Springing into Cognitive Dissonance

Am I the only one who thinks it's jarring that the first day of spring coincides with the sixth anniversary of the Iraq War? As if the war itself weren't appalling enough, the timing just seems like an affront to all that's good in the universe.

In a different register, but also distressing: Ohio's unemployment rate climbed to 9.4%, the highest in 25 years, according to figures released today.

In the face of all that, my daffodils have finally burst into bloom.

Cornel West, Love, Justice ... and Me

Well, okay. I didn't actually even shake his hand, much less get to talk with him one-on-one. But I got to hear Cornel West speak at my university today, and I was both moved and impressed.

Impressed: because he's got such an stirring delivery. If I tried to riff on the whole scale of emotion and power that he uses, I'd come across as a screeching, bombastic pedant. (Heck, I'm still trying to get comfy with wielding a microphone when I lecture!) But he's got the voice and presence to pull off the sort of oratory that's otherwise reserved for legendary preachers.

Moved: because he's not just way smarter than me, and he's not just a brilliant showman. He calls us to tend to our own spiritual maturity while committing ourselves to rooting out oppression. He takes Socrates' injunction that "the unexamined life is not worth living," mixes it with the blues, and inspires you to recommit to a better self and a better world. Actually, the better self is the bridge to that better world.

I'm not going to try to summarize all that West said. (He was giving the keynote at a conference on a founder of progressive Islam, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, a Sudanese visionary executed by his government for his beliefs, whom West grouped with Gandhi, King, and Mandela.) Instead, I'll just share a few of the lines that I found most inspiring, yet pithy enough that I got them on paper - no small thing, because the ideas were flowing so furiously.

Indifference is the one trait that makes the very angels weep. It's the very essence of inhumanity.

Optimism deodorizes the catastrophic. Hope allows us to confront the catastrophic.

These weren't just eloquent yet empty phrases. While celebrating Obama's upcoming inauguration, West called on "Brother Barack" to serve hope, not optimism. To speak out against the carnage in Gaza. To explain why he chose Rick Warren in apparent contempt of his LGBT supporters.

This, however, is the thought I've promised myself to repeat every day until it becomes part of my blood and bones:

Justice is what love looks like in public.

Imagine what the world might look like if that became everyone's mantra. Imagine how different our history would be. How radiant our future.

Of course this is way out of season, but I swear it's posted in a spirit of hope, not optimism. (The flower is a Climbing Peace Rose from early September 2008.)

Echoes of Dubya in the Alaskan Wilderness

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

Quick follow-up to my last post on Tina Fey's wonderful Sarah Palin send-up (and also my earlier fretting on what seems to be her willful ignorance of foreign policy).

James Fallows at the Atlantic cogently analyzes why Palin is clueless about the Bush Doctrine and why this should rob us of our sleep:

How could she not know this? For the same reason I don't know anything about European football/soccer standings, player trades, or intrigue. I am not interested enough. And she evidently has not been interested enough even to follow the news of foreign affairs during the Bush era.

A further point. The truly toxic combination of traits GW Bush brought to decision making was:

1) Ignorance
2) Lack of curiosity
3) "Decisiveness"

That is, he was not broadly informed to begin with (point 1). He did not seek out new information (#2); but he nonetheless prided himself (#3) on making broad, bold decisions quickly, and then sticking to them to show resoluteness.

We don't know for sure about #2 for Palin yet -- she could be a sponge-like absorber of information. But we know about #1 and we can guess, from her demeanor about #3. Most of all we know something about the person who put her in this untenable role.

(My emphasis. Read his whole commentary here.)

Now, I did follow European soccer when I lived in Germany, and it's great fun - but only if you're willing and able to invest some effort in it. Otherwise, you're left with a sea of furrin names that don't mean much. Same for furrin policy. But darn it, virtually everyone I know who's involved in local politics has more of a clue about the Bush Doctrine than Sarah Palin does.

That, to me, is pretty strong evidence that Palin suffers from congenital lack of curiosity about foreign affairs. Seems to me that Fallows really underplays his second point. His third point - about "decisiveness" - is pretty well illustrated by Palin's approach to preterm labor. If you object that this was a "personal" arena and thus no predictor of how "resolute" she'd be as president, please recall her "I did not blink" mantra in the Charlie Gibson interview.

