Intersectionality.

Posted on September 10, 2014 by Pat Greene

In a post following the protests in Ferguson, I talked about my friend’s rules for shopping as an African-American male.  I finally began to emotionally (rather than intellectually) relate to his experience when I began mapping them onto the “rules” I have internalized as a woman and a mentally ill person.

Being a woman has, at various times, meant for me…

  • Having my keys out when I leave the building to go to my car, often with them sticking through my knuckles.
  • Skipping the seat on the crowded bus next to the man in the sweatshirt to go three rows back to sit with the woman with the baby. (I learned this as a teenager, being groped on public transportation to and from the library.  I have never discussed with this anyone, mainly because it seemed to be such a common occurrence as to be unremarkable, which is in itself sad.)
  • Don’t get drunk with men you don’t know. It used to be “don’t get drunk with men you don’t know unless you have a friend to watch your back,” but bitter experience shortened the rule.
  • Never leave your drink unattended.
  • Watch out for frat guys.
  • Do not argue with angry men — or any male stranger — in public. I was once threatened by a man much stronger and larger than me for “disrespecting” him.  The “disrespect”? Telling him not to discipline my child because I would handle it. I have had men shout at me for not doing a good enough job parking. (Although,  in fairness, I am a terrible parker; the only people who ever get angry at me about it are men, though.)
  • Don’t make eye contact with strangers on the street.
  • In urban areas, be alert for strange guys following you after dark if there is no one else around. (I know African-American men who have complained about white women crossing the street to the other sidewalk; in my case at least it is not because they are black but because they are male.)
  • Be resigned to the fact that if you go out with a man and you refuse to have sex with him if he wants it, he will call you a slut, not only to your face but to everyone he can relate the story to. (This happened to me while I was at a program for high school students at the University of Florida.  Of course, I should probably have wondered why a graduate student would want to go out with a seventeen-year-old in the first place, but I was young and stupid.)
  • Smile.

********

Some of these rules I learned through bitter experience, some through having them drummed in my head by well-meaning people who thought they were looking out for me. There are other rules — don’t dress provocatively, e.g. — which I never thought applied to me because I never had the urge to dress in anything that could be considered provocative.

Many of these rules applied to me as a young woman, but don’t any longer.  The “don’t argue with angry men,” though… Remember the incident with the man blocking my driveway who told me I needed to “ask nicely” before he would move? My response was not to answer him directly and appropriately with “I don’t need to ask nicely; move your damned car,” but to be passive-aggressive.  Even my alternate solution (sit in my driveway and call the cops on him) had someone else confronting him rather than me.

Not every woman I know follows rules like these.  One friend from work, D., does whatever she damn well pleases.  She is the toughest (in the nicest sense of the word) woman I know; of course, having been a Teamster and a long-haul trucker at twenty-one probably has something to do with that.

I was relieved that I did not have a daughter because, among other reasons, it would break my heart to see her living in a world where she has to follow “rules” like that, knowing it would be difficult to teach her otherwise. Teaching boys to treat women as they should seems like the easier task.

*****

There are the “rules” you have to watch out for as a mentally ill person:

