dummy can do, either.  Then he got a Masters of Divinity Degree from Covenant Theological Seminary, in 1984.  He entered the political arena by running unopposed for a seat.  He then won some close races, but then he won by large margins--until this year.  It jumps out at me that he voted against public funding support for school nurses and school breakfasts and lunches.  In a 2008 speech on the House floor, Akin called abortion providers "terrorists" and alleged that it was "common practice" for abortion providers to perform abortions on women who were not actually pregnant.

So what are we to make of this?  An intelligent guy--or a college-educated one, which Bush proved isn't the same thing--saying the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard (and with my job, that's saying something) about a controversial topic, during his own campaign, with a conclusion that this man clearly seriously believed, based on no facts at all (and one wonders who those "doctors" were), probably gleaned from something he'd heard someone say once...and yet the most bothersome things to me in all this is his mention of the phrase "legitimate rape," and the fact that he thinks abortionists are performing abortions on women who are not pregnant.

First, then, is the uncomfortable feeling that this man has a pretty good idea of what he thinks "legitimate" and, therefore, "illegitimate" rapes are.  He never elaborated, but it must be that he thinks a large proportion of rape victims are simply lying about the rape.  Or, maybe more disturbingly, he subscribes to the notion of blaming the victim, that perhaps some rape victims wear skirts that are too short, or that they are promiscuous, and are therefore rape victims after the fact.  Who knows?  But he clearly, in his own mind, is making a distinction here, in whatever land he lives in, and he's not giving the rest of us the bridge to get there.

Or is he?

Maybe this is Conservative Republicanland, where men are very fearful of women, and therefore hold a certain resentment towards them.  This reminds me a bit of the illogical thoughts and fears people had about African-Americans, and it's really not too far of a stretch to say that such men held both women and African-Americans in disdain back in the day.  Do they still, in different ways?

Are their women thought of as such foreign animals as African-Americans were?  Remember when every black man was thought to be raging for white men's white women?  When black men were prone liars, and prone to violence?  When they were all so simple-minded?

How about Jews?  Remember when they were thought to be able to bewitch people?  That they killed Christ?  That they ruled all the monetary establishments in the world?  That they controlled the world's banks?  That they were money-driven liars and chisellers?  (I know a couple of Jewish people who can't balance their own checkbooks.)

Now we have women who somehow have the power to stop the biological process after being raped.  (Notice that the rapists themselves are ignored in such conversations.  They would be, of course, men.)  We have women who will, apparently, create "illegitimate" rape stories, perhaps after realizing they didn't want to have sex with that man after all.  Maybe they're thought to be drunken, promiscuous louts who don't want to be thought of that way?  Maybe they're thought to be dressed for it, flirting for it, and therefore asking for it?  We have women who will, for some reason, consent to an abortion without ever being pregnant to begin with.

This is foreign animal thinking here.  This man clearly thinks that women don't have anything in common with men, or with him specifically.  He can't think of them as human, and still think and speak of them like this.  After all, one does not get asked a question about rape, and about abortion laws that do not blink at rape or incest, and then suddenly spit out this bad boy of a statement.  In fact, people who know this guy can't possibly be surprised by his answer here.  One cannot be a reasonably intelligent, intellectually steadfast, verbally proficient person--and then suddenly spout out this bad boy.  (One cannot imagine Lincoln, Obama or even Clinton saying this.)  He's had to have said tons of things like this before--such as the wild animal abortionists performing abortions on women who are not pregnant statement above.  I don't know what in the world he's thinking, but I'll bet that he thinks he knows what he's thinking.

And I'll bet he's not the only one thinking it.  How can he be?  Even Mitt Romney thought he was talking to an entire room of supporters (without the one traitor) when he let loose his 47% bad boy.  He clearly thought he was preaching to the choir there--and, for the most part, he was.  I have a feeling Akin thought the same, that he was speaking to a closed room of supporters rather than to an open mike and a camera.  His real crime to his party wasn't in what he said--it's that, like Romney, he was being too honest.  Really saying what he felt.  And feeling that he had a large audience who'd agree with him.  Why would he think he had an agreeing audience unless it was, at least moderately, the case?  Go back up to the politically-confused Mr. Broun, the congressman who thought he had a captive, agreeing audience that would cheer him (as many of them did) when he said that the Bible controlled his every political decision.  You don't think he thinks he's preaching to the choir there?