Fallows could've also added a fourth similarity to GW Bush: Palin's penchant for cronyism, secrecy, and intimidation, as reported in the New York Times. Apparently her attempt to fire the Wasilla public librarian was only her warm-up act. And Troopergate is only the most publicized manifestation of her Nixonian qualities.

All of this adds up to someone who I wouldn't want on my local school board, much less a heartberat away from being Leader of the Free World. The only person I trust less, at this point, is the guy who picked her.

Parenting in the Shadows of Atrocity

Pictures from a few hours ago:

We're in the mountains. The sky is preternaturally blue. Maybe I'm in Colorado.

An airplane approaches, too low. It breaks into two pieces. There's no fire, smoke, or explosion. The fuselage just snaps in two, breaking right behind the wings. It goes down instantly, silently.

In the dream, everyone knows it's September 12. Oddly, I'm the only one who immediately realizes that this isn't just a technical malfunction.

I wake up. Sometimes, commemoration doesn't involve flag pins or pious moments of silence. Sometimes, it's neurotic and lonely and feels as real as the rubble of history.

********

We haven't yet told our kids about the 9/11 attacks. Each year, we keep the news off the TV and radio so that the Bear won't pick up on the story. I realize he needs to hear about it from us before he hears about it from other kids; I know that time is running out on our policy of avoidance. He was not quite two in 2001. It was easy to shield him, then, and he was too young to ask why my eyes were so red-rimmed.

Now, as he approaches his ninth birthday, he's a very sensitive kid - so much so that he asks me to turn off NPR if a report about the Iraq War comes on. He understands that war is not a game, that it's about death and destruction. I've never discouraged him from gun-play because it's never really come up; he's scared of guns, plain and simple.

He's familiar with the word "terrorist." He knows about the shoe bomber. We fly regularly and he hates taking off his shoes for security. I explained that a bad guy tried to sneak a bomb onto a plane in his shoes, and that it won't happen now because the TSA is watching for it. I believe this is true. Something else will happen, but it won't be a shoe bomb.

It's much easier to provide reassurances about those attacks that never happened.

How do I explain falling buildings? How do I make sense of the kind of zealotry that guides a plane into a skyscraper? How do I assure him that we can still get on a plane without fear?

I'm not looking for advice. Legions of child psychologists dished out tips on managing our children's fears after 9/11. None of it struck me as very helpful. These are questions without an answer, and I know it.

Maybe I'm overprotective. I think it's more complicated than that.

********

I'm a historian. I don't understand how people can be "history buffs." History is not a hobby. History is a chronicle of atrocity, disaster, and horror. Every once in a while the archives give you a glimpse of love or heroism or honor. Mostly, it's war, plague, oppression, and one child in five dying as an infant.

I am as thin-skinned as my Bear. I cried the first time I saw Night and Fog - not discreet, dignified tears, but big gulping sobs. My doctoral adviser was sitting right next to me. I was afraid she'd conclude that if I lost it while watching a documentary on the Holocaust, I wasn't tough enough to study German history professionally. Instead, she kindly told me: There would be something wrong with you if this left you untouched. Once I'd calmed down, I realized she was right.

It's possible to be that thin-skinned and still stare down history without blinking. I want that for my children. I don't want them to become impervious.

Given that my kids are half German, they'll have to live with the legacy of the Holocaust. From me, their American mother, they inherit the legacy of slavery and the persecution of American Indians. We've talked about this things in age-appropriate ways. The Bear knows about slavery, Martin Luther King, and Huckleberry Finn. He knows Germany had a very bad ruler who was mean to the Jews and started a huge war when his Oma was a little girl. There's time enough for the harsh details when he's old enough put them into context: A great-grandfather who made his peace with the Nazis. A great-grandmother who was killed in an air raid while his Oma was buried alive. The deportations and the death camps.

Is it ever possible, really, to put such stories into context? Or do we just learn to hold ourselves at an ostensibly safe distance?