  • Be careful about talking to yourself in public.  While there are a lot of neurotypical people who talk to themselves, it is often, or used to be, at least, considered a sign of “being crazy.” (All of this has changed, of course, with the advent of Bluetooth:  mutter to yourself and people just assume you are on the phone.) People actually ask each other on the Internet “I talk to myself, does that mean I’m crazy?”
  • Be careful about how you show anger. One experience that many bipolar people I know have had is to express anger in an appropriately strong manner, only to be asked “You seem angry — have you taken your meds today?” (Or “are you manic?”) A few nights ago, I got angry with my sons for not doing a task which I had repeatedly asked them to do. I was not yelling, but I was speaking strongly in upset tones. The rest of my family looked at me askance because I was clearly angry.
  • Prepare yourself to hear people misuse psychiatric diagnoses in casual conversation: “That situation was just schizophrenic;” “I was really bipolar this week.” Question whether or not to call them on their ableism, and decide it probably isn’t worth it.
  • Listen patiently to the stories that many of your non-mentally ill friends have to share with you about other people they know who are just horrible because they are mentally ill. Pro-tip: being mentally ill is not a “get out of jail free” card — if someone repeatedly acts awful, they may just be an awful person. There are mentally ill people who are dicks, just like in any other segment of the population. Another pro-tip: the answer to the question “Why wouldn’t X take meds?” is “The meds often suck, that’s why.” So don’t ask.
  • Be resigned to the fact that there are going to be people who are afraid of you.  This is more of an issue for mentally ill men, for whom it can occasionally become a life-threatening problem: cops do not always know how to deal with them. I am not immune to being afraid myself: a man came into the Starbucks where I was web-surfing yesterday, and loudly asked several women, myself included, if we had been born after 1962, and if so, would we be his roommate? He was wild-eyed and disheveled.  The woman next to me looked actively scared, and I had to remind myself that he was unlikely to actually be dangerous. I thought of answering that I was too old for his criteria; instead, I just smiled at him and shook my head.  The manager asked him to leave shortly thereafter, and he did so docilely, presumably on his quest to find a new roommate. I do feel a little guilty, not because I was momentarily afraid, but because I did not ask him if I could help him.
  • Weigh whether being honest about yourself trumps the probability that some people will abandon you, or at the very least change how they interact with you.  I decided that it does, but it took me decades to come to that conclusion, and I frequently second-guess myself.

*****

I am not saying by all of this that what I deal with is worse than anyone else.  Quite frankly, with the challenges I face, I would much rather have them than what young African-American men have to contend with.* I am unlikely to be thrown out of stores or shot by cops in part because I was young and black. (And that is not to even get into the prison-industrial complex, which is another post I keep meaning to write.) Nor would I want to have to worry about the things that transpeople are understandably afraid of.

Power does not exist only along one axis: it is multi-faceted and multi-dimensional.  Intersectionality matters: we need to understand how America is skewed against all people who are not “normal” — with normal being defined as white, male, heterosexual, cis-gendered, and abled. We need to understand the role class plays in the dynamics of power as well: one of the most effective stratagems used against poor whites is to convince them that the enemy is minorities, or women, or the labor movement, rather than a system which massively privileges the wealthy.  (Organized labor is an effective tool to protect the working class; the extent to which it has been undermined during the past few decades has made “the American Dream” a pipe-dream.) We are allies: I have to support the fight against the treatment of my African-American male friends as strongly as I want them to help change the world for me. I need to respect picket lines, and speak out against homophobia, while at the same time realizing it’s not all about me.

We need to kill all the heads of the hydra.

*I understand that race is not merely a black-white issue: Latinos and Asians face their own brands of racism.  Geography changes things as well: the experience of a Mexican-American in southern Arizona is going to be different than that of a Cuban-American in Miami.

 

Posted in Justice, Social Issues | Tagged | Leave a comment

Interview fail.

Posted on September 5, 2014 by Pat Greene

Dear Ms. Recruiter:

I am very sorry that the connection was so bad yesterday when we talked.  Otherwise, it would not have taken until I saw your email at 10:00 pm Pacific last night for me to see that the interview you set at 10:30 a.m. this morning for me was in West Des Moines.

I’m sorry, but that’s just too long a commute.

Pat.

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It’s been a day.

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Pat Greene

Not a very productive one, I’m afraid. Still…

I have my resume out there, and am getting nibbles.  So far, they have all been with insurance companies looking for salespeople.  It makes me hopeful, though.

Starbucks has brought Salted Carmel Mochas back, which makes for a happy Pat. On the coffee front, at least.

The Thousand Oaks Cobra has been caught.  I would retweet the funniest lines from the three accounts it “opened,” but all the accounts have been swamped by news of the capture, and the albino snake’s disappointment at being in captivity again.  My favorite tweet from this morning: “Where does a snake get its coffee in the morning? From a barissssta.”  After the Thousand Oaks Cobra complained about seeing snakeskin boots in Nordstrom’s (“Not cool, Nordstrom.  Not cool.”) @Nordstrom tweeted back that they were sorry that the snake had had a bad experience at the store, and promising to pass along its concerns to the customer service team.  Perfect.  I can’t decide if I would find it funnier if it was an actual person answering, or if it was an automated response.

