EthicalDemocracy
New York City
September 16th, 2009
4:23 am
My NYT Comment #75.
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
September 16th, 2009
8:39 am
Segregation vs. Social Justice in Democracy: The India Case
\"New Peace in commute\" for India's women? Your article illustrates the axiom -- No Justice No Peace.
Women-only commuter trains are an integral part of an adhoc, unequal, inadequate and functionally inequitable public transportation policy in Indian Democracy.
Gender segregation on public transportation reinforces the most negative aspects of India's powerfully entrenched patriarchy. Sequestered travel on a train to work is predictively unlikely to increase women's safety, or equal participation in India's democracy.
India's public transportation systems are grossly underfunded. This inequity punishes the poor, especially the poorest women. The nation's poorest women, don't get to ride these commuter trains. That structural inequity is the crux of the problem. In a nation-state that should be providing adequate public transportation for ALL, while making every attempt at a smaller carbon footprint, regardless of what the West does.
Finger-pointing at the West will not help Indians become more ecologically responsible or more socially just, as they attempt to meet their expanding transportation needs.
An Indian policy implementation of relentless attrition in funding, blatantly devalues PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION as a universal social good that should be intentionally deployed, through policy, by both the Centre and the States, as a powerful social leveler, in our unprecedented democratic civil society.
I travel to India twice a year every year (since 1999), spending a total of 5 months, every visit. Over this past summer, I traveled in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Jammu & Kashmir, logging thousands of miles and several days on trains and buses. That's democracy on wheels.
A woman, I travel alone in India, entirely by State public buses, state-run commuter trains and the Indian railways ((Second Class sleeper), refusing to use cars proffered by my middle class relatives. Any form of PUBLIC transport is acceptable to me.
Now that may appear eccentric or overly zealous but I am attempting, always in flawed fashion, to sincerely develop ethical practices of civic participation, in myself (no one else), within Indian democracy.
In my view, India cannot afford to produce, much less dispose, a paper cup, as millions carelessly do daily on the Indian trains, any more than India can afford to promote PRIVATE transportation over PUBLIC transportation. Mass Public Transit is a core social justice issue in India's current stage of development, right up there with food/water security, shelter, universal healthcare, universal primary/ secondary education, employment.
My Indian women and men co-travelers in Democracy, especially the burgeoning, heavily subsidized and bribegiving/bribetaking, complicit-in-corruption middle class, who are the main beneficiaries of the women-only commuter trains, can fight JOINTLY for adequate affordable PUBLIC transportation for ALL, instead of cynically choosing cars over buses and/or riding separately in trains.
Such vigorous civic participation would likely advance the Greater Collective Good (GCG), a wholly attainable ideal of ethical democracy.
Satyameva Jayate!
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
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New York Times copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/world/asia/16ladies.html
On India’s Railways, Women Find New Peace in Commute
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Social Justice, Whiteness & Discursive Restraint: A Case Example in US Democracy
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
My NYTimes comment
September 17th, 2009
3:53 am
Comment #93.
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
September 17th, 2009
8:36 am
(scroll all referenced URLs below my comments)
Using RACE as a Political Weapon against We the People
President Obama is making the right decision by refusing to get drawn into the so-called race debate.
What debate? This is no debate. It is a cynical attempt, by some inside and outside Congress, to destroy healthcare reform.
It is WE the People who will pay the price, if healthcare reform is not enacted.
A majority of Republicans would like to USE RACE to scuttle Obama's healthcare agenda. That is what one Republican, Joe Wilson, did when he insulted the President, on primetime national TV in an unprecedented shoutout, inside Congress.
But here's the issue. Joe Wilson has the healthcare I want.
Both Clyburn and Carter EXPOSED Wilson and Co. and the hate agenda of some Americans both inside and outside Congress. Actually Maureen did it first. Dowd led the way.
Let us keep our Eyes on the Prize -- FAIR healthcare for ALL Americans, with no one left out.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy as Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
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My NYT Comment #132.
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/opinion/16dowd.html?sort=oldest&offset=6
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
September 16th, 2009
12:07 pm
Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina shouts "You lie" on primetime national TV, to President Obama while Obama is addressing the joint session of Congress on his proposed Healthcare plan.
Wilson is White, Obama is Black.
Wilson is advised by some of his Republican colleagues to call Obama to "apologize".
Wilson calls the White House and conveys his apology to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel. Emanuel informs Wilson his apology is "accepted" by the President.
The House of Representatives, controlled by Democrats, discusses and passes a Resolution of Disapproval on Wilson's accusation against the President
Former President Carter, white, male and Southern like Wilson, asserts that Congressman Wilson statement was "based on racism."
Wilson's performance of whiteness can be explained most comprehensively through the Theory of Systemic Whiteness. Without using a rigorous theoretical explanation, statements like Wilson's, as well as the statements and actions that follow, will continue to be seen as unusual, atypical, incidental. When viewed through the lens of Systemic Whiteness, we see race as performative and structural, indispensable to US civil society and its particular trajectory of democracy. We see whiteness as a system of Power exercised over unadmitted others. WE undestand Toni Morrison's comment that Bill Clinton was the nations first black president. WE can understand why powerful middle aged white men in the Republican Party did not think he was qualified to be President because Clinton satisfied every Black stereotype -- poor, working class, raised by a single mother. With all those self-fullfilling racialized stereotypes, why should he be allowed to be president? Strip him. Now, that's the power of systemic whiteness.
Q. Is discursive restraint essential to advance social justice in Ethical Democracy, or will ethical practices advance precisely because of the absence of discursive restraint in the public sphere?
more.......
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NYTimes Comment
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
September 16th, 2009
6:17 am
Discursive Restraint & Democracy
Maureen I think you were the first reporter in the entire country to pick up on, and analyze the racial subtext of Joe Wilson's \"You Lie\"
verbal assault on President Obama, in Your earlier \"Boy Oh Boy\" column. I think you gave Clyburn the boost he may have needed, to follow up with that successful Resolution of Disapproval that passed today in Congress 240 - 179.
Even former President Carter made his assertion that Wilson's comment was racist, AFTER your column. Good going, thanks, your antiracism, not to mention drawing scathing attention to boorishness disguised as candor in public service, is appreciated.
Persuasive persistence pays, that is Discursive Democracy at its best -- and it made Wilson pay.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://Et6hicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
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New York Times copyright
Op-Ed Columnist
Boy, Oh, Boy
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 12, 2009
WASHINGTON
Skip to next paragraph
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Maureen Dowd
The normally nonchalant Barack Obama looked nonplussed, as Nancy Pelosi glowered behind.
Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.
But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!
The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and T-shirts.
The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president. Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.
I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.
I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.
But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.
“A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,” said Congressman Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the South Carolina delegation. Clyburn, the man who called out Bill Clinton on his racially tinged attacks on Obama in the primary, pushed Pelosi to pursue a formal resolution chastising Wilson.
“In South Carolina politics, I learned that the olive branch works very seldom,” he said. “You have to come at these things from a position of strength. My father used to say, ‘Son, always remember that silence gives consent.’ ”
Barry Obama of the post-’60s Hawaiian ’hood did not live through the major racial struggles in American history. Maybe he had a problem relating to his white basketball coach or catching a cab in New York, but he never got beaten up for being black.
Now he’s at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension. Even if he and the coterie of white male advisers around him don’t choose to openly acknowledge it, this president is the ultimate civil rights figure — a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe.
For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.
The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War has now given us this: Senator Jim DeMint exhorted conservatives to “break” the president by upending his health care plan. Rusty DePass, a G.O.P. activist, said that a gorilla that escaped from a zoo was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors.” Lovelorn Mark Sanford tried to refuse the president’s stimulus money. And now Joe Wilson.
“A good many people in South Carolina really reject the notion that we’re part of the union,” said Don Fowler, the former Democratic Party chief who teaches politics at the University of South Carolina. He observed that when slavery was destroyed by outside forces and segregation was undone by civil rights leaders and Congress, it bred xenophobia.
“We have a lot of people who really think that the world’s against us,” Fowler said, “so when things don’t happen the way we like them to, we blame outsiders.” He said a state legislator not long ago tried to pass a bill to nullify any federal legislation with which South Carolinians didn’t agree. Shades of John C. Calhoun!
It may be President Obama’s very air of elegance and erudition that raises hackles in some. “My father used to say to me, ‘Boy, don’t get above your raising,’ ” Fowler said. “Some people are prejudiced anyway, and then they look at his education and mannerisms and get more angry at him.”
Clyburn had a warning for Obama advisers who want to forgive Wilson, ignore the ignorant outbursts and move on: “They’re going to have to develop ways in this White House to deal with things and not let them fester out there. Otherwise, they’ll see numbers moving in the wrong direction.”
Recommend More Articles in Opinion » A version of this article appeared in print on September 13, 2009, on page WK17 of the New York edition.
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NYTimes copyright
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/opinion/16dowd.html#bozoanchor
Rapping Joe’s Knuckles
By MAUREEN DOWD
The pressure from House Democrats, and a handful of Republicans, on Joe Wilson to apologize was a rare triumph for civility in a country that seems to have lost all sense of it.
CNN copyright
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/09/15/wilson.resolution/index.html#cnnSTCText
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The House of Representatives on Tuesday formally admonished Republican Rep. Joe Wilson for shouting "you lie" during President Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress last week.
Rep. Joe Wilson, R-South Carolina, shouts "You lie!" during President Obama's speech Wednesday night.
Rep. Joe Wilson, R-South Carolina, shouts "You lie!" during President Obama's speech Wednesday night.
The House passed a resolution of disapproval on a 240-179 vote that was mostly along party lines, reflecting the Democratic majority in the chamber. Twelve Democrats voted "no," while seven Republicans voted for the measure. Five representatives, all Democrats, voted "present."
According to the Office of the House Historian, it was the first time in its 220-year history that the House has disciplined a member for speaking out during a presidential speech in the chamber to a joint session of Congress.
During debate on the resolution, Wilson called the measure a waste of time and failed to apologize to the chamber, as demanded by House Democrats.
"When we are done here today, we will not have taken any further steps toward helping" the nation deal with urgent challenges, said Wilson, of South Carolina. "It is time that we move forward and get back to work for the American people." Video Watch House members debate the resolution »
He and other Republicans noted that Wilson apologized to Obama immediately after the speech, and that the president accept it. Asked after the vote if he apologized privately to House leaders such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Wilson told journalists it wasn't necessary.
"In my view, by apologizing to the president, the most important person in the history of the world, that applied to everyone," Wilson said.
However, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, said Wilson's refusal to apologize to the House for his disrespectful behavior to the chamber required admonishment.
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The issue, he said, "is whether we are able to proceed with a degree of civility and decorum" that Congress requires.
The House resolution was the mildest form of discipline the chamber can exercise for misconduct on the House floor.
"Whereas the conduct of the Representative from South Carolina was a breach of decorum and degraded the proceedings of the joint session, to the discredit of the House: Now, therefore, be it resolved that the House of Representatives disapproves of the behavior of the Representative from South Carolina, Mr. Wilson, during the joint session of Congress held on Sept. 9, 2009," said a text of the resolution posted earlier on Hoyer's legislative Web site.
Before debate on the measure began, one Democrat said the disrespect shown Obama by Wilson never would have happened to a white president.
"It only happened when this country elected a president of color," said Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia. Another noted the heckling of the president in the House was unprecedented, and the chamber needed to enforce discipline in order to maintain civility. Video Watch Johnson comment on why he supports the resolution »
"No president has been subjected to that type of treatment on the floor of the House of Representatives, and if we go down that road, then it's the law of the jungle, and I think that's just wrong," said Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia.
However, House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio called the resolution "piling on."
In the debate, Boehner and other Republicans acknowledged the mistake by Wilson while citing his military career and how his four children also served in the military. They noted that he already had apologized to Obama and accused Democrats of a partisan stunt intended to deflect attention from what they called increasingly unpopular health care legislation. Video Watch Boehner talk about health care, support Wilson's apology »
"The American people want less politics and more jobs," said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Indiana.
In closing the debate, Democratic Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, the House Majority whip, noted that all Americans, especially schoolchildren, learn about civics and government by observing the House.
Clyburn, a former schoolteacher, said failing to enforce House rules against Wilson's outburst would send the wrong message.
The House Democratic leadership agreed to move forward with the vote after meeting to discuss the issue Monday evening, according to two Democratic leadership aides.
Kristie Greco, a spokeswoman for Clyburn, said the discussion at Monday's meeting was about "how this speaks to the breach of decorum alone, and not addressing the issue sets a precedent for bad behavior."
"We're not the British Parliament for a reason," Greco added. Video Watch combative politicians in other countries »
Wilson on Sunday described his loud retort to Obama's statement that illegal immigrants would not be covered under the Democrats' health care bill as "a town hall moment." But he made it clear he would not apologize on the House floor.
"I called immediately, I did apologize, but I believe one apology is sufficient," he said.
Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the episode "unfortunate" and told reporters at her weekly news conference, "It's time for us to talk about health care and not Mr. Wilson."
But when Pelosi met with Democratic leaders later that day, her colleagues argued that unless Wilson apologized on his own, they would want a formal vote on a resolution of disapproval, according to several Democratic sources.
On Tuesday, Pelosi refused to comment on the resolution to reporters outside the weekly Democratic caucus meeting, saying that journalists should be focusing on the health care reform issue.
Other Democrats offered their thoughts.
Johnson said Wilson's comment amounted to a "wink" of approval to right-wing extremists who have brought highly charged language and imagery -- such as posters depicting Obama with a Hitler mustache or as an African witch doctor -- to the health care debate.
"He [Wilson] did not help the cause of diversity and tolerance with his remarks," Johnson said. "If I were a betting man, I would say that it instigated more racist sentiment feeling that it's OK -- you don't have to bury it now."
Johnson added that failing to rebuke Wilson would bring increased racism in the public discussion on health care, saying: "You can bring it out and talk about it fully, and so I guess we will probably have folks putting on white hoods and white uniforms again riding through the countryside intimidating people."
"That's the logical conclusion if this kind of attitude is not rebuked, and Congressman Wilson represents it," Johnson said. "He is the face of it, and that's why I support the resolution."
To Rep. Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania, a member of the moderate Blue Dog Democratic coalition, the issue was simple: "He has not apologized to the House for the embarrassment he brought" to the chamber, Altmire said.
Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California, a leading member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said Wilson's violation of House rules was "egregious enough that it warrants an apology on the floor." Without that, the resolution of disapproval is called for, she said.
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On the Republican side, Rep. Steve King of Iowa began circulating a letter among House Republicans last weekend urging Wilson not to apologize on the House floor.
The letter stated, "We urge that you hold your ground against those who seek partisan advantage and reject all demands for additional redress. When the president of the United States accepts an apology, no observer has an additional claim."
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CNN's Deirdre Walsh and Lisa Desjardins contributed to this report.
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Associated Press/Yahoo News copyright
Jimmy Carter: Wilson comments 'based on racism'
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090916/ap_on_go_co/us_health_care_heckling_carter;_ylt=Ai9mfZisPYyC1O81svEugZW2GL8C;_ylu=X3oDMTMxNTlrZ3R1BGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMDkwOTE2L3VzX2hlYWx0aF9jYXJlX2hlY2tsaW5nX2NhcnRlcgRjcG9zAzEEcG9zAzEEc2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yaWVzBHNsawNqaW1teWNhcnRlcnc-
By GREG BLUESTEIN, Associated Press Writer Greg Bluestein, Associated Press Writer – 2 hrs 39 mins ago
ATLANTA – Former President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday that U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst to President Barack Obama during a speech to Congress last week was an act "based on racism" and rooted in fears of a black president.
"I think it's based on racism," Carter said in response to an audience question at a town hall held at his presidential center in Atlanta. "There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president."
The Georgia Democrat said the outburst was a part of a disturbing trend directed at the president that has included demonstrators equating Obama to Nazi leaders.
"Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national program on health care," he said. "It's deeper than that."
Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, was formally rebuked Tuesday in a House vote for shouting "You lie!" during Obama's speech to Congress last Wednesday.
The shout came after the president commented that illegal aliens would be ineligible for federal subsidies to buy health insurance. Republicans expressed their disbelief with sounds of disapproval, punctuated by Wilson's outburst.
Tuesday's rebuke was a rare resolution of disapproval pushed through by Democrats who insisted that Wilson had violated basic rules of decorum and civility. Republicans characterized the measure as a witch hunt and Wilson, who had already apologized to Obama, insisted he owed the House no apology.
Wilson's spokesman was not immediately available for comment, but his eldest son defended his father.
"There is not a racist bone in my dad's body," said Alan Wilson, an Iraq veteran who is running for state attorney general. "He doesn't even laugh at distasteful jokes. I won't comment on former President Carter, because I don't know President Carter. But I know my dad, and it's just not in him."
"It's unfortunate people make that jump. People can disagree — and appropriately disagree — on issues of substance, but when they make the jump to race it's absolutely ludicrous. My brothers and I were raised by our parents to respect everyone regardless of background or race."
South Carolina's former Democratic Party chairman said that he doesn't believe Wilson was motivated by racism, but said the outburst encouraged racist views.
"I think Joe's conduct was asinine, but I think it would be asinine no matter what the color of the president," said Dick Harpootlian, who has known Wilson for decades. "I don't think Joe's outburst was caused by President Obama being African-American. I think it was caused by no filter being between his brain and his mouth."
Harpootlian said he received scores of racial e-mails from outside South Carolina after he talked about the vote on Fox News.
"You have a bunch of folks out there looking for some comfort in their racial issues. They have a problem with an African-American president," he said. "But was he motivated by that? I don't think so. I respectfully disagree with President Carter, though it gives validity to racism."
Carter called Wilson's comment "dastardly" and an aftershock of racist views that have permeated American politics for decades.
"The president is not only the head of government, he is the head of state," he said. "And no matter who he is or how much we disagree with his policies, the president should be treated with respect."
___
Associated Press Writer Seanna Adcox in Columbia, S.C., contributed to this report.
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New Yorker magazine copyright
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1998/10/05/1998_10_05_031_TNY_LIBRY_000016504?printable=true
New Yorker comment by Toni Morrison on Clinton as the nation's first Black President
Comment
Thanks to the papers, we know what the columnists think. Thanks to round-the-clock cable, we know what the ex-prosecutors, the right-wing blondes, the teletropic law professors, and the disgraced political consultants think. Thanks to the polls, we know what “the American people” think. But what about the experts on human folly?
by Toni Morrison October 5, 1998
Keywords
Newspapermen;
Communications;
Lewinsky, Monica;
Clinton, Bill (Pres.);
Washington;
Adultery;
African-Americans (Blacks)
This summer, my plan was to do very selective radio listening, read no newspapers or news magazines, and leave my television screen profoundly, mercifully blank. There were books to read, others to finish, a few to read again. It was a lovely summer, and I was pleased with the decision to recuse myself from what had become since January The Only Story Worth Telling. Although I wanted cognitive space for my own pursuits, averting my gaze was not to bury my head. I was eager for information, yet suspicious of the package in which that information would be wrapped. I have been convinced for a long time now that, with a few dazzling exceptions, print and visual media have thrown away their freedom and chosen jail instead—have willingly locked themselves into a ratings-driven, money-based prison of their own making. However comfortable the prison may be, its most overwhelming feature is loss of the public. Not able, therefore, to trust reporters to report instead of gossip among themselves, unable to bear newscasters deflecting, ignoring, trivializing information—orchestrating its minor chords for the highest decibel—I decided to get my news the old-fashioned way: conversation, public eavesdropping, and word of mouth.