********

I also don't want my children to be ruled by fear, which is surely what will happen if they're exposed young to all the world's dangers. We have become a nation of cowards that specializes in saber-rattling. We are "governed" by chickenhawks who think invading Iraq worked out so well, we might as well take on Iran and Russia next. I don't want to raise my sons with the sort of false bravado that becomes a defense against otherwise unmanageable fears.

The same people who peddle fear promise to deliver us from it. Vote for them, and they'll snuff out the evildoers all around the globe. Give them power, and we'll be freed of the stuff of our nightmares.

I don't want that freedom, bought with the blood of innocents. I want a leader who will say yes, there is evil in the world, and I can't make all your bad dreams go away. I want to hear that even when the world bristles with real threats, we can be brave without being belligerent.

I want to be told that it's our job to be the grown-ups.

Preemptive Ignorance

I don't know if it's just the weather or if it's the wretched political climate, but I'm feeling too droopy to write anything. By now you've probably heard that in her ABC interview last night, Sarah Palin showed she didn't know WTF the "Bush Doctrine" refers to. Here she is, displaying her ignorance.



The problem is, you can hardly go after a candidate for their ignorance without a nasty bumerang effect. Too many Americans are ignorant, themselves, and they'll identify and sympathize. It seems to make no difference that John McCain can't tell Shiite from Sunni. And Palin's cluelessness about the Bush Doctrine's "justification" of preemptive warfare is unlikely to bother anyone except nerds like me who weren't going to vote for her anyway.

The Rubble of History

Watching the Republican National Convention, the image that keeps haunting me is Paul Klee's Angelus Novus. This is the figure that Walter Benjamin called the angel of history - blown ever forward by the winds of time, face turned perpetually toward the past, watching the rubble of human "progress" pile up behind him:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

(Walter Benjamin's ninth thesis from his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," cited in Wikipedia - yeah, I'm that lazy. Wikipedia claims fair use of this reproduction of Klee's Angelus Novus, and so do I.)

Of course, it's not the convention itself that calls forth the angel of history. It's the repeated references to danger and terror and 9/11. It's the memory of the avoidable human wreckage piled upon the ruins of the Twin Towers in the seven years since. And it's the very real fear that we as a country might not be wise enough to recognize the rubble for which we're culpable, nor strong enough to turn and face forward into the wind.

Cancer, "Positive Thinking," and the War Metaphor

Toy soldier image by Flickr user atomicShed, used under a Creative Commons license.

Ted Kennedy underwent surgery today for a brain tumor. The press coverage of his illness has stressed two major themes so far: He has a particularly bad type of brain tumor, a glioma. And even in the face of his grim prognosis, Senator Kennedy is displaying courage. A fighting spirit.

Yesterday's New York Times finally tackled the obvious collision between these two themes with a wonderfully insightful article by Jan Hoffman. Now, I don't know anything about how Senator Kennedy is handling this. And really, it's not my business. (Of course, I do sincerely wish him well. Nobody should have to face such a tough diagnosis.)

But I do have a very personal stake in how popular culture portrays the "fight" against cancer. Far too often, the media and ordinary people employ metaphors that just violate the experiences I've had with my loved ones who've been stricken by it.** So I'm grateful that the NYT devoted some space to deconstructing them.

First, there's the relentless pressure to "think positive." An AP article posted after successful completion of Kennedy's surgery today quoted him as saying, "I feel like a million bucks. I think I'll do that again tomorrow." Obviously he's being flip about it. I'm genuinely glad for him that he can crack a joke while in recovery; black humor is one of the better coping mechanisms, in my experience. But boy, this sort of media chatter sets the bar high for the rest of us who might come out of surgery groggy, scared, shaking with cold, and - believe it or not - humorless.

If you get a cancer diagnosis, dozens of people will tell you to stay positive. Some of these will be people you barely know. Of course, if your remaining time on this earth turns out to be rather short, it's a wonderful gift if you can find pleasure in it. But it's just not so simple. You don't hear people exhorting hostages to "think positive" while a gun is being held to their heads, do you?

Hoffman's NYT article accurately describes the pressure patients come under to put a positive spin on their illness:

“Whether you’re a celebrity or an ordinary person, it’s obligatory, no matter how badly you’re feeling about it, to display optimism publicly,” said Dr. Barron H. Lerner, the author of “When Illness Goes Public.” [Dr. Lerner is a physician at Columbia who's also an expert on the history of breast cancer.]