I did take the Red-Headed Menace to the running shoe store to get more shoes.  He has not been running because he exhausted his last pair of shoes.  Running is not as cheap a sport as one might imagine.

I feel suspended in time: as if I were over a river of the present with it slipping away underneath me. Life is too short to keep going on this way.

I have struggled with writing lately.  Yes, I know I am whining, and breaking one of the cardinal rules of blogging (“don’t whine about blogging”), but it has been a real roadblock for me.  I do not blog on the news in a timely fashion, and I keep feeling that by the time I write about anything, someone else has written about it better. James Thurber, my favorite writer of the 20th century, once observed that one of the fears of a writer of light comic pieces was the nagging suspicion that the piece that he has been working on for two days was written better and more quickly by Robert Benchley in 1924.  I know the feeling.

When I write about my family, that is new.  But one can’t write about family all the time. So I try to write about my reaction to the world, and keep running up against the feeling that I’m not that special, that my reactions are pretty much the same as most liberal-progressive feminists. (There are a couple of areas that I would love to blog about but can’t, because of confidentiality agreements.)

So, I will keep on keeping on.  Not much else to do, really.

 

Posted in Miscellany, My life and times | Leave a comment

Owning my privilege.

Posted on August 31, 2014 by Pat Greene

C., a friend whom I knew from church, is someone I would want my kids to be like.  He attended an Ivy League school, dresses conservatively, and holds down a very nice job at a tech company.

He is also African-American.

Recently, in a comment to a Facebook post, he outlined some of his personal rules for avoiding trouble in stores: always get receipts for goods you get.  Only hold goods for as long as you need to read the label.  Don’t carry items around until you have. Try not to carry items from store A into store B if store B also sells them.

This was an eye opener for me.  Yes, I knew there was white privilege, and that I benefited by it, and was aware of problems of African-Americans being followed around stores.  But receipts? I often ask not to be given receipts, especially for small items.  I don’t want the extra paper, and I figure the amount of the purchases will show up on my bank statement. And not holding goods?  I carry things around stores often without thinking about it.

But I am a white woman, and I am never harassed.

There have been a lot of articles since the shooting of Michael Brown detailing the various indignities — and downright dangers — faced by African-Americans in day-to-day life. While intellectually I knew about a lot of these problems, and was outraged by them in that white liberal “I hate racism in all forms sort of way,” I am perhaps reading them with more emotional intelligence than before.

After all, as I said, I am a white woman, and a middle-aged one at that.  I get the benefit of doubt. Others do not.

I worked a campaign last year with my friend J. He was the best phone canvasser of our group, so much so that I once sat next to him to see if I could learn his technique. (I didn’t.) But things changed when we began precinct walking: he was treated with suspicion, while I was greeted, if not warmly, at least civilly. He took to carrying books around with him, so he would appear more acceptable. (Not unlike whistling Vivaldi.) He once commented “people look out their windows at you and see a neighbor.* They look out their windows at me and see a big black guy.”

Stories — a few among many — that have been reported the past few years:

Black man gets shot by police while looking at toy guns in WalMart. This while the white NRA members swagger around events holding real guns to demonstrate how important their interpretation of the Second Amendment is.

Young black man talks about how he nearly became another shooting statistic.

Fifty-one year old man (with impressive resume) is arrested and detained for six hours because he “fit the description” of a suspect in a burglary. (I have previously mentioned the Palo Alto police chief who in 2008 instructed officers to stop and talk to young black men, because they would “fit the description” of a suspect in a string of break-ins.)

In 2009, a black man in Ferguson gets arrested by mistake, is beaten by police and then charged with “property damage” because he bled on their uniforms.

Young black former college football player shot and killed by police while seeking help after he was in a serious car accident.

Black woman gets shot in her own doorway, and the cop who shoots her lies in his report.

And, of course, Trayvon Martin** and Oscar Grant.

