The Use of Women

I just (ashamedly for getting to it so late) finished Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s first memoir, Infidel. Nomad, the second, is still waiting on my shelf.

It is an eloquent and powerful insight into the process of rational examination she went through on her transition away from Islam and the developing world.

And it made me reconsider something that had spoken true to me at an earlier time but no longer seemed to fit my worldview, and showed me why.

I heard a keynote speaker once who had just come back from Afghanistan, in the early years of the ongoing war. She talked about visiting women and children and asking them about “women’s rights”, and said they responded that while they were concerned about violence and clean water, it was foolish to worry about gender equality and the oppression of women.

At the time, it sounded right. But looking at the problems in many developing parts of the world, it started to seem inadequate. And Infidel cleared up my thinking on the subject. There is no way these problems can even begin to be addressed without exploiting the social potential of women. And that’s why the treatment of women is a development issue, as well as a moral one.

A book that changed my opinion about something

One that I was pleased to read because of how it took me aback and made me reconsider my own thinking… JFK’s Profiles in Courage. I talked about it here.

In an age where we’ve come to feel that other people should be able to give us the answers and solve our problems, it was refreshing to read JFK’s call for personal responsibility, and that if we required more from the people we support in the public sphere, things would, eventually, improve. Only paying attention to them every four years doesn’t do any of us any good, nor does taking the promises of people who say they can put more money in your pocket.

I’d love to have more money. On the other hand, I also love living in a country that takes some care of its marginalized people, allows the opportunity to become better educated in whatever field I choose, and the freedom to do most anything I’d want. I don’t think higher taxes are too high a price to pay for those things, and I’m ashamed that politicians seem to be able to convince us otherwise.

A book I wish more people had read

Not that I think they were avoided, but I wish everyone would pick up at least one of Jeffrey Sachs’ books. They were eye-opening to me.

You can see what I said about them before, here.

Hitch

I’m in a bit of a Hitchens mood recently (not a bad mood to be in). I’m nowhere near as well-spoken or as contrarian as he is, but I like to think that at my best I get into a little bit of both. Just finished The Quotable Hitchens, and next I’m finally getting into Hitch-22. Looking forward to it. So here are some collected bits of Hitch:

“…Much more probable, really, is the countertheory that man created God in his image. This would account for there being so many of Him…and also for His being such a son of a bitch.”

“Human life can and should be respected whether or not it is constituted by a creator with an immortal soul; to make the one position dependent on the other is to make the respect in some way contingent.”

“It’s one thing to be lucky: it’s another thing to admit that luck has been yours.”

“Orwell’s views have been largely vindicated by Time, so he need not seek any pardon on that score. But what he illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that ‘views’ do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.”

“Poverty and underdevelopment are not God-given but are man-made, and can be unmade by man.”

“In order to be a ‘radical’ one must be open to the possibility that one’s own core assumptions are misconceived.”

“…one should strive to combine the maximum of impatience with the maximum of skepticism, the maximum of hatred of injustice and irrationality with the maximum of ironic self-criticism. This would mean really deciding to learn from history rather than invoking or sloganizing it.”

“I’m very happy by myself–I’m lucky in that way–if I’ve got enough to read and something to write about and a bit of alcohol for me to add an edge, not to dull it.”

“…however little one thinks of the Jewish tradition, it is surely insulting to the people of Moses to imagine that they had come this far under the impression that murder, adultery, theft, and perjury were permissible.”

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”

“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant, or neutral, without inviting their own suicide.”

“…’Tragedy’ is a term that ought not to be cheapened; especially in its original sense of the awful unintended consequences of human action. The pity and the terror are enhanced, of course, if the consequences are the result of human action that is idealistic.”

“The usual duty of the ‘intellectual’ is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae. But there is another responsibility, to say that some things are simple and ought not to be obfuscated.”

Plus one more:

“On the whole, observe the same rule about gin martinis–and all gin drinks–that you would in judging female breasts: one is far too few, and three is one too many. Do try to eat the olives: they can be nutritious.”

Rich and Poor

Disclaimer: I know, even though it doesn’t feel that way sometimes, that compared to many, I am wealthy.

I keep on coming smack up against the contradiction (to me) in American life where so many in the middle class are becoming so much more impoverished, and at the same time they say things and behave (read: vote) in ways that show that they have no concern for those living in poverty.  I said once that it must be because I’m not rich enough that “spreading the wealth”, the horror of the 2008 US presidential election, still sounds pretty good to me. Or maybe I’m just a communist. Read too much Steinbeck, too young.

In Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a book I should have read a long time ago, she describes working as a house cleaner and having a discussion with her fellow workers that indicated that they were more interested in making enough money to buy the same big houses as the people they cleaned for than they were in the unfairness of the economics they were in. I realize that a critical position is in many ways a privileged one, and that a lot of it is that people living in poverty don’t have the luxury of examining it from a sociological perspective. But I wonder just what it will take, just how unequal things will have to get, before people realize…hey, maybe I won’t be the person who lives out the rags to riches American dream, so maybe I should care about whether everyone has health care or can make a living wage…because maybe someday in the not-too-distant future, it could be me.

Ehrenreich’s book is stunning, and I’m sure 10 years (it was published in 2001, that’s how tardy I am) has only exacerbated the situations she describes.  And no one else is doing the working poor any favours. This is Tavis Smiley’s comment from April 17th’s Meet The Press:

“What I know is this.  I believe that budgets are moral documents.  Budgets are moral documents.  You can say what you say, but you are what you are.  I mean, you put your budget on the table, that’s when we learn who you really are. And I’m not so sure that this is not anything more than an immoral document where the poor are concerned.  Yes, to your point, David, we avoided a shutdown of government, but we effectively locked out the American people, namely the poor.  And I don’t understand why it is in this town that every debate about money always begins and ends with how we can further reward the rich and more punish the poor.  I don’t get that.”