That optimism reassures anxious relatives, the public and doctors, regardless of whether it accurately reflects the patient’s emotional state. “If Ted Kennedy wanted to stick up his middle finger,” Dr. Lerner added, “that would be the more appropriate finger, but he’s doing what he is supposed to.”

Whether such images inspire patients, or reinforce unrealistic expectations that they, too, should maintain a game face, remains an open question, say doctors, social workers, family members and patients themselves.

That middle finger would be such a relief! It would take a lot of pressure off patients to act brave for other people's sake. Sure, sometimes it's adaptive and helpful to act brave for your own sake; acting brave can help you feel brave. Sometimes you have to shield your young children from the whole truth, since it doesn't help a preschooler to hear that a parent might die when in fact that parent might live.

The problem arises when the patient feels unable ever to let her guard down - when platitudes take the place of real support and encouragement. Hoffman collected a few of the real prizewinners:

Uneasy well-wishers, steeped in near-superstitious belief about positive mental attitude, can exacerbate anxiety. On Cancerblog.com and ChemoChick’s “Excuse Me?” sites, lists of tone-deaf remarks include, “If anyone can beat it, it’s you,” “You gotta think positively” and “Just look at Lance,” a reference to Lance Armstrong, the champion cyclist and a cancer survivor.

What the NYT can't say, because it's a respectable publication, but I can, since Kittywampus is not: These platitudes are just bullshit. The superstition, of course, stems from the idea that positive thinking is not just a way to make the most of our remaining days but our best weapon in defeating the disease itself. Having had a birds-eye view of chemo at work, I can assure you that a resolute attitude might get you out of bed in the morning; it is not likely to make the difference between life and death.

The second load of bullshit that Hoffman exposes is what she felicitously calls the "stirring martial language" that we employ in discussing cancer.

Dr. Gary M. Reisfield, a palliative care specialist at the University of Florida, Jacksonville, believes that the language used by cancer patients and their supporters can galvanize or constrain them. Over the last 40 years, war has become the most common metaphor, with patients girding themselves against the enemy, doctors as generals, medicines as weapons. When the news broke about Senator Kennedy, he was ubiquitously described as a fighter. While the metaphor may be apt for some, said Dr. Reisfield, who has written about cancer metaphors, it may be a poor choice for others.

“Metaphors don’t just describe reality, they create reality,” he said. “You think you have to fight this war, and people expect you to fight.” But many patients must balance arduous, often ineffective therapy with quality-of-life issues. The war metaphor, he said, places them in retreat, or as losing a battle, when, in fact, they may have made peace with their decisions.

To describe a patient’s process through illness, he prefers the more richly ambiguous metaphor of a journey: its byways, crossroads, U-turns; its changing destinations; its absence of win, lose or fail.

Hoffman then describes a patient who's nearly ten years out from pancreatic cancer. He became angry once treatment was over and realized "Oh my God, I have nothing left to fight with." It's not at all uncommon to become depressed after treatment, and this sense of having run out of "ammunition," as Hoffman puts it, can be one contributor to depression. I've seen exactly this occur in someone near and dear to me. Studies have shown major depression to be common after breast cancer, as has lots of anecdotal evidence. I'm not aware of much research on other cancers but it stands to reason that breast cancer would not be unique in this respect.

One reason for post-treatment depression - and for its lack of recognition - is the idea that you should just get back to normal right away, especially if your disease was caught early and your prognosis is reasonably good. Everyone from employers to family members want this and expect it. (I'm sure that as a family member, I've had moments where I've let this desire show, too, as much as I've tried not to expect the "new normal" to look like the "old normal.") It's not that simple, of course. Even with a "good prognosis" you're still waiting for the ax to fall. And you're constantly reminded of this by the fact that your body is not the same anymore; maybe you've lost your hair, maybe your energy is permanently depleted, maybe you've lost a part of yourself to surgery.

Another contributor to post-treatment depression is personality and temperament. Those of us who are biased toward doing something - anything - will inevitably feel some let-down when there's nothing left to be done. And if this is how you're already wired, the ethos of modern Western medicine, which is similarly slanted toward action instead of watchful waiting, does nothing to counteract this tendency.