One thing that strikes me is how often details such as “college-bound” or “good father” or other qualifiers are added to descriptions of victims, or how they are described as thugs who (implicitly) deserved what they got. (The New York Times ran a piece that declared that Michael Brown was “no angel,” as if that mattered.) It is though we think that such things don’t happen to middle class people who act “appropriately.”  Even how I started this post: the fact that my friend went to a good college and doesn’t dress like a gang member is irrelevant.  He should not have to deal with the petty humiliations that come his way based on his skin color. (C. also commented in the Facebook thread that “Justin Beiber can get away with wearing baggy pants.  I can’t.”) It is almost as though the media needs to reassure us that yes, this is horrible: the deceased was a “perfect victim.” Or not, as in the case of Michael Brown. (Horribly, media coverage tends to treat white killers better than black victims.)

Nothing matters except than what happened in the confrontation that resulted in the shooting. No one deserves to go around afraid for their life or safety just because they’re young and black.

And I have to remind myself that I am the beneficiary of three centuries of slavery and oppression.  That my white skin shields me from indignities and fears that others have to live with all their lives.

That I need to speak out for justice, and support others who do the same.

*This was not true when I walked Vietnamese neighborhoods.

**Yes, I do know that Trayvon Martin was not killed by law enforcement, but by a vigilante. If anything that makes the case even scarier: if you are young and black you can be a target even if you don’t have a run  in with the cops.

Posted in Justice, Social Issues | Tagged | 2 Comments

My kind of guy.

Posted on August 31, 2014 by Pat Greene

quix·ot·ic: hopeful or romantic in a way that is not practical.
Full Definition of QUIXOTIC:
1. foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals; marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or extravagantly chivalrous action.
2. capricious, unpredictable.
Merriam Webster Dictionary.

As most of you know, the title of this blog comes from the song “Man of La Mancha,” from the Broadway musical of the same name. The musical is about both the life of Miguel Cervantes and his most well-known character, Don Quixote.

Don Quixote is not necessarily an admirable character. He’s clearly delusional, and the “tilting at windmills” was because he thought he faced a horde of giants. That we think of him fondly owes as much to popular representations of him as it does to Cervantes’ magnificent novel. (Although it is true that Cervantes seems to be fond of his character, as well.  The piece is clearly satire of romantic and chivalric traditions.) At least in my circles, “quixotic” is not a pejorative: being quixotic may not be a good trait in all circumstances, but it is one viewed with a sort of bemused fondness by most people I know.

I am quixotic. I don’t know if I am proud of that, but I am certainly willing to embrace it.

I am going to Spain soon (knock wood), to La Mancha and Castile, among other places.  I do not know if I will make it out to Alcala de Henares, Cervantes’ birthplace.  I did last time I was in Spain, eating at the Ristorante Rocinante.  Given that it was primarily a steakhouse, the name was a little unsettling (Rocinante was what Don Quixote named his horse).

I am sure that I will think often of my mascot, and wonder if I should maybe try to be less like him.*

*I am absolutely convinced that I will keep humming “The Man of La Mancha” all the time we are near Madrid. Once we head south, that changes to “The Barber of Seville.” I know, because that is what I did the last time I was in Spain.

 

Posted in Culture (popular and otherwise), Travel (real or imaginary), Who I am | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Reading Comprehension Fail 101.

Posted on August 31, 2014 by Pat Greene

Reading comprehension, it’s a thing. A thing at which I apparently failed yesterday.

Ian Osmond has pointed out to me that he did not actually do a cost-benefit analysis, merely pointed out that one needed to be done. I think his analysis was spot-on, but he did not actually provide numbers. I think my point — that the analysis matters — was still correct, but I misunderstood what was going on.

Of course, I then wrote an indignant WWF post based on my misunderstanding, lamenting the lack of reading comprehension and critical thinking skills in the Facebook population. (I broke my own “don’t write posts after midnight” general rule.) It’s kind of like writing a post crying out against the poor grammar skills of today’s youth which contains glaring grammatical errors.

