Breaking news! McCain picks Python as running mate!

As the eternally funny Branson fixture and Republican, Yakov Smirnoff would say, "What a Country!"

It's funny, I had figured the Pythons were too lefty for McCain. And foreign. Go figure.

Here.

American culture is profoundly unfriendly to children

So there's an article in the Times this morning about how some bars in park slope are banning strollers. And it's interesting, because rather than sticking to the narrow point that strollers have gotten very large and take up too much damn space in small city stores and restaurants, the whole thing gets blown up to some kind of "how dare parents take their kids out to bars?" and "Parents these days don't want to give up their hipster lives just because they have kids," and the child-free people get involved and bitch about how they don't want to hear crying babies when they're out having beers. And oh, a generation ago it would never have been a problem, because people would never have thought it was appropriate to take your kids out to a bar. Oh, those self-absorbed refuse-to-grow-up modern parents.

The whole debate really strikes me as so incredibly parochial and also a bit twisted. When we took Ari to Spain with us two years ago, we dragged him all over creation, till all hours. (Well, all hours that we could manage, which was pretty much till 11 pm) (Yes, he inhaled secondhand smoke. We are evil, evil people.) We weren't bizarre weirdos, either. Just people with a kid. And other people with kids also took them out with them. And there weren't specially segregated kiddie places, and kid restaurants, and kid menus. Kids out in the world weren't treated as a nuisance or an imposition, but as people, sometimes charming, sometimes annoying, sometimes difficult or tired or adorable or silly or quiet or loud. We found the same thing in New Zealand. And in St. Martin. (Those are the three foreign places we've traveled with Ari; we are going to France with the kids in May, so we'll provide an update after that).

Anyway, so if you don't travel with your kids outside of the country, you might not realize just how much American culture just doesn't like kids. American culture is great at selling stuff to kids, and using kids to sell stuff to parents. But actually respecting kids as actual members of the community? Not so much. We do our best to make sure that the only grownups our kids come into contact with are family, teachers, childcare providers, coaches, and members of the child-related product industry. Adults without kids, especially men, have barely ANY opportunities to interact with children in the course of their daily lives. Then, of course, when and if they do have kids themselves, they are utterly unprepared to understand how to interact with these small people. Everyone loses.

Children learn to exist in community from older children, and from adults in the community. Likewise, adults learn about caring for and interacting with children by, strangely, having opportunities to watch others care for and interact with children, and to do so themselves. We segregate children not only from all adults save those who have some authority and responsibility for them, but also, for large parts of their days, from children of different ages from whom they might learn and to whom they might teach.

the whole thing is bizarre and unhealthy.

Nevertheless, I do think it's reasonable to carry your kid in a sling if you're going barhopping. Or at least use an umbrella stroller, and you know, ACTUALLY FOLD IT UP WHEN YOU PARK IT.

No, it was always illegal!!!!!

This headline in the Times this morning absolutely kills me:
C.I.A. Chief Doubts Tactic to Interrogate Is Still Legal

What it should read is: "CIA chief falsely suggests waterboarding was legal five years ago."

I don't give a crap what the sadists at the OLC said about it, that shit was never legal, not least because it violated a fucking treaty that our nation is a fucking party to.

I hope Bush and Cheney live in fear of traveling outside the US for the rest of their lives and getting arrested for crimes against humanity. Actually, I'd prefer to skip to the end, and see them stand trial for crimes against humanity sooner rather than later.

Getting our videotaping priorities right

I was starting to write a post about how fortunate it is that Arlen Specter has worked up his righteous indignation about the destruction of videotapes, but Dr. Jonas at Buzzflash has already said it better.

Naturally, the videotapes in question are not the destroyed tapes of CIA agents torturing prisoners, but instead of the New England Patriots videotaping another team's coach during a game.

Right on, Arlen.

Privacy slowly dissolves

This evening I went to buy some generic Sudafed (pseudoephedrine) for the first time in a while. I already knew that they now stock it in the pharmacy, and I thought that was to keep people from stealing them easily to use in their methamphetamine labs.