But surely the metaphors we use feed these post-treatment problems, too. We've been waging a "war against cancer" ever since President Nixon declared it in 1971. Since then, we're lost two real wars (counting the present one as unwinnable). The war metaphor might have provided some reassurance to Americans with a clear memory of sacrifice and triumph in World War II. I don't see it as reassuring at all today, and I don't think that's just due to my own pacifist leanings.

We speak of "survivors" in a well-intentioned attempt to remove the stigma and victimhood from cancer. It's good that we no longer treat the disease as taboo, speaking of it in hushed tones (if at all). But what does it mean when the word "survivor" comes to denote anyone with cancer from the moment of diagnosis up to the moment of death, whether from cancer or other causes? And even if you're lucky enough to die much later of something wholly unrelated, what do you gain from the implicit pressure in "survivor" to put the disease behind you as soon as treatment ends, never mind that the gun is still at your temple?

There are exceptions to the triumphalist military narrative. A recent memoir by Kathlyn Conway, who has struggled through both Hodgkins lymphoma and breast cancer, is refreshingly honest, though often bleak. In Ordinary Life: A Memoir of Illness she describes how her illness was just something she had to get through. It did not transform her. It did not make her a better person, nor did it lead her to deep religious faith. But stories like hers are still the exception that proves the rule.

Finally, it's worth asking what it means to have war metaphors mixed promiscuously and unthinkingly with all this talk about "positive thinking." It's not just that war-talk shapes how we think about cancer; the reverse is likely to be true, too. Isn't it likely that valorizing military language in our cancer discourse helps recast war as brave and noble even in times where it's clear that it's simply a lost cause? Certainly there's a long history of seeing "the enemy" in terms that evoke tumors and metastases. But that would be a whole 'nother post.

** I'm basing my reflections on experiences of several people close to me, including some immediate family members, but they're a composite because I want to respect everyone's privacy.

In Memoriam: 4081

That's the number of reported deaths of American soldiers in Iraq since hostilities began in March 2003.**


I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me why we're there and how we're going to extricate ourselves. Even my man Barack Obama, who I think will steer a much wiser course in future foreign policy, doesn't have a truly persuasive plan for getting out. No one does.

That figure of 4081 deaths doesn't count other Allied deaths, nor non-fatal (but often devastating) injuries, nor the orders-of-magnitude higher toll among Iraqis. You can find much of that information at iCasualties: Iraq Coalition Casualty Count.

For Iraqis, the Lancet put "excess deaths" at 655,000 in its October 2006 study. The Iraq Body Count project estimates roughly 90,000 as of May 2008. (Wikipedia gives a decent overview of the controversies over Iraqi casualty figures for both the Lancet and the IBC.)

I tend to believe the Lancet numbers are closer to the truth because they use statistical and epidemiological approaches to compensate for the difficulty of obtaining an accurate actual count. But even the lower IBC number is scandalous.

Whatever the exact numbers, they raise the question: What are we commemorating this Memorial Day? Yes, there's been a lot of bravery among both Allied forces and ordinary Iraqis, among soldiers and civilians alike. But to what purpose?

What will redeem the losses that so many of them have suffered - whether a dear comrade or family member, a limb, their mental health, or their very life?

** Figures were current as of the start of Memorial Day 2008.

Poppies from a neighbor's garden.

The Children of Abu Graib

This is not an atrocity blog. I promise this sort of thing won't become a daily feature. But I spent a long while crying about this today, and then I decided to turn those tears into outraged action. Since I can't singlehandedly shut down Abu Ghraib, I can only write about it - and urge y'all to vote for candidates who seem likely to shutter that hellhole forever.

In the not-quite-latest New Yorker, there's a profile of Sabrina Harman, the woman who took most of the infamous Abu Ghraib photos, that's as insightful as it is chilling. The authors, Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, use extensive interviews with Harman and several of her fellow MPs to illuminate how a bunch of young people who mostly just wanted to subsidize their college education gradually became inured to torture. Or nearly so; it turns out that Harman's pictures were motivated by a mixture of macabre fascination, gallows humor, and a partly-inchoate awareness that she was partaking in atrocities that needed to be documented.