(The part in the last post concerning the scare-graphic about Nestle is still accurate, however.  I spent half-an-hour rereading a short article several times and running numbers. To do a thorough analysis I would still want to look up the actual facts from a source with less of an obvious agenda, and run more numbers, but I stand by my original outrage.)

I have since edited the post to clarify the situation, of course.  I would take the post down, but I think I need to keep it up as a lesson in humility.

 

Posted in Blogging | Tagged | Leave a comment

Posted on August 31, 2014 by Pat Greene

I need to get off Facebook.  In the past hour, I have had a discussion with a guy who felt that arming teachers was the right thing to do, and who responded to a careful cost benefit analysis showing that in the end, more kids were likely to be shot accidentally than get shot by psychopaths, with “All the math won’t matter to a parent whose kid has just taken a bullet to the brain in algebra class.” I pointed out that it wouldn’t matter to the parent whether the kid was shot by Adam Lanza or by a teacher accidentally. This is the sort of reasoning that leads to large portions of the American public believing that ten-year-olds shouldn’t walk a couple of blocks to school unsupervised. [Edited to Add: Ian Osmond, who did the original analysis in the Facebook post, points out that he did not actually do a cost-benefit analysis, because he did not have the numbers, but merely pointed out that one needed to be done. His analysis of the situation was, I think, spot-on, and the “the maths don’t matter” claim was still ridiculous. However, it seems that this was a case where my reading comprehension failed. As I said, I needed to get off Facebook.]

I also was faced with an alarmist claim that the Nestle Corporation was siphoning off 75% of the groundwater in the Colorado River Basin. Even had I known next to nothing about water systems (and I do know a little), the claim would have looked ridiculous. I followed back the link to the purported “full story” and found that the people who made the scare-graphic had massively misstated what the story said. (Not that the “full story” itself wasn’t a piece of propaganda: the authors converted the number of acre-feet that Nestle bottles from the Colorado each year, roughly about 1,400 acre-feet, into millions of gallons, and then resumed the story talking about millions of… acre-feet.  The entire effect was to make the Nestle draw-off seem massively larger than it was.) [ETA: I want to point out that, unlike in the previous example, I did re-read the story several times, and actually ran the numbers.]  I hate being placed in the position of feeling I need to defend a large multi-national corporation. As I said in a comment, corporations often do such awful things, why resort to hyperbole? The facts are bad enough.

Math, people. It’s a thing.  Reading comprehension is a thing, too, as is critical thinking.

Sheesh.

Posted in The Internet and its perils | Tagged | 2 Comments

NOW I’m awake.

Posted on August 24, 2014 by Pat Greene

Damn earthquakes.

ETA: It’s sad, but the first thing I did after the shaking stopped was check Facebook.

Posted in The Bay Area | Leave a comment

Religious tolerance for me but not for thee.

Posted on August 23, 2014 by Pat Greene

Support for religion only exists for fundamentalist Conservative Christian believers, it seems.

Last month, Operation Save America  terrorists activists surrounded and invaded a Unitarian Universalist Church in Louisiana. They screamed at the congregants that they were hell-bound baby killers. It’s okay, they believe, because the UUs allowed the groundbreaking for a new abortion clinic to take place within their facilities. So these people decided to crash their worship services, to scream hatred towards people who have different ideas about when life begins.

At the time the terrorists activists showed up, the congregation was having a moment of silence for the members who had died in the past few weeks. The Operation Rescue people desecrated this time of prayer with no hesitation. The congregants responded by singing hymns. After they were shown the door, the protestors stood outside the nursery to scream at the children within.

George Tiller, the abortion doctor who was shot a few years back, was killed at the church where he was an usher. In church. Where is the respect for the sanctity of houses of worship?

What do you think any of those Operation Rescue people would do if an Evangelical Protestant church was surrounded by a Islamist congregation screaming that the people inside were infidels who needed to convert or possibly die?  Such a scenario is unthinkable, not the least because conservative factions are already willing to believe that even the most moderate Muslims are ready to engage in violence at the drop of a hat.