Romney really felt that 47% of the country--ironically in his mind, all of them Obama voters--were leeches of the government, couch potatoes and pot smokers and baby producers who don't try to find work, all of them lazy.  How many white men does he see in that picture?  I think, when he envisions that 47%, that they're all minorities, and women, and teens (or black teen women).  And so I also think Akin envisions women in this way.  They're rape victims.  They're promiscuous women who lie about being raped.  They're such loathsome creatures that they would allow an abortion without even being pregnant.  But, as disdainfully as he views them, they're somehow so powerful that they can shut down the entire creation process (quite like God, in fact) if they want to, after they've been raped.  This is the same man who inserted unwanted legislation into a bill that lawmakers were trying to pass to publicly support school nurses [i.e.--women].  After Akin insisted that the bill contain a provision that such nurses could not speak of, or provide, birth control to the students, none of the Missouri lawmakers wanted to pass it.

This last bit deserves recognition.  Nurses (women) can't speak of condoms, or provide information about other birth control.  Women cannot have abortions under any circumstance, including rape and incest.  In other words, they also cannot provide their own birth control.  I'll repeat that: birth control.  Simply stated, he does not want women to control birth.  More important than rape, or incest, or their own health is the fact that he does not want them to control birth.  In short, he does not want them to be God.  That is, apparently, for he, and other men, to do.  It's all about who has the power to control birth.  I smell fear there, and perhaps a bit of a Freudian issue.  (I would love to interview his wife and/or mother.)

Overall, then, I think he thought he was speaking to the choir, and was astonished to find that he wasn't.  (Read his Wikipedia page to learn of quite a few instances in which he thought he was verbally holding forth, only to apologize and backtrack after he realized he was being hissed at.  And these are just times, mentioned here, in a large public forum.  I wonder what he has said to his wife or daughters over dinner over the years.)  Do I think there's large contingent of southern and midwestern white Christian conservative males who still fear women, and minorities, and homosexuals, and anyone who's not a white Christian conservative male?

Yes.  Yes, I do.  We've seen nine of them lately, old white men yahoos who are (or, rather, after Tuesday, were) shockingly in positions of power to put forth this rather violently hateful agenda.  (And shame on the people who voted them in and gave them that power.  Akin has been in power for over ten years.)  And since the Old Testament largely feared the same groups of people, and was vehemently against them, (For example, when Adam is rebuked about eating the fruit, God chastises him first for listening to the woman, and only secondly for disobeying Him and eating the fruit.  As Satan and the snake are still seen as tempters, so too, apparently, are women still seen as the temptresses, and therefore something to be feared and loathed.) then the two have become as one.

How stringent is this mental framework in that segment of the population?  Well, I'll ask you: When someone asks you for your opinion about abortion, do you immediately speak of women who've lied about rape?  Do you think of how women can shut down the entire process of giving birth?  If you're fixated on males controlling birth, and not the dastardly abortionists or women (notice how he sort of grouped those together in that other quoted comment) then, yes, I guess you do.  And he wasn't the only one lately, including almost-Vice-President Paul Ryan, and seven others.  Nine men, all of them (former) important politicians, senators, congressmen and policymakers, all of them with a misunderstanding of the Separation of Church and State, all of them who will, as Mr. Broun did, flat out admit that the Bible controls their every political decision, all of whom think that the Bible "teaches us how to run all of public policy and everything in society."  If the Bible--mostly the Old Testament--is viciously and violently against women, homosexuals, immigrants and minorities (those who were not of the same Jewish tribe as was the author of a particular passage that spoke against these things), then why wouldn't these guys be?  And, therefore, why wouldn't they pass legislation that controls the rights of these groups of people, these Others, who they loathe and fear?  (Which is why the Separation of Church and State is so important.)

I'll cover one of those eight other denizens of disinformation next:

As written by Jonathan Weisman of The New York Times: The delicate issue of pregnancies resulting from rape rattled another campaign for the Senate when Indiana's Republican Senate nominee, Richard Mourdock, said a life conceived by rape "is something that God intended to happen."

Separation of Church and State, and Women-Haters

Photo: Todd Akin's official 109th Congress photo, from his Wikipedia page.

And so this begins a long series of blog entries chronicling the recent election.  There's a lot I want to go over here, including, in no order, why Obama won, why Romney didn't, the election results, the nine or so boneheaded rich old white men who said incredibly stupid and insensitive things about rape, and why someone would marry and/or vote for such people.  I do not, and I will not, mean to offend; if I do, please feel free to send me a (polite) comment and let me know.