The whole article is long and upsetting but very much worth your time. For me, the most upsetting part is Harman's comments about children being held in Abu Ghraib. Yep, that's right - kids as young as ten were locked up, generally in order to coerce confessions from their fathers.

You may be asking: Wait, don't you mean Saddam's Abu Ghraib? Well, yes, Saddam also imprisoned and raped family members to extract confessions. But guess what: We didn't just take over his prison, we took over some of his most heinous tactics.

Gourevitch and Morris write:

It was easier to be nice to the women and children on Tier 1B [than to the adult male prisoners], but, Harman said, “It was kind of sad that they even had to be there.” The youngest prisoner on the tier was just ten years old—“a little kid,” she said. “He could have fit through the bars, he was so little.” Like a number of the other kids and of the women there, he was being held as a pawn in the military’s effort to capture or break his father.

Harman enjoyed spending time with the kids. She let them out to run around the tier in a pack, kicking a soccer ball, and she enlisted them to help sweep the tier and distribute meals—special privileges, reserved only for the most favored prisoners on the M.I. block. “They were fun,” she said. “They made the time go by faster.” She didn’t like seeing children in prison “for no reason, just because of who your father was,” but she didn’t dwell on that. What was the point? “You can’t feel because you’ll just go crazy, so you just kind of blow it off,” Harman said. “You can only make their stay a little bit acceptable, I guess. You give them all the candy from the M.R.E.s to make their time go by better. But there’s only so much you can do or so much you can feel.”

But even this account plays down the horror of it, though the article otherwise doesn't pull many punches. Since Gourevitch and Morris have kindly posted some of their primary source material at the New Yorker online, you can read in the interview transcript that the ball playing petered out as the prison grew increasingly overcrowded. Said Harman:

It got filled up pretty fast, so fast that we couldn’t take the children out anymore and they had to stay in their cells. We used to let them out and play ball with them. Like, just let them out in the tier and locked the main lock, like the main door so they couldn’t get out. And we’d have like 20 kids just running around and we couldn’t do it anymore because these other prisoners were coming in. These…We had people that were crazy and we had people that were just causing problems and we just couldn’t let them out because you don’t want them talking to these other people or passing them notes or corrupting the kids. So we had to keep the kids inside also. So it was pretty much like they were also being interrogated pretty much because they were in a cell. Maybe if you were one of the lucky ones, you would get out for like a half hour to help pass around food or go take your shower, or if you want a cold shower. But it was getting really crowded.
(Read the rest of Harman's comments on the children.)

We had people that were crazy. Yeah, I know she means prisoners who'd snapped, but what about her direct superiors, who put Harman and the other MPs into a situation without any training, apparently precisely so they wouldn't know that they were being ordered and encouraged to violate U.S. military and international law on the treatment of prisons? What about their superiors - all the way up to and including Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush?

I do recall Sy Hersh referring to women and children being raped in Abu Ghraib shortly after the first torture photos became public, but I had no clue that their detention was a systematic, long-term practice as opposed to a few isolated incidents. And I'm one of the people who's paying attention, most of the time. (For a round-up of the "old news" on this, see this American Leftist post from July 2004 and also Hersh's comments as reported in Salon's War Room.)

What I want to know - and what I can't figure out, despite having googled it like crazy - is this: Are children still being held in U.S. military and CIA prisons today?

Maybe we'll get an answer to this from the New Yorker article's co-author, Errol Morris, who has directed a documentary on Abu Ghraib, S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure, that won a jury prize at the Berlinale and is scheduled for release in the U.S. later this month. Or maybe, like so much else about this war, we won't know the answer even when the historians get their say.

One thing I do know for sure: Holding family members hostage to extract a prisoner's confession violates international law. Our next president better know this, too.

Prostitution among Iraqi Refugees

On the five-year anniversary of the start of this stupid, immoral war, Alternet reported that an estimated 50,000 Iraqi women and girls in Syria have been forced into prostitution because as refugees they had no other means of sustenance. As the shock and snickers fade from the Spitzer affair, this comes as a harsh reminder that many, if not most, prostitutes either have no meaningful choice in entering sex work or "choose" it under tightly constrained circumstances.