Across the nation, there have been a whole host of regulations and court decisions, ranging from “conscience provisions” for pharmacists to Hobby Lobby, that warp the First Amendment to privilege conservative Christian religious doctrine over any other.  (Hobby Lobby also allows religions to define their own scientific reality, but that’s another post.) Who cares if an employee belongs to a religion that accepts contraception as morally acceptable (or no religion at all)*? Or if a young woman who seeks emergency contraception or *gasp!* an abortion is following her own conscience?

Southern Baptists believe (or at least used to) in the “priesthood of the believer.” This concept meant that there was no intermediary between the human soul and God. It seems that that only applies if you hold the same very narrow views as they do.  People who believe otherwise are set up for damnation.

Last week, police surrounded St. Mark’s church near Ferguson, Missouri, on several nights.  The church and its school building were being used as a “safe space “by the community in the midst of the ongoing chaos. The police were apparently upset that people were leaving the church wearing gas masks, among other things.

So maybe we should make that privilege narrow to white conservative Christian religion.

That “War on Christianity”  that people on Fox News rant about is even more obscenely ridiculous than it ever was.  If fundamentalist Christianity in America is at war, it is an offensive war of its own choosing with the goal of squelching any other belief.

We will never have Sharia law in America; but I am afraid that unless we are careful at some point we may have theocracy nonetheless.

*Do NOT get me started on the “paying for it” issue.  Employees pay for their own insurance, either directly or through their labor. Hobby Lobby and other corporations of their ilk should have no say in the personal medical decisions of their employees, given how much money they make off them.

 

Posted in God faith and theology, Justice | Tagged | 1 Comment

Hmmm…

Posted on August 21, 2014 by Pat Greene

My two rotating playlists lately are “Humor” and “Broadway Favorites.” I know this will never happen, but I would love to see Weird Al do a Broadway parody album. (And yes, I know about, and love, Forbidden Broadway.)

Posted in Culture (popular and otherwise) | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Posted on August 19, 2014 by Pat Greene

Note to the jerk who insisted on blocking my driveway, and refused to move when I told him to, saying I needed to “ask nicely”:

You would not have said that to a man. You’re the one breaking the law here, not me, and I have no obligation to be nice to you at all.  Had I not been in a tearing hurry, I would have sat in my car and called 911.

Also, I am somewhat relieved that you clearly don’t understand sarcasm, or you would have heard my saccharine “please  move your car” for what it was: “f*** you.”

As we say in the South, bless your heart.

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Miscellany.

Posted on August 19, 2014 by Pat Greene

Summer is nearly over, thank goodness.

Today was the first day of school.  It was the first time in 18 years I have not had a child to get off to school in the morning.  I’m rather sad about this.

I had a job interview today. It was an initial interview, but it seemed to go well. I don’t know if they will call me back for a second interview.

I hate having Impostor Syndrome.

I have letters I need to write, but I am sitting here reading about the coverage of Michael Brown case and the protests in Ferguson.

Note to my Facebook friend: I like you, but that “you weren’t there, so you don’t know the officer’s side of things?” Brown was shot six times, with several of the bullets having two entry and exit points.  He was unarmed. Res ipsa loquitur.

The militarization of police across the country is scary.

The head of the Missouri GOP says that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton putting up voter registration booths is “disgusting.” Wait, isn’t that how we want people to resolve disputes with the government? By voting for elected officials who will represent their interests?

The Red-Headed Menace rode his bike back and forth after midnight a couple of weeks ago.  I had the discussion about privilege with him, that even in our more or less enlightened part of the world, had he been a person of color he might have been stopped for no reason. It’s only been a few years since the Palo Alto police chief had to publicly apologize for a directive for officers to stop young African-American men, due to a string of burglaries where the suspect was black. 

Ferguson goes on my list of things I’m not discussing on Facebook right now, along with the situation in Gaza.

I dressed up for the interview — I don’t know what to do now. “All dressed up with no place to go” is a trite saying, but true in this case.

 

 

Posted in Miscellany, My life and times | 1 Comment

Overheard at dinner the other night…

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Pat Greene

“If pi r squared, then cobbler r rectangled.”