While that's the motivation for the policy, the new policy is dramatically more sinister than that (which isn't particularly sinister; I don't have a problem with stores keeping high-shoplift items under tighter control.)

No. What do you need to do now to purchase pseudoephedrine?

• Provide a picture ID. Your name and address are recorded.
• Sign an electronic form.
• You are limited to 3.6 g/day and 9 g/month. Presumably this is enforced by the above items.

It's breathtaking what people are willing to give up in the name of "fighting" terrorism, crime, whatever. Individual, personal records kept. I suppose that this is one of the things that the pro-gun fanatics lose their heads about, but it's an awful lot harder to do harm to somebody with some decongestant pills than with a gun.

We sit by as we are increasingly monitored and controlled.

And I can't excuse myself either: I didn't complain.

Two things from the Times

This op-ed made me cry. The diseases of the mind are terrible, terrible things.

Nothing, for example, can bring back the life of Carol Ann Gotbaum, 45, whose terrible end in a holding cell at the Phoenix airport was chronicled in a Times report by Eric Konigsberg. Depressive and fighting alcoholism, Carol missed a connection by minutes. She became hysterical and was subdued, handcuffed, shackled, abandoned and found dead with the shackle across her neck.

All this happened fast. We can hear her cry: “I’m not a terrorist. I’m a sick mother.”

Note to everyone: don't let your mentally ill loved ones fly anywhere alone when they are in a crisis. Flying is too stressful, and people are no longer tolerant of strange behavior in airplanes and airports. Anyone remember that poor guy who was shot to death in the Miami airport a couple years back? You would think that reasonable people would remember that someone acting strangely is far, far more likely to be mentally ill than a terrorist, and that while some mentally ill people ARE dangerous, most are not. And even the dangerous ones could use some compassion. But compassion and reason are out of favor these days. So: if you have to, pay an aide to fly with your sick loved one. Don't send them off alone to face airport security.

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Second thing from the Times. Krugman. I love that, besides being right-on as usual, he riffs off a Talking Heads song here:

Now, as they survey the wreckage of their cause, conservatives may ask themselves: “Well, how did we get here?” They may tell themselves: “This is not my beautiful Right.” They may ask themselves: “My God, what have we done?”


But their movement is the same as it ever was. And Mr. Bush is movement conservatism’s true, loyal heir.

In 50 years, that will have to be footnoted in his collected works. Or it won't be, and the reference will be lost in the mists of time.

outrage, both minor and major

Oh, fer christ's sake! I swear to god the new york times runs these articles just so people like me will be outraged and link to them, increasing their page views and ad revenues. (And look, it works! Last week it was that article about twenty-something women who make more than their boyfriends and are annoyed that their boyfriends don't want to fly first class on vacations. go find it yourself if you want to read it).

On the other hand, they didn't make up the whole idea of the 'mommy job', a package deal in plastic surgery to put your body 'back the right way' after you've had kids.

“The severe physical trauma of pregnancy, childbirth and breast-feeding can have profound negative effects that cause women to lose their hourglass figures,” he said. His practice, Marina Plastic Surgery Associates, maintains a Web site, amommymakeover.com, which describes the surgeries required to overhaul a postpregnancy body.

Lots of our friends and family think me and Max are totally anal and freakish when it comes to allowing our kids access to pop culture and television. (yes, I know many of you are too polite to say it to our faces, and we do appreciate that.) Well, people, shit like this is why. Hypercapitalist surface-is-everything anti-woman super-consumption revoltingness like that.

Even as I'm revolted by this, however, another article in the New York Times this morning forces me to return, once again, to the original purpose of this blog, from which I often stray, and from which I hope (dimly) one day to leave behind forever. So:

Reprise: I'm a torturer. Are you?

If you're an American citizen, you are. We let our government do this. We find out about it, we wring our hands, and we do nothing. We're torturers. Here's me, nearly three years ago:

Alberto Gonzales thinks torture is A-OK. If we allow him to become Attorney General, we are also saying we think torture is A-OK.