According to Alternet's source on this, The Independent, many of the clients are Saudis seeking pleasures they can't find at home. A prostitute can earn $60 per evening - equivalent to a month's pay in a factory. As a refugee, she'd be barred from working legally in a factory anyway. Family members not uncommonly pressure or force women and girls - some as young as 13 - to sell their bodies:

Bassam al-Kadi of Syrian Women Observatory says: "Some have been sexually abused in Iraq, but others are being prostituted by fathers and uncles who bring them here under the pretext of protecting them. They are virgins, and they are brought here like an investment and exploited in a very ugly way."
(Source: The Independent)

The girls enter the clubs where they work fully covered, as modest as any other devout Muslim, and tart themselves up once inside, sometimes aping Girls Gone Wild moves to entice potential customers.

But the majority of prostituted Iraqis are forced into it not by family but by the threat of starvation, according to a New York Times report published last year. Part of the problem is that a sizable fraction of the 1.2 million Iraqi refuges in Syria have no man in the household; women with no work permit and no work experience thus have no other choice.

UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security requires all branches of the UN to considered the gendered impacts of war. Prostitution and human trafficking are among the biggest of these (along with rape as a weapon of war). But precisely because the scope of the problem is so huge, the UN's resources are vastly inadequate to addressing the problem. To make things worse, in a number of other war zones UN peacekeepers have themselves become involved in the prostitution trade, as Elisabeth Rehn and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf found in the their 2002 UNIFEM report, "Women, War, Peace."

Of course, one could also demand accountability from the entity that created the Iraqi refugee crisis in the first place. But that'd first require ... regime change.

Photo of Damascus Old Town by Flickr user Richard Messenger, used under a Creative Commons license.

Five Years Ago Today, We Made a Historic Mistake

If you've been reading this blog even semi-regularly, you know that I teach women's studies. But my actual degree is in German history with a minor field in women's studies. So today I'm donning my historian's cap to say a few words about the Iraq war as I think it might be viewed in history books 50 or 100 years from now.

It's not the case that every last historian opposed the war from the get-go. But it's also not an accident that most of them did. Some of the leading luminaries of the profession are involved in Historians against the War, as are lots of us humbler practitioners. Thousands more who haven't signed the HAW petition still ardently opposed Bush's war of aggression.

Yeah, we're a bunch of liberals and pinko lefties, but by golly, those of us who earned a Ph.D. have spent a decade or so being formally trained to do something most Americans, left or right, never do: to take the long view.

Now, a good historian always relies on evidence to back up her assertions. We fetishize footnotes. Most of us are pretty fixated on archival research, too. With regard to the Iraq war, all of our usual goodies will be classified for decades to come, so we can't yet draw historical conclusions that would satisfy any historian's standard of evidence. And yet I think it's possible - by taking the long view - to advance a few educated guesses about how future historians will view this debacle.

First, the evidence for prosecuting a war of aggression was self-evidently weak to non-existent in the summer of 2002. This was obvious to any thoughtful, critical observer outside the Beltway even at the time, not just in retrospect. It was also glaringly obvious that this war was being marketed to us. This came out in Andy Card's famous statement about August being a bad month to sell a war: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.'' Dick Cheney's blatantly overblown insinuations of a connection between Saddam and Al Qaida also ought to have been a dead giveaway that none of the "evidence" for war was trustworthy. Even Colin Powell's famous speech to the UN - which postdated the Senate resolution authorizing war, let's not forget - should have been no more than a call for the UN inspectors to step up their search for weapons of mass destruction on the basis of the intelligence Powell cited. Future historians will likely judge all of the actors - from the Senate to the Pentagon, from the New York Times to the White House - quite harshly for their blindness, stupidity, and mendacity.

And speaking of mendacity, I think it's likely that only the declassified archival material will show just how many lies we've been fed. We all know by now (or we should, if we don't watch too much Fox News) that there were no WMD, that George Tenet spun the "slam-dunk" evidence to support the administrations case for war, that Saddam and Al Qaida were sworn enemies, that Rumsfeld and Cheney were pushing an Iraq invasion just days after 9/11 following the agenda of the Project for the New American Century. We're going to have to wait at least a couple more decades to discover just how very intricate a web of lies Bush and his cronies spun; this assumes that they haven't been massively destroying documents as they've already been busted doing with emails. In that case, historians will view the administration even more balefully, because we really don't like it if you fuck with our source base.

Finally, I'm pretty sure that the Iraq war will mark the end of American hegemony as we've known it. The war has bankrupted us for a generation to come, financially and morally. It's undermined our military readiness; troops are burned out, and understandably so, as they spend months in the desert hoping and praying they won't be blown up, only to return to a homeland where the V.A. lacks necessary services and no one else is being asked to make sacrifices - and where they face redeployment mere months later, never mind that many of them only signed up for the Reserves or the Guard. We're stretched so thin in Iraq that we don't have the strength to respond to crises elsewhere, as Katrina proved. Add to this skyrocketing oil prices, a tanking dollar, a historically unfavorable balance of payments, strained relations with our long-time allies, the inexorable rise of China - and we can only conclude that the long American party is over.

The New American Century is stillborn, thanks to our friends at the PNAC, and the old one is dead. Historians 50 or 100 years hence will almost certainly pinpoint March 19, 2003, as the date when the American hegemon went on life support.

Peace, Feminism, and the #%*&@ Primary

I'd promised myself I'd write about sex since that's what I'm teaching about this week - but with Super Tuesday looming, I just can't get in the mood.

A group called New York Feminists for Peace and Barack Obama has come out in favor of Obama. Comprising over 100 prominent feminists, the group is heavy on academics. It includes some of the historians whose work I've admired since I embarked on grad school: Victoria de Grazia, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Linda Gordon. Emily Martin, Rayna Rapp, and Rosalind Petchesky have all influenced my thinking on women, embodiment, and reproduction. And Katha Pollitt still inspires me every time I read her column; her latest explains beautifully why she's backing Obama.

But their status as feminist luminaries in my personal cosmos isn't nearly as important as their compelling reasons for backing Obama, which are pretty much identical to mine: We need peace first, and everything else depends on that. Feminism is dead in the water unless we've got peace and prosperity. This means that we need need to get out of Iraq, stay out of Iran, break our oil addiction, and recommit to the rule of law.

The Iraq sinkhole has put us in hock for at least a generation, hampering our ability to spend on the domestic needs that most feminists care about, such as health, the environment, and education. Obama doesn't have a foolproof plan for getting us out of there. No one does. But he's opposed the war from the very start. Clinton has never even apologized for her pro-war vote.

Based on Obama's consistent opposition to the Iraq war and Hillary Clinton's steadfast support in the Senate for a "stronger" military, there's good reason to believe he'll be more cautious in using military force elsewhere, too. Obama has said he'd be willing to talk directly with the leaders of "rogue" states such as Syria. Clinton mocked the idea. I can't see why that's so ridiculous. Talk is a heck of a lot cheaper than bombs, and often more effective.

The New York group doesn't mention Iran, but I'm worried that Hillary will take a hard line there, too. She's already signaled this by voting for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which designated Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. This puts us on a collision course with Iran that's apt to end in military action.

As Christopher Hayes argued eloquently in the Nation last week, foreign policy is the area where presidential power is least restrained by the Congress or courts. And that's precisely where the candidates' differences are greatest.

Neither candidate has adequately addressed the looming energy and climate catastrophes, which together with our foreign policy constitute a monstrous three-headed beast. Neither has signed onto the goals of the Apollo Alliance. While this worries me, my gut feeling is that Obama is more likely than Clinton to pursue an innovative energy policy. He's more willing to think outside the box. He's less indebted to vested interests. And for what it's worth, he's been chatting with Al Gore.

Finally, I'm not at all sure Clinton will renounce the new presidential powers that Dubya has arrogated to himself. She equivocated when she was asked about this a couple months back. As a former professor of constitutional law, Obama is more likely to reject Bush and Cheney's theory of the unitary executive and restore civil liberties. This, too, is essential if feminism is to thrive.

So if you're reading this, and if (unlike us disenfranchised Ohio residents) you get to vote in Super Tuesday, I hope you'll weigh these humble thoughts and consider voting for Barack Obama.

And now that that's settled, I'm going back to thinking about sex.