Posted in Things my kids say | Tagged | Leave a comment

The problems with agriculture.

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Pat Greene

I have written about my lack of respect for the anti-GMO position as being nonscientific, agreeing with those who characterized this issue as being “the climate-change of the left.” (I am not alone on this: Neil DeGrasse Tyson feels this way, too.)  While I still think the anti-GMO stance is wrong, I am willing to admit the picture is more nuanced than I previously felt.   What both reinforced my opinion of GMOs while informing me of the bigger picture was a series of posts by Nathanael Johnson called Panic-Free GMOs at Grist.org. (As an aside, did you know that some of the hybrids for some crops were created by bombarding seeds with radiation? That’s natural?)

I think that there are a lot of other issues with agriculture — especially large-scale agribusiness — that we need need to be concerned with.  So, if I am not opposed to GMOs, what am I unhappy about?

1. I oppose any restrictions on research in the area of genetic engineering, by either side.  I also oppose restrictions on food production and distribution not based on science.*

2. I oppose monoculture.  Monoculture can cause a raft of environmental and social problems.

3. I oppose any crop developed through genetic modification or traditional techniques which allows farmers to increase pesticide or herbicide use, and therefore increase the exposure to harmful chemicals that farm workers face.

4. I oppose the use of slave labor in farming cacao and other crops.

5. I oppose the mistreatment of farmworkers, especially undocumented migrants in the United States. (This goes for exploitation of workers in other fields as well, such as construction.)

6. I oppose the use of child labor in agriculture.

7. I oppose the creation of sterile seeds, however developed, and patents on seeds which prevent farmers from saving seed from one crop to use for their next.

8. I oppose the routine use of antibiotics in livestock.

9. I oppose the inhuman conditions under which chickens are raised.

10.  I oppose raising crops in climates for which they were not originally suited, and the massive diversion of resources (usually water) which this requires.  That means I am unhappy at rice being grown in California’s Central Valley, which is essentially a desert.

11. I oppose fish farming methods which result in environmental degradation, as well as overfishing. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a good guide to environmentally sound choices. (Eat more catfish! No Chilean Seabass!)

12. I oppose the destruction of habitat for the creation of palm plantations, or other crops or livestock.

13.  I oppose any regulation that favors large agribusiness over small local farmers.

And finally,

14. I strongly support increasing federal oversight of agriculture .

Except for 1, 3, and 7, very little of that involves GMOs.

Am I perfect in adhering to these principles? No, and I admit it.  But I am working on it — buying Fair Trade coffee and chocolate, where available. Looking to limit my use of products with palm oil  or palm kernel oil. Checking the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch List before getting seafood.  (It’s hard: my favorite seafood craving is grouper.  I love fried-grouper sandwiches, and I admit I do not ask the restaurant where they get their fish from.)

I think those are reasonable stances to take.

*That, of course, goes for antiscientific regulation in general, whether it is GMOs, abortion regulations based on scientific fairy tales, or requirement that teachers include Intelligent Design in classroom education. (Not all of those are equally unscientific, of course. There is room for GMO debates and there is none for creationism; I do not mean to equate the two.)

 

 

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When heroes fall.

Posted on July 30, 2014 by Pat Greene

I call it the Frank Lloyd Wright axiom: sometimes geniuses are horrible human beings.

Most of the time, I can separate the person from their creation: I can look at the Robie House and admire its beauty.  The fact that Wright was an arrogant SOB (the model for Ayn Rand’s protagonist in Atlas Shrugged) who ran off with the wife of a client does not in the end figure into any assessment of his work.

Sometimes, though, I cannot in my mind divorce the awful things someone has done from what it is I admire them for.

I am not a scientist. While I know Richard Feynmann for being an important figure in physics, I’d be lying if I said I understood what his accomplishments were. My admiration for Feynmann had always come from his seeming attitudes towards the world, his willingness to be provocative and outrageous, and his ability to capture lyrically the  essence of what is magnificent about the world.  Until today, one of his quotes was listed on my sidebar.