So let's all stand in front of a mirror, right now, and practice saying to our kids, "Torture is A-OK." Practice explaining to them what constitutes torture. "Torture is when you stub out cigarettes in someone's ear, threaten to rape their sister, or their son, beat them in the kidneys, don't let them sleep, and use the advice of psychiatric experts to permanently damage their minds, all in the expectation that good will come of it."

Feeling a little nervous about how to have "The Talk about Torture" with your kids, current or future? A little shaky on the best way to explain why torture is A-OK? Vomiting into your toilet about now, thinking about what it means to teach your kids that torture is A-OK?

Then please, please, let us stand up against the perverse and depraved lifestyle of torture. Let us purge the government of people who think torture is a legitimate lifestyle choice. Let us tell our perhaps-elected representatives exactly what we think about torture-loving perverts serving in high office.

It's unlikely they'll pay us any mind, of course, but what else can we do?

And yet here I am today, still a torturer.
Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon:

All of these subversive and grotesque policies -- the Yoo/Addington theories of the imperial presidency, torture, rendition, illegal surveillance, black sites -- began as secret, illegal Bush administration policies. But the more they are revealed, and the more we do nothing about them, the more they become our own.

It is vital to emphasize here that these revelations are not obsolete matters of the distant past -- something we can all agree to leave behind in the spirit of harmoniously moving forward. The torture, detention and surveillance policies in question are still the formal and official position of our government -- and thus can be applied with far greater vigor not merely in the event of a new terrorist attack, but at any time.

The current policies of the U.S. Government still include, in undiluted form, the Bush administration's theories of unlimited presidential power; the lawless powers of indefinite, due-process-free imprisonment even of U.S. citizens (as applied to Jose Padilla); the use of black sites; the asserted right to spy on Americans with no warrants or legal constraints. None of that has gone away. We just decided to accept it.

After all, look at Britney's revolting mommy-belly on MTV! She needs her a nice mommy job, doesn't she!

---

Yeah, this whole thing is depressing. What are we supposed to do about this, Amy? I don't want to shove cigarettes in people's ears, but how do I stop? I don't know, exactly, people. I mean, all the usual stuff, like calling your congresspeople and giving money to Amnesty International and the Center For Constitutional Rights and things like that. But to actually stop it, for real? When there doesn't seem to be any political will to do so? I dunno.

So maybe we can't stop it. Maybe what we have to do is learn to live with it. In June 2005 I wrote a post about that:

Tell me it can be fixed before I look at it, you say to me, and I say to you that no such promise can be made. But if we cannot fix it, if we cannot make our government stop, then we must learn to live with it, and how can we do that unless we see it for what it is? Do you not have the sense, some part of each day, that there's something enormous that you're avoiding? Like that pile of bills on your desk, some of which are no doubt overdue. But you don't pay the bills, and you don't even open them, and you don't even look at them, and instead you think about easier things. And yet the bills are there, a hole of discomfort, a gravitational force that pulls at your mind. As long as those bills sit unopened, parts of you are sloughing off and drifting toward them.

Such is the power of unpaid bills, so imagine the great black hole that is torture. My friends who will not look, do not imagine that you thereby protect yourselves from the terrible force of this fact. Your fear grows and grows. You are afraid, and you feel guilty and ashamed that you are afraid, and all of these feelings are awful, and you hope, by not looking, that you will not have to feel them so much.

Feel your fear, friends -- it's a fearsome thing. Feel guilt and shame too. I certainly do. But do not let those feelings keep you from turning toward torture. Only by turning toward it can we hope to stop it. And if we cannot stop it, then, if we see it together, we can comfort one another. We can share the burden of seeing together. Surely that is better than staying locked, each in our own private horror. If we cannot stop the torture, then let us cry for it together. Let us beat our breasts and tear our hair together, in our guilt and shame and helplessness and fear and our despair. Let us witness, and witness honestly, and not convince ourselves that if we do not look that it does not affect our humanity.


In this moment, while torture again is in the news, we have the opportunity to pay attention, and to ask one another to pay attention to it.


I beg you to see, in this moment, and the next, and the next, and the next after that.. If we cannot help one another to do this, then there will be no end to our shame.