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.