Having said that, I have to start with the boneheaded rich old white men who said incredibly stupid and insensitive things about rape.  But before I do, let me offer you a recent quote from a congressman, who said the following, and much more, at a banquet at a church:

U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, Georgia Republican (someone needs to tell me whether this guy was able to keep his job after the firestorm a few days ago):

The words below were taken from a video clip, distributed by the Bridge Project, which itself was taken from a longer version recorded on Sept. 27 during the 2012 Sportsman's Banquet at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell, Ga. Here's a transcript of the Bridge Project's snippet:

"God's word is true. I've come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I've found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don't believe that the earth's but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That's what the Bible says.

"And what I've come to learn is that it's the manufacturer's handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives individually, how to run our families, how to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all of public policy and everything in society. And that's the reason as your congressman I hold the Holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I'll continue to do that."

Now there's, of course, a lot wrong here, but what struck me the most was the last part, the part where he explicitly says that the Bible dictates how he votes in D.C., and how "it teaches us how to run all of public policy."  This part hit me hard because it is at the core of what is causing these guys to say such things about rape, about science, about their voting decisions, and about almost everything: they take it all from the Bible--or, at least, they say that they do.  (Though the Bible has a lot of rape in it, it does not say, as a politician recently did, that rape is just another form of procreation.)

The Republican Right, forever represented by George W. Bush, does indeed follow the Bible in every decision they make, in D.C. and at home.  While what they do at home is their own business (a concept they fail to realize, ironically, themselves), what they do in D.C. is not just their own business.  That's ours, too.  We need to know what makes these guys think and vote as they do, because they, more so than the President, shape America's social climate.  And these guys, apparently, have never heard of the Separation of Church and State.  If they had, Bush could not have started his Faith-Based Initiatives in his first five minutes in office.  And Mr. Broun certainly wouldn't admit in public (with an honesty rivaled only by Romney's now-infamous 47% speech) that he bases all of his decisions as a congressman and lawmaker solely on the Bible--which is, of course, an unconstitutional thing to do.  Their stance is simple: They place the Bible before the Constitution.  But in American politics, you can't do that.  You can, though, if you're already in office, and no one holds your hand to the fire when you screw up.  Bush and Broun should have been ousted from office immediately, the second they obviously held their Bibles higher than their Constitution.  We, the American people, have the right--in fact, the obligation--to throw them out of office, and we do have the legal power to do so.  But this never happens.  These guys are never held accountable for what they say--much less for what they do.

Which brings me to Mr. Todd Akin, in an interview with KTVI:

REP. TODD AKIN (R-Mo.): It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that's [pregnancy resulting from a rape] really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something. You know I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.

Obama's response:

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:

"The views expressed were offensive.

"Rape is rape. And the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we're talking about doesn't make sense to the American people and certainly doesn't make sense to me.


"So, what I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn't have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health care decisions on behalf of women."

My comments, which are longer, and more in number, but perhaps not expressed any better than Obama's here, will follow in an upcoming entry...Stay tuned.

Randomness 10/23/12

 Photo: Jackson asleep on the couch.  A colleague said he looked "angelic" in this picture.  True dat.  What can you say when your dog is more photogenic than you are?

Been away for awhile again, this time because my dog's been very ill, to the extent that I had to bring him to the vet yesterday and he has to spend two, maybe three, days and nights there to recover.  He's got an infected pancreas, which sounds nasty to me.  Very treatable, they say, and he doesn't have a fever, which means the infection wasn't too bad, but he'd been vomiting a ton of times over the past few days.  So wish Jackson the Wonderdog well!

So a few random things on my mind lately:

--I'm as lazy as anyone.  (Well, actually I'm very hyperactive and always busy, but whatever.)  But I draw some kind of line.  Convenience is just a fancy word for laziness, and there's only so much convenience I can take.  I don't know exactly where the line is, but a lot of money at the cost of convenience/laziness is simply not something I'll allow myself.  (Heck, not even a little amount of money.)