I hoped to avoid the spectacle I was sure would be mounted, fearing that at any minute I might have to witness ex-Presidential friends selling that friendship for the higher salaries of broadcast journalism; anticipating the nausea that might rise when quaking Democrats took firm positions on or over the fence in case the polls changed. I imagined feral Republicans, smelling blood and a shot at the totalitarian power they believe is rightfully theirs; self-congratulatory pundits sifting through “history” for nuggets of dubious relevancy.
I did not relinquish my summer plans, but summer is over now and I have begun to supplement verbal accounts of the running news with tentative perusal of C-span, brief glimpses of anchorfolk, squinting glances at newspapers—trying belatedly to get the story straight. What, I have been wondering, is the story—the one only the public seems to know? And what does it mean?
I wish that the effluvia did add up to a story of adultery. Serious as adultery is, it is not a national catastrophe. Women leaving hotels following trysts with their extramarital lovers tell pollsters they abominate Mr. Clinton’s behavior. Relaxed men fresh from massage parlors frown earnestly into the camera at the mere thought of such malfeasance. No one “approves” of adultery, but, unlike fidelity in Plymouth Rock society, late-twentieth-century fidelity, when weighed against the constitutional right to privacy, comes up short. The root of the word, adulterare, means “to defile,” but at its core is treachery. Cloaked in deception and secrecy, it has earned prominence on lists of moral prohibitions and is understood as more than a sin; in divorce courts it is a crime. People don’t get arrested for its commission, but they can suffer its grave consequences.
Still, it is clear that this is not a narrative of adultery or even of its consequences for the families involved. Is there anyone who believes that that was all the investigation had in mind? Adultery is the Independent Counsel’s loss leader, the item displayed to lure the customers inside the shop. Nor was it ever a story about seduction—male vamp or female predator (or the other way around). It played that way a little: a worn tale of middle-aged vulnerability and youthful appetite. The Achilles’ heel analogy flashed for a bit, but had no staying power, although its ultra meaning—that Achilles’ heel was given to Achilles, not to a lesser man—lay quietly dormant under the cliché.
At another point, the story seemed to be about high and impeachable crimes like the ones we have had some experience with: the suborning of federal agencies; the exchange of billion-dollar contracts for proof of indiscretion; the extermination of infants in illegal wars mounted and waged for money and power. Until something like those abuses surfaces, the story will have to make do with thinner stuff: alleged perjury and “Lady, your husband is cheating on us.” Whatever the media promote and the chorus chants, whatever dapples dinner tables, this is not a mundane story of sex, lies, and videotape. The real story is none of these. Not adultery, or high crimes. Nor is it even the story of a brilliant President naïve enough to believe, along with the rest of the citizenry, that there were lines one’s enemies would not cross, lengths to which they would not go—a profound, perhaps irrevocable, error in judgment.
In a quite baffling and frustrating manner, it was not a “story” but a compilation of revelations and commentary which shied away from the meaning of its own material. In spite of myriad “titles” (“The President in Crisis”), what the public has been given is dangerously close to a story of no story at all. One of the problems in locating it is the absence of a coherent sphere of enunciation. There seems to be no appropriate language in which or platform of discourse from which to pursue it. This absence of clear language has imploded into a surfeit of contradictory languages. The parsing and equivocal terminology of law is laced with titillation. Raw comedy is spiked with Cotton Mather homilies. The precision of a coroner’s vocabulary mocks passionate debates on morality. Radiant sermons are forced to dance with vile headlines. From deep within this conflagration of tony, occasionally insightful, arch, pompous, mournful, supercilious, generous, salivating verbalism, the single consistent sound to emerge is a howl of revulsion.
But revulsion against what? What is being violated, ruptured, defiled? The bedroom? The Oval Office? The voting booth? The fourth grade? Marriage vows? The flag? Whatever answer is given, underneath the national embarrassment churns a disquiet turned to dread and now anger.
African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear: “No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and—who knows?—maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us.”
For a large segment of the population who are not African-Americans or members of other minorities, the elusive story left visible tracks: from target sighted to attack, to criminalization, to lynching, and now, in some quarters, to crucifixion. The always and already guilty “perp” is being hunted down not by a prosecutor’s obsessive application of law but by a different kind of pursuer, one who makes new laws out of the shards of those he breaks.
Certain freedoms I once imagined as being in a vault somewhere, like ancient jewels kept safe from thieves. No single official or group could break in and remove them, certainly not in public. The image is juvenile, of course, and I have not had recourse to it for the whole of my adult life. Yet it is useful now to explain what I perceive as the real story. For each bootstep the office of the Independent Counsel has taken smashes one of those jewels—a ruby of grand-jury secrecy here, a sapphire of due process there. Such concentrated power may be reminiscent of a solitary Torquemada on a holy mission of lethal inquisition. It may even suggest a fatwa. But neither applies. This is Slaughtergate. A sustained, bloody, arrogant coup d’état. The Presidency is being stolen from us. And the people know it.
I don’t regret my “news-free” summer. Getting at the story in that retrograde fashion has been rewarding. Early this week, a neighbor called to ask if I would march. Where? To Washington, she said. Absolutely, I answered, without even asking what for. “We have to prevent the collapse of our Constitution,” she said.
We meet tonight. ♦
end of New Yorker copyrighted comment
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NYTimescopyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/us/politics/17obama.html?hp
As Race Debate Grows, Obama Steers Clear of It
By JEFF ZELENY and JIM RUTENBERG
Beyond posing a distraction, the race issue could further strain the president’s broad but tenuous coalition.
(My NYT comment in response to this article, appears above
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New York City
My NYTimes comment
September 17th, 2009
3:53 am
Comment #93.
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
September 17th, 2009
8:36 am
(scroll all referenced URLs below my comments)
Using RACE as a Political Weapon against We the People
President Obama is making the right decision by refusing to get drawn into the so-called race debate.
What debate? This is no debate. It is a cynical attempt, by some inside and outside Congress, to destroy healthcare reform.
It is WE the People who will pay the price, if healthcare reform is not enacted.
A majority of Republicans would like to USE RACE to scuttle Obama's healthcare agenda. That is what one Republican, Joe Wilson, did when he insulted the President, on primetime national TV in an unprecedented shoutout, inside Congress.