Canadians might not be facing the exact same issue, but we’re certainly facing similar ones. And May 2nd is coming up fast.

Current reads

Ebooks and working at a library were both sure ways for me to get into trouble…now everything I read has a due date!

Except one thing: I’m almost done with Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes, which is making me very sad that I didn’t take more Can. Lit. in school. It’s beautiful.

On the Kobo, I’m reading the 10th Anniversary ed. of the Dalai Lama’s Art of Happiness, and haven’t yet started Philipp Meyer’s American Rust. 1 week till Art of Happiness “expires” and just under 2 on Meyer.

Physical books: 2 from Annie Proulx, Fine Just the Way It Is, the 3rd volume of Wyoming stories, and the new memoir, Bird Cloud. And also Condoleezza Rice’s memoir Extraordinary, Ordinary People. At least I’ve got 3 weeks to get through those.

Machiavellian

So I’ve finished with The Prince. I actually think it’s gotten a bad rap. Machiavelli is really just making an argument about the most effective way to gain and retain power, in a very specific historical context (I skipped some of those bits). He’s not making moral arguments, and in fact, when he does, I often found myself agreeing with him:

“Thus it happens in matters of state; for knowing afar off (which it is only given to a prudent man to do) the evils that are brewing, they are easily cured. But when, for want of such knowledge, they are allowed to grow so that everyone can recognise them, there is no longer any remedy to be found.”

“Whoever thinks that in high personages new benefits cause old offences to be forgotten, makes a great mistake.”

And of course the famous feared/loved dichotomy, although people don’t seem to quote the first part:

“…one ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to be wanting.”

I enjoyed the writing style; Machiavelli is clear in terms of the goals of his argument and the topics he chooses to cover, and offers historical explanation for his views. If we don’t want to read the book as political science anymore, maybe we can use it as a writing example for first year English students?

I was struck by one comment in the introduction (by Christian Gauss), though, and maybe it was because I was reading G.W. Bush’s memoir right before:

“To keep our consideration of Machiavelli in perspective it is necessary to remind ourselves that f there is any error involved, it is intellectual error, and that it is one of the fundamental tenets of American democracy that intellectual error is innocent.”

Maybe my liking of Machiavelli, and my disagreement with applying this principle in modern history, is just because it’s so removed from my time that I don’t see the other errors that accompanied the intellectual ones.

George’s sense of humour

For someone who talks so much about how he’s a big kidder, I’m having a hard time understanding George W. Bush’s sense of humour (reading Decision Points right now). He talks about a lot of “jokes” that he (or the people around him) made, but the first thing that actually made me laugh was this:

“[My employer] had a saying about well-educated folks he knew: ‘Book smart, sidewalk stupid.’ I was determined not to let that phrase apply to me.”

And I don’t think that was the intention.

Then shortly thereafter he talks about his dad:

“When the nurse came to check on him, he asked, ‘Are my testicles black?’ She was taken aback. ‘Excuse me, Mr. President?’ He repeated his question, ‘Are my testicles black?’ As she reached for the sheet, he quipped, ‘I said, are my test results back?’ His medical team roared with laughter.”

In this regard, at least, the whole thing says too much about powerful people, who are used to the people around them saying they’re funny, or smart, or whatever, whether that bears any resemblance to the truth or not.

When I saw Oliver Stone’s W with my mother-in-law in theatre, I actually came away from it with more sympathy and, I think, understanding for the man. I think hearing the same stories the way he tells them might just undo that.

I’m back.

Like most important periods in one’s life, my recent weeks have been among the most sorrowful and the most joyful.

My mother in law, a vibrant lady whom I knew even before I met her son (we sang together), died on Oct. 7. Her body had been ravaged by MS but even the last time K saw her they joked together.  I am joyful for her and sorrowful for us, and miss her a great deal.

I changed jobs, which required leaving people I have come to love dearly and a good, secure job in the place I want to live for a job that gets me a step closer to where I want to wind up. In just a week I’ve found myself suited to public library work: I like the variety; I like seeing the impact the library has on those who use it and the community it’s in. I like taking well-loved, falling apart Dr. Seuss books off the shelves and being able to replace them with beautiful new copies for more children to love. I like putting out the new books I’ve gotten ready and going back out the next day and seeing them half gone. And my cube walls go all the way to the ceiling, here.

But I’ve moved to a town 2 hours from my home and rented a room in a lady’s townhouse. I see K when he comes during the week and when I go home on weekends, but it’s hard missing him, too.

Books, books, books. I’ve finished the book on the Supreme Court and the Constitution and picked up another very readable piece of non-fiction, G.J. Meyer’s The Tudors. Started it last week and I’m 400 pages in. It’s gone so quickly because he offers an approachable (and also sufficiently historical) view on the short-lived dynasty (as dynasties go). I’d recommend it to everyone, including the friend I’m giving a copy for Christmas.

Next…Sara, how about The Prince? Seems like a suitable next read for me.

Status report

So I’ve got 4 books left in my TBR challenge: The Prince, Catcher in the Rye, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and All The Pretty Horses. I’m excited to read all of them, so I’m not sure what to do. I think maybe I’ll do the McCarthy, because I have the movie on hand at the moment and will probably want to read it first. Anyway, 9 down, 4 to go.

5th book in the Dexter series was lots of fun. Very pleased by the return of Brian Moser (not dead in the books, obviously), and interested in the big changes for Deb. Dexter is Delicious.

My most recent Vanity Fair had a column by James Franco (already shared online) about playing Allan Ginsberg. Fascinating. I hope the movie comes somewhere close.

And somehow I thought this was a good idea:

So we’ll see how I do with that.