So recently there were two instances on Pawn Stars that drove me crazy.  I temporarily misplaced lost my notes about one of them, so I can only speak about one.  For sale: a 1760 bell.  Very good condition; used to be someplace very important and historical.  (Forgot where.)  Anyway, the expert was called in, and he said that at an auction it would fetch at least $15,000.  At least!  So let's just say fifteen.  Auctions take fifteen to twenty percent of the sale price.  Ten percent of fifteen grand is fifteen hundred, so twenty percent is three thousand.  So now it's twelve grand.  Maybe there are taxes to pay; I don't know, but there'd be taxes to pay, theoretically, selling it to the Pawn Stars, too, so that's a wash.  Let's say that other fees, like shipping it to the closest good auction house (though he's already in Vegas!  He couldn't just drive it to an auction house in Vegas?!?) would bring the total take down to ten grand (and I'll bet the take would be closer to the twelve.)  And that's minimum, as the expert said at least fifteen grand.  Bottom line, then, is that at an auction, the seller could walk away with ten to twelve grand.

He sold it to the Pawn Stars for $7,200.  After the expert says that if the seller takes it to an auction, it would sell for fifteen grand, and so he'd walk away with at least ten to twelve thousand, he sells it to them for $7,200.  That's a loss, minimum, of $2,800, and probably more like $4,800.  Why?  Because he's standing in front of a buyer, right then and there.  Didn't want to make a few calls, and drive it or ship it anywhere--or wait.  That's just crazy.  Someone's got to explain this to me.

--Two girls, both twelve years old, were murdered this past week by someone as they were walking or riding a bike to a friend's house.  And a twenty-two year old woman in Oregon was killed by a man who punched through a window of her SUV, got in the car and killed her, dumped her body, used her phone and then dumped the phone (cell phones can be traced), and then left her car somewhere.  It's a sick world out there.

--I've heard weather experts say it's going to be a very cold winter around here.  I've also heard the same number say it'll be a warm winter, though not as warm as last year.  A warm winter actually means more snow around here, as it's too dry to snow when it's too cold.  I'll take the too cold anyday.  More snow means bad driving, more shoveling, less walking of the dog, which will lead to much more whining, and possibly paying a neighbor to plow my driveway if the snow gets crazy.  So here's to the cold--but no ice on the roads, please.  Hate that.

--If Romney wins, I don't want to hear it from the 47% he obviously doesn't care about.  In his head, he's the rich white man's president.

--During the last debate, his facial expressions ran the gamut between obvious lovey-dovey towards Obama, to looking like he was about to vomit, with the occasional greasy used car salesman thrown in.  Weird, sad and slimy, in turns.

--His chin and jowls are tucked; his hair is slicked; his chin got in a duel with Jay Leno and won; his smile is either slick, sick or frozen.  He's more superficial than flavored ice cream on the nip and tucked face and silicone lips of a bottled blonde with chest enhancements.  And he openly and honestly doesn't give a damn about at least 47% of the country.  Voting for him would still be less insane than voting for Bush, especially the second time, but it would still be insane, nonetheless, and if you believe his assertion that he's run businesses and so therefore he can run the country, then you must think that snuffing out a lit candle makes you a professional firefighter.

--You can break a mirror in one second, but it would take a ton of hours to fix every little piece of glass into the mirror frame.  And so it would obviously take more than four years to fix eight years of broken pieces.  In fact, it would take at least a generation.  We can't give that, but we can give four more.

--This is post #250 on this site.  I appreciate my audience.  Thanks for reading, everyone.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne--Don't Be Instructed by the Uninstructed

Photo: (Top) Title page of the First Edition, 1850, from the book's Wikipedia page.
Photo: First Editions, from flavorwire.com.

I have a lot of little things to say about this--about its plot, themes, images, metaphors and writing--so let's just bullet them:

--There was a stretch of fifteen pages (in my book, pages 66-81) of straight narration, with no dialogue at all.  And there were many other shorter stretches of straight narration as well.  This simply wouldn't happen in a book today, unless it was by a magic realist like Salman Rushdie, or someone working within an arcane specialty.  Certainly not by a popular novelist, which Hawthorne was in his day.  Literary agents and publishers would insist, perhaps correctly, that it simply wouldn't hold the reader's attention.

--Considering this, the book is remarkably well-written.  Though it did take me quite awhile to read it because of this fireplace-narration style, it was still well done.  Just hard to get through.  Some of the sentences are brilliant, such as: "...the children of the Puritans looked up from their play,--or what passed for play with those sombre little urchins..."

--Hawthorne was not a lover of Puritans, or of their children.  It comes across as an amusing bias in the book.  You get such straight-laced and sincere narration with such an author-reading voice, then he springs a sentence like the last one on you.  Tolkein did the same, but in more sleep-inducing ways.