But here's the issue. Joe Wilson has the healthcare I want.
Both Clyburn and Carter EXPOSED Wilson and Co. and the hate agenda of some Americans both inside and outside Congress. Actually Maureen did it first. Dowd led the way.
Let us keep our Eyes on the Prize -- FAIR healthcare for ALL Americans, with no one left out.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy as Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
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My NYT Comment #132.
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/opinion/16dowd.html?sort=oldest&offset=6
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
September 16th, 2009
12:07 pm
Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina shouts "You lie" on primetime national TV, to President Obama while Obama is addressing the joint session of Congress on his proposed Healthcare plan.
Wilson is White, Obama is Black.
Wilson is advised by some of his Republican colleagues to call Obama to "apologize".
Wilson calls the White House and conveys his apology to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel. Emanuel informs Wilson his apology is "accepted" by the President.
The House of Representatives, controlled by Democrats, discusses and passes a Resolution of Disapproval on Wilson's accusation against the President
Former President Carter, white, male and Southern like Wilson, asserts that Congressman Wilson statement was "based on racism."
Wilson's performance of whiteness can be explained most comprehensively through the Theory of Systemic Whiteness. Without using a rigorous theoretical explanation, statements like Wilson's, as well as the statements and actions that follow, will continue to be seen as unusual, atypical, incidental. When viewed through the lens of Systemic Whiteness, we see race as performative and structural, indispensable to US civil society and its particular trajectory of democracy. We see whiteness as a system of Power exercised over unadmitted others. WE undestand Toni Morrison's comment that Bill Clinton was the nations first black president. WE can understand why powerful middle aged white men in the Republican Party did not think he was qualified to be President because Clinton satisfied every Black stereotype -- poor, working class, raised by a single mother. With all those self-fullfilling racialized stereotypes, why should he be allowed to be president? Strip him. Now, that's the power of systemic whiteness.
Q. Is discursive restraint essential to advance social justice in Ethical Democracy, or will ethical practices advance precisely because of the absence of discursive restraint in the public sphere?
more.......
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NYTimes Comment
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
September 16th, 2009
6:17 am
Discursive Restraint & Democracy
Maureen I think you were the first reporter in the entire country to pick up on, and analyze the racial subtext of Joe Wilson's \"You Lie\"
verbal assault on President Obama, in Your earlier \"Boy Oh Boy\" column. I think you gave Clyburn the boost he may have needed, to follow up with that successful Resolution of Disapproval that passed today in Congress 240 - 179.
Even former President Carter made his assertion that Wilson's comment was racist, AFTER your column. Good going, thanks, your antiracism, not to mention drawing scathing attention to boorishness disguised as candor in public service, is appreciated.
Persuasive persistence pays, that is Discursive Democracy at its best -- and it made Wilson pay.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://Et6hicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
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New York Times copyright
Op-Ed Columnist
Boy, Oh, Boy
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 12, 2009
WASHINGTON
Skip to next paragraph
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Maureen Dowd
The normally nonchalant Barack Obama looked nonplussed, as Nancy Pelosi glowered behind.
Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.
But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!
The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and T-shirts.
The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president. Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.
I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.
I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.
But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.
“A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,” said Congressman Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the South Carolina delegation. Clyburn, the man who called out Bill Clinton on his racially tinged attacks on Obama in the primary, pushed Pelosi to pursue a formal resolution chastising Wilson.
“In South Carolina politics, I learned that the olive branch works very seldom,” he said. “You have to come at these things from a position of strength. My father used to say, ‘Son, always remember that silence gives consent.’ ”
Barry Obama of the post-’60s Hawaiian ’hood did not live through the major racial struggles in American history. Maybe he had a problem relating to his white basketball coach or catching a cab in New York, but he never got beaten up for being black.
Now he’s at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension. Even if he and the coterie of white male advisers around him don’t choose to openly acknowledge it, this president is the ultimate civil rights figure — a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe.
For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.
The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War has now given us this: Senator Jim DeMint exhorted conservatives to “break” the president by upending his health care plan. Rusty DePass, a G.O.P. activist, said that a gorilla that escaped from a zoo was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors.” Lovelorn Mark Sanford tried to refuse the president’s stimulus money. And now Joe Wilson.
“A good many people in South Carolina really reject the notion that we’re part of the union,” said Don Fowler, the former Democratic Party chief who teaches politics at the University of South Carolina. He observed that when slavery was destroyed by outside forces and segregation was undone by civil rights leaders and Congress, it bred xenophobia.
“We have a lot of people who really think that the world’s against us,” Fowler said, “so when things don’t happen the way we like them to, we blame outsiders.” He said a state legislator not long ago tried to pass a bill to nullify any federal legislation with which South Carolinians didn’t agree. Shades of John C. Calhoun!
It may be President Obama’s very air of elegance and erudition that raises hackles in some. “My father used to say to me, ‘Boy, don’t get above your raising,’ ” Fowler said. “Some people are prejudiced anyway, and then they look at his education and mannerisms and get more angry at him.”
Clyburn had a warning for Obama advisers who want to forgive Wilson, ignore the ignorant outbursts and move on: “They’re going to have to develop ways in this White House to deal with things and not let them fester out there. Otherwise, they’ll see numbers moving in the wrong direction.”
Recommend More Articles in Opinion » A version of this article appeared in print on September 13, 2009, on page WK17 of the New York edition.
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NYTimes copyright
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/opinion/16dowd.html#bozoanchor
Rapping Joe’s Knuckles
By MAUREEN DOWD
The pressure from House Democrats, and a handful of Republicans, on Joe Wilson to apologize was a rare triumph for civility in a country that seems to have lost all sense of it.
CNN copyright
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/09/15/wilson.resolution/index.html#cnnSTCText
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The House of Representatives on Tuesday formally admonished Republican Rep. Joe Wilson for shouting "you lie" during President Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress last week.
Rep. Joe Wilson, R-South Carolina, shouts "You lie!" during President Obama's speech Wednesday night.
Rep. Joe Wilson, R-South Carolina, shouts "You lie!" during President Obama's speech Wednesday night.
The House passed a resolution of disapproval on a 240-179 vote that was mostly along party lines, reflecting the Democratic majority in the chamber. Twelve Democrats voted "no," while seven Republicans voted for the measure. Five representatives, all Democrats, voted "present."
According to the Office of the House Historian, it was the first time in its 220-year history that the House has disciplined a member for speaking out during a presidential speech in the chamber to a joint session of Congress.
During debate on the resolution, Wilson called the measure a waste of time and failed to apologize to the chamber, as demanded by House Democrats.