That changed with the accounts I have read recently about how Feynmann  treated women. That women continue to be mistreated and marginalized in science and academia today is not Feynmann’s fault, but the willingness to excuse his behavior sends troubling messages.  As I am n0t a scientist, and my admiration is based mainly on his nonscientific attributes, I cannot divorce his humorous writing from his willingness to prey on women, in a manner that would make a PUA proud. I cannot read his eloquent defense of the magnificence of stars set apart from any creationist mythos without also recalling that he thought the young women he targeted in bars “worse than whores” if they wouldn’t have sex with him.  I can’t let go of the fact that he likewise sought out the wives of his graduate students.  As the wife of a Ph.D., who remembers how much power your advisor can hold over your future (especially one as notable as Feynmann), had I had to face it, being sought after for special attention by a husband’s advisor would have made me sick with fear. Coercive does not even begin to describe such a situation.

He cannot be a hero any longer.

He is not the only person whose work I cannot encounter without revulsion for reasons totally separate from that work: I gave up on Orson Scott Card a long time ago.  The good that John Edwards or Anthony Weiner did for progressives is drowned by my disgust and horror at their other activities.

And then there is Marion Zimmer Bradley. The disclosures about her behavior make Feynmann look like a feminist.

I have read all the Darkover novels.  I loved The Mists of Avalon.  I discounted the disturbing aspects of her novels (the status of women on Darkover, the incest and sexual violence towards women and young girls in Avalon) as being simply parts of her convincing world-building.  It’s not as though she approved of those things, I thought.  And on Darkover, she created a world where homosexuality was acknowledged, and accepted.

Recently, her daughter has come forward telling of the severe physical and sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother. ( A good summary of the fandom coverage by Jim Hines can be found here.) In addition, MZB’s husband, Walter Breen, was a serial molester of young boys, and Bradley covered for him to the point where she can be seen as facilitating the molestation.  By her own admission, she had no problem in Breen sexually assaulting minors.

After first reading about the abuse, I reread one of her Darkover novels.  I was struck by its treatment of children and women’s sexuality, among other things.  What sort of mind creates such  a place? And excuses it? And then there is Avalon, which includes the following description of a fertility rite:

“The little blue-painted girl who had borne the fertilizing blood was drawn down into the arms of a sinewy old hunter, and Morgaine saw her briefly struggle and cry out, go down under his body, her legs opening to the irresistible force of nature in them.”

Good Lord in heaven.  Child rape painted as an “irresistible force of nature.”

I can no longer read MZB’s work.  Art is the result of the artist.  She committed, and excused in others, horrific acts of predation on children.  Nothing she can write can overcome that:  all of her work is tainted.

There are differences of opinion on this, clearly.  A writer at Entertainment Weekly  who discovered Mists of Avalon after hearing about the allegations against MZB finds the book brilliant.   And the comments on any post about this will include some by people who clearly find the works “feminist,” although rethinking what she wrote about Darkover makes that a questionable assessment. (Yes, she had the Guild of Renunciates who were independent women; they were however, considered outside society and scorned because they forfeited the protection of men — most women were destined for marriage. Or to work in the Towers.) In her Darkover Landfall, her Darkover origin story, she creates a world in which women go overnight from being independent scientists to baby machines. Because of MZB’s unquestionable gifts as a writer, I have read that book probably six or seven times, and only on the last read did it bother me. Not to mention that, as one commenter I read pointed out, in her books telepathy signals a person’s desires, sexual and otherwise, so “no” really can mean “yes.”

I have lost a literary friend.  I have read the all of the Darkover novels, many of repeatedly. The only thing I can think that would be worse, as far as reading, would be if a horrible revelation came to light about Jane Austen.

Great writers and scientists are people.  Sometimes that means they do horrible things. Looking the other way, excusing their actions because they are great artists, merely denigrates and belittles their victims.*

It’s a matter of who you want to stand next to, emotionally.  I choose to stand next to the powerless.

*For me, one of the most painful statements by Moira Greyland, MZB’s daughter, who has come forth with the details of her horrific treatment at the hands of her mother, was that she waited so long to air the abuse because of fear that MZB’s fans would be angry. Sadly, I find this completely understandable.

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