--His descriptions and details are ingenious.  I missed them in a glazed stupor because of the blocks of narration, but then one hit me as I read it, and then I went back to see what else I'd missed in my reading doze.  Often, it was a lot.  Describing Pearl's clothing as a purposeful, fiery, living representation of the scarlet letter was a strong idea: "So much strength of coloring...was admirably adapted to Pearl's beauty, and made her the very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon the earth."  That's good writing.

--The narration as it unfolds is more or less a series of vignettes starring Hester Prynne.  As such, this would make a good Tarantino film, with a few flourishes, of course.  And you'd have to give her an Uzi.

--Arthur Dimmesdale>Hester Prynne>Pearl = Thomas Jefferson>Sally Hemmings>their descendants, if you follow the drift of the hypocrisy (though, in fairness, Jefferson--as far as I know--didn't give long racist rants).  You could go there with today's conservative, gay-bashing Republicans and their male lovers as well.  The Scarlet Letter is a political novel, too, because the religious leaders of the day were also the political leaders of the day.  That's one of the points of the book: separation of Church and State, after all.

--Art imitates life.  Read the last two sentences above again, and then consider the reasons politicians say they oppose gay marriage, or any number of other societal things.  Anytime you invoke God to pass, or to not pass, legislation, you're violating the most simple and most powerful tenet of this, or of any other, democracy: Separation of Church and State.

--Emma Stone as a child would've made a perfect, intelligent, sassy and fiery Pearl, just as she did as a quasi-Hester Prynne in Easy A.

--Hawthorne went out of his way to pile on the hypocrisy.  The real Governor Bellingham, for example, served in office for just one year before his Puritan constituents threw him out.  His crime?  He married a woman who had been betrothed to a friend of his.  (Notice that the woman's preference mattered little.)

--There's a remarkable benefit of having to wear the scarlet letter.  Since everyone will think badly of you anyway, why not behave as boldly as you wish, all the time?  The need to impress others won't exist.

--And no one will not tell you to behave this way, since you're too sinful to be spoken to anyway.

--Hawthorne had no love for the clergy, of any time.  When Hester visits the Governor, he's in a meeting with a few ministers, and the servant (an enslaved and bonded freeman, but that's another point) says to her: "Yea, his honorable worship is within.  But he hath a godly minister or two with him, and likewise a leech."  The leech turns out to be her worthy husband, Roger Chillingworth.  Dimmesdale is representative of Hawthorne's attitude towards the clergy--when he was in a positive mood.

--Speaking of Dimmesdale, his speech imploring Hester to reveal the name of the father, in front of the populace in the beginning of the book, is an ingenious scene of dichotomy.  Forced by his superior to pull the name from her, he's 100% hoping she will say it, and, of course, 100% hoping she won't, at the same time.

--Her husband was indeed chilling, and her lover was, in fact, a bit dim: "Then, after long search into the minister's dim interior..." (107).  I wrote that observation long before I read that quote; good to know I don't just pull this stuff out of the air.

--"On the wall hung a row of portraits...All were characterized by the sternness and severity which old portraits so invariably put on; as if they were the ghosts, rather than the pictures, of departed worthies, and were gazing with harsh and intolerant criticism at the pursuits and enjoyments of living men."  There are dozens of great passages like this.  Genius.

--The image of the armor acting like a funhouse mirror and making the A of gigantic proportion on her, as if "...she seemed hidden behind it" was another great touch in a book filled with such written flourishes.

--The home that the two men shared with the old woman was adorned with tapestry depicting the story of David and Bathsheba.  Again going out of his way to pile on the metaphors and symbols of guilt and hypocrisy, Hawthorne gives us the famous biblical story of the great man who slept with a minor man's wife, hanging in the house of the man who did the same.

--"When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived" (105).  Indeed.  For everyone who fervently believe that most (or, any) of the 9/11 hijackers came from Iraq, or that Obama isn't an American citizen, or that he is Islamic, or a socialist, pay heed.  Don't be instructed by the uninstructed.

--Birthers.  Please.

--Speaking of that, when Romney blurted something Birther recently, it told me he knew he was a rat on a sinking ship.  McCain, for all his faults, was a good, moral man who refused (unlike his pretty but empty VP) to run a campaign based on purposeful misinformation and outright lies.  He even told an audience that Obama was a good, kind man, and not a terrorist.  Mitt should pay heed.  The blind leading the blind, there.

--Mitt.  Please.  At least Clinton didn't actually ask to be called Bubba.  Even a reference to baseball can't save this guy in my eyes.

More to come.  A truly great novel, worth the effort.