"When we are done here today, we will not have taken any further steps toward helping" the nation deal with urgent challenges, said Wilson, of South Carolina. "It is time that we move forward and get back to work for the American people." Video Watch House members debate the resolution »
He and other Republicans noted that Wilson apologized to Obama immediately after the speech, and that the president accept it. Asked after the vote if he apologized privately to House leaders such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Wilson told journalists it wasn't necessary.
"In my view, by apologizing to the president, the most important person in the history of the world, that applied to everyone," Wilson said.
However, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, said Wilson's refusal to apologize to the House for his disrespectful behavior to the chamber required admonishment.
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* Health care reform critics converge on Capitol
The issue, he said, "is whether we are able to proceed with a degree of civility and decorum" that Congress requires.
The House resolution was the mildest form of discipline the chamber can exercise for misconduct on the House floor.
"Whereas the conduct of the Representative from South Carolina was a breach of decorum and degraded the proceedings of the joint session, to the discredit of the House: Now, therefore, be it resolved that the House of Representatives disapproves of the behavior of the Representative from South Carolina, Mr. Wilson, during the joint session of Congress held on Sept. 9, 2009," said a text of the resolution posted earlier on Hoyer's legislative Web site.
Before debate on the measure began, one Democrat said the disrespect shown Obama by Wilson never would have happened to a white president.
"It only happened when this country elected a president of color," said Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia. Another noted the heckling of the president in the House was unprecedented, and the chamber needed to enforce discipline in order to maintain civility. Video Watch Johnson comment on why he supports the resolution »
"No president has been subjected to that type of treatment on the floor of the House of Representatives, and if we go down that road, then it's the law of the jungle, and I think that's just wrong," said Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia.
However, House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio called the resolution "piling on."
In the debate, Boehner and other Republicans acknowledged the mistake by Wilson while citing his military career and how his four children also served in the military. They noted that he already had apologized to Obama and accused Democrats of a partisan stunt intended to deflect attention from what they called increasingly unpopular health care legislation. Video Watch Boehner talk about health care, support Wilson's apology »
"The American people want less politics and more jobs," said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Indiana.
In closing the debate, Democratic Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, the House Majority whip, noted that all Americans, especially schoolchildren, learn about civics and government by observing the House.
Clyburn, a former schoolteacher, said failing to enforce House rules against Wilson's outburst would send the wrong message.
The House Democratic leadership agreed to move forward with the vote after meeting to discuss the issue Monday evening, according to two Democratic leadership aides.
Kristie Greco, a spokeswoman for Clyburn, said the discussion at Monday's meeting was about "how this speaks to the breach of decorum alone, and not addressing the issue sets a precedent for bad behavior."
"We're not the British Parliament for a reason," Greco added. Video Watch combative politicians in other countries »
Wilson on Sunday described his loud retort to Obama's statement that illegal immigrants would not be covered under the Democrats' health care bill as "a town hall moment." But he made it clear he would not apologize on the House floor.
"I called immediately, I did apologize, but I believe one apology is sufficient," he said.
Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the episode "unfortunate" and told reporters at her weekly news conference, "It's time for us to talk about health care and not Mr. Wilson."
But when Pelosi met with Democratic leaders later that day, her colleagues argued that unless Wilson apologized on his own, they would want a formal vote on a resolution of disapproval, according to several Democratic sources.
On Tuesday, Pelosi refused to comment on the resolution to reporters outside the weekly Democratic caucus meeting, saying that journalists should be focusing on the health care reform issue.
Other Democrats offered their thoughts.
Johnson said Wilson's comment amounted to a "wink" of approval to right-wing extremists who have brought highly charged language and imagery -- such as posters depicting Obama with a Hitler mustache or as an African witch doctor -- to the health care debate.
"He [Wilson] did not help the cause of diversity and tolerance with his remarks," Johnson said. "If I were a betting man, I would say that it instigated more racist sentiment feeling that it's OK -- you don't have to bury it now."
Johnson added that failing to rebuke Wilson would bring increased racism in the public discussion on health care, saying: "You can bring it out and talk about it fully, and so I guess we will probably have folks putting on white hoods and white uniforms again riding through the countryside intimidating people."
"That's the logical conclusion if this kind of attitude is not rebuked, and Congressman Wilson represents it," Johnson said. "He is the face of it, and that's why I support the resolution."
To Rep. Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania, a member of the moderate Blue Dog Democratic coalition, the issue was simple: "He has not apologized to the House for the embarrassment he brought" to the chamber, Altmire said.
Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California, a leading member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said Wilson's violation of House rules was "egregious enough that it warrants an apology on the floor." Without that, the resolution of disapproval is called for, she said.
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On the Republican side, Rep. Steve King of Iowa began circulating a letter among House Republicans last weekend urging Wilson not to apologize on the House floor.
The letter stated, "We urge that you hold your ground against those who seek partisan advantage and reject all demands for additional redress. When the president of the United States accepts an apology, no observer has an additional claim."
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CNN's Deirdre Walsh and Lisa Desjardins contributed to this report.
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Associated Press/Yahoo News copyright
Jimmy Carter: Wilson comments 'based on racism'
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090916/ap_on_go_co/us_health_care_heckling_carter;_ylt=Ai9mfZisPYyC1O81svEugZW2GL8C;_ylu=X3oDMTMxNTlrZ3R1BGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMDkwOTE2L3VzX2hlYWx0aF9jYXJlX2hlY2tsaW5nX2NhcnRlcgRjcG9zAzEEcG9zAzEEc2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yaWVzBHNsawNqaW1teWNhcnRlcnc-
By GREG BLUESTEIN, Associated Press Writer Greg Bluestein, Associated Press Writer – 2 hrs 39 mins ago
ATLANTA – Former President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday that U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst to President Barack Obama during a speech to Congress last week was an act "based on racism" and rooted in fears of a black president.
"I think it's based on racism," Carter said in response to an audience question at a town hall held at his presidential center in Atlanta. "There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president."
The Georgia Democrat said the outburst was a part of a disturbing trend directed at the president that has included demonstrators equating Obama to Nazi leaders.
"Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national program on health care," he said. "It's deeper than that."
Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, was formally rebuked Tuesday in a House vote for shouting "You lie!" during Obama's speech to Congress last Wednesday.
The shout came after the president commented that illegal aliens would be ineligible for federal subsidies to buy health insurance. Republicans expressed their disbelief with sounds of disapproval, punctuated by Wilson's outburst.
Tuesday's rebuke was a rare resolution of disapproval pushed through by Democrats who insisted that Wilson had violated basic rules of decorum and civility. Republicans characterized the measure as a witch hunt and Wilson, who had already apologized to Obama, insisted he owed the House no apology.
Wilson's spokesman was not immediately available for comment, but his eldest son defended his father.
"There is not a racist bone in my dad's body," said Alan Wilson, an Iraq veteran who is running for state attorney general. "He doesn't even laugh at distasteful jokes. I won't comment on former President Carter, because I don't know President Carter. But I know my dad, and it's just not in him."
"It's unfortunate people make that jump. People can disagree — and appropriately disagree — on issues of substance, but when they make the jump to race it's absolutely ludicrous. My brothers and I were raised by our parents to respect everyone regardless of background or race."
South Carolina's former Democratic Party chairman said that he doesn't believe Wilson was motivated by racism, but said the outburst encouraged racist views.
"I think Joe's conduct was asinine, but I think it would be asinine no matter what the color of the president," said Dick Harpootlian, who has known Wilson for decades. "I don't think Joe's outburst was caused by President Obama being African-American. I think it was caused by no filter being between his brain and his mouth."
Harpootlian said he received scores of racial e-mails from outside South Carolina after he talked about the vote on Fox News.
"You have a bunch of folks out there looking for some comfort in their racial issues. They have a problem with an African-American president," he said. "But was he motivated by that? I don't think so. I respectfully disagree with President Carter, though it gives validity to racism."
Carter called Wilson's comment "dastardly" and an aftershock of racist views that have permeated American politics for decades.
"The president is not only the head of government, he is the head of state," he said. "And no matter who he is or how much we disagree with his policies, the president should be treated with respect."
___
Associated Press Writer Seanna Adcox in Columbia, S.C., contributed to this report.
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New Yorker magazine copyright
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1998/10/05/1998_10_05_031_TNY_LIBRY_000016504?printable=true
New Yorker comment by Toni Morrison on Clinton as the nation's first Black President
Comment
Thanks to the papers, we know what the columnists think. Thanks to round-the-clock cable, we know what the ex-prosecutors, the right-wing blondes, the teletropic law professors, and the disgraced political consultants think. Thanks to the polls, we know what “the American people” think. But what about the experts on human folly?
by Toni Morrison October 5, 1998
Keywords
Newspapermen;
Communications;
Lewinsky, Monica;
Clinton, Bill (Pres.);
Washington;
Adultery;
African-Americans (Blacks)
This summer, my plan was to do very selective radio listening, read no newspapers or news magazines, and leave my television screen profoundly, mercifully blank. There were books to read, others to finish, a few to read again. It was a lovely summer, and I was pleased with the decision to recuse myself from what had become since January The Only Story Worth Telling. Although I wanted cognitive space for my own pursuits, averting my gaze was not to bury my head. I was eager for information, yet suspicious of the package in which that information would be wrapped. I have been convinced for a long time now that, with a few dazzling exceptions, print and visual media have thrown away their freedom and chosen jail instead—have willingly locked themselves into a ratings-driven, money-based prison of their own making. However comfortable the prison may be, its most overwhelming feature is loss of the public. Not able, therefore, to trust reporters to report instead of gossip among themselves, unable to bear newscasters deflecting, ignoring, trivializing information—orchestrating its minor chords for the highest decibel—I decided to get my news the old-fashioned way: conversation, public eavesdropping, and word of mouth.
I hoped to avoid the spectacle I was sure would be mounted, fearing that at any minute I might have to witness ex-Presidential friends selling that friendship for the higher salaries of broadcast journalism; anticipating the nausea that might rise when quaking Democrats took firm positions on or over the fence in case the polls changed. I imagined feral Republicans, smelling blood and a shot at the totalitarian power they believe is rightfully theirs; self-congratulatory pundits sifting through “history” for nuggets of dubious relevancy.
I did not relinquish my summer plans, but summer is over now and I have begun to supplement verbal accounts of the running news with tentative perusal of C-span, brief glimpses of anchorfolk, squinting glances at newspapers—trying belatedly to get the story straight. What, I have been wondering, is the story—the one only the public seems to know? And what does it mean?
I wish that the effluvia did add up to a story of adultery. Serious as adultery is, it is not a national catastrophe. Women leaving hotels following trysts with their extramarital lovers tell pollsters they abominate Mr. Clinton’s behavior. Relaxed men fresh from massage parlors frown earnestly into the camera at the mere thought of such malfeasance. No one “approves” of adultery, but, unlike fidelity in Plymouth Rock society, late-twentieth-century fidelity, when weighed against the constitutional right to privacy, comes up short. The root of the word, adulterare, means “to defile,” but at its core is treachery. Cloaked in deception and secrecy, it has earned prominence on lists of moral prohibitions and is understood as more than a sin; in divorce courts it is a crime. People don’t get arrested for its commission, but they can suffer its grave consequences.
Still, it is clear that this is not a narrative of adultery or even of its consequences for the families involved. Is there anyone who believes that that was all the investigation had in mind? Adultery is the Independent Counsel’s loss leader, the item displayed to lure the customers inside the shop. Nor was it ever a story about seduction—male vamp or female predator (or the other way around). It played that way a little: a worn tale of middle-aged vulnerability and youthful appetite. The Achilles’ heel analogy flashed for a bit, but had no staying power, although its ultra meaning—that Achilles’ heel was given to Achilles, not to a lesser man—lay quietly dormant under the cliché.
At another point, the story seemed to be about high and impeachable crimes like the ones we have had some experience with: the suborning of federal agencies; the exchange of billion-dollar contracts for proof of indiscretion; the extermination of infants in illegal wars mounted and waged for money and power. Until something like those abuses surfaces, the story will have to make do with thinner stuff: alleged perjury and “Lady, your husband is cheating on us.” Whatever the media promote and the chorus chants, whatever dapples dinner tables, this is not a mundane story of sex, lies, and videotape. The real story is none of these. Not adultery, or high crimes. Nor is it even the story of a brilliant President naïve enough to believe, along with the rest of the citizenry, that there were lines one’s enemies would not cross, lengths to which they would not go—a profound, perhaps irrevocable, error in judgment.
In a quite baffling and frustrating manner, it was not a “story” but a compilation of revelations and commentary which shied away from the meaning of its own material. In spite of myriad “titles” (“The President in Crisis”), what the public has been given is dangerously close to a story of no story at all. One of the problems in locating it is the absence of a coherent sphere of enunciation. There seems to be no appropriate language in which or platform of discourse from which to pursue it. This absence of clear language has imploded into a surfeit of contradictory languages. The parsing and equivocal terminology of law is laced with titillation. Raw comedy is spiked with Cotton Mather homilies. The precision of a coroner’s vocabulary mocks passionate debates on morality. Radiant sermons are forced to dance with vile headlines. From deep within this conflagration of tony, occasionally insightful, arch, pompous, mournful, supercilious, generous, salivating verbalism, the single consistent sound to emerge is a howl of revulsion.
But revulsion against what? What is being violated, ruptured, defiled? The bedroom? The Oval Office? The voting booth? The fourth grade? Marriage vows? The flag? Whatever answer is given, underneath the national embarrassment churns a disquiet turned to dread and now anger.
African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear: “No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and—who knows?—maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us.”
For a large segment of the population who are not African-Americans or members of other minorities, the elusive story left visible tracks: from target sighted to attack, to criminalization, to lynching, and now, in some quarters, to crucifixion. The always and already guilty “perp” is being hunted down not by a prosecutor’s obsessive application of law but by a different kind of pursuer, one who makes new laws out of the shards of those he breaks.
Certain freedoms I once imagined as being in a vault somewhere, like ancient jewels kept safe from thieves. No single official or group could break in and remove them, certainly not in public. The image is juvenile, of course, and I have not had recourse to it for the whole of my adult life. Yet it is useful now to explain what I perceive as the real story. For each bootstep the office of the Independent Counsel has taken smashes one of those jewels—a ruby of grand-jury secrecy here, a sapphire of due process there. Such concentrated power may be reminiscent of a solitary Torquemada on a holy mission of lethal inquisition. It may even suggest a fatwa. But neither applies. This is Slaughtergate. A sustained, bloody, arrogant coup d’état. The Presidency is being stolen from us. And the people know it.
I don’t regret my “news-free” summer. Getting at the story in that retrograde fashion has been rewarding. Early this week, a neighbor called to ask if I would march. Where? To Washington, she said. Absolutely, I answered, without even asking what for. “We have to prevent the collapse of our Constitution,” she said.
We meet tonight. ♦
end of New Yorker copyrighted comment
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NYTimescopyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/us/politics/17obama.html?hp
As Race Debate Grows, Obama Steers Clear of It
By JEFF ZELENY and JIM RUTENBERG
Beyond posing a distraction, the race issue could further strain the president’s broad but tenuous coalition.
(My NYT comment in response to this article, appears above
====================================================================================
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Sunday, September 13, 2009
SOCIAL JUSTICE & The Green Revolution
An expanded version of my Comment NYTimes #25.
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
September 13th, 2009
11:58 am
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/business/energy-environment/14borlaug.html?sort=oldest&offset=1
I am proud that I grew up as a schoolgirl in India knowing who Borlaug was. No, his name did not appear in my grievously irrelevant postcolonial high school curriculum, but in newspapers I read avidly even then.
Borlaug richly deserved his renown. He fed people. I salute Borlaug. He died yesterday in Texas, age 95. Bless him for working untiringly, and without exception, for the Greater Collective Good (GCG).
I quote from your NYTimes article to make 2 related points and assert that both Borlaug and his critics were wrong about the unprecedented Green Revolution ignited throughout the Global South, by him.
Your article states:
"The Green Revolution eventually came under attack from environmental and social critics who said it had created more difficulties than it had solved.
Dr. Borlaug responded that the real problem was not his agricultural techniques, but the runaway population growth that had made them necessary."
My Point #1:
The self-styled "social and environmental critics" were part of the problem. They represented the political class that, at least in India, cynically overturned many of the potential benefits of the Green Revolution,by preventing farmers from leading the GR, instead exploiting these innovative farmers, through middlemen who brokered speculation in grain prices and stockpiling grain instead of feeding the starving. So, blame the pols. and their client middlemen. These pols and middlemen are still causing farmer suicides in many parts of India. Go figure.
My Point #2
Borlaug was a plant geneticist, he was neither a politician nor a political sociologist. Borlaug mistakenly blamed accelerated population growth for the limited success of the Green Revolution. He blamed WE the People, the ordinary beneficiaries of his extraordinary accomplishment. I know I ate better because of Borlaug. Millions did.
Every study conducted in former colonized nation-states, shows that accelerated population growth is mainly the INTERIM (note interim) result of Social Justice indicators -- access to food, water and shelter, better healthcare, ergo freedom from famine, the chance to survive.
If these social goods CONTINUE and become PERMANENT, the rate of population growth will causally go DOWN, not up. Ordinary people are rational maximizers. Species including our own, adapt to survive, If a people's food supply is assured and their social wellbeing is assured, they will have fewer children, not more. It would not make sense to them to threaten their food supply by being prolific at reproduction. This is true from Sweden to Singapore, a fact based on evidence not opinion.
Social Justice impedes runaway population growth. Hunger (which is a core component of social INjustice) accelerates population growth. So, Borlaug was mistaken (though he saw the big picture on social justice) to blame a faster population growth before and during the GR.
Social Justice redistributive policies, (which are the responsibility of government not the obligation of individuals, that is precisely why we have govts) did NOT accompany the GR, hence populations (especially birth rates) continued to increase. More food through the GR, did not end up feeding timely all the people it was intended for.
Social Injustice breeds accelerates birth rates, which are of importance when studying population growth rates.
Don't Blame Borlaug & His Green Revolution.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------------------------------------------------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/business/energy-environment/14borlaug.html
Norman Borlaug, 95, Dies; Led Green Revolution
By JUSTIN GILLIS
A Nobel Peace Prize winner, he developed high-yielding crop varieties that helped to avert famines worldwide.
-----
NYtimes copyright
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/greatest-human-being-rip/?hp
--------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/weekinreview/20martin.html
Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
DINNERTIME Sudanese refugees unload bags of food at a camp in neighboring Chad. The refugees had fled the violence in Darfur.
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By ANDREW MARTIN
Published: September 19, 2009
This past week the world celebrated the life and achievements of Norman Borlaug, the Iowa-born plant scientist who created high-yielding wheat varieties to stave off famine.
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Norman Borlaug, Plant Scientist Who Fought Famine, Dies at 95 (September 14, 2009)
Dr. Borlaug, who died at age 95 on Sept. 12, led the so-called Green Revolution that created bumper crops in once impoverished countries like Mexico, India and Pakistan. In lauding Dr. Borlaug’s achievements, the United Nations’ World Food Program said he had saved more lives than any man in history.
But the eulogies for Dr. Borlaug often neglected an important and perplexing fact. Despite his accomplishments, more people are hungry today than ever and that total should exceed one billion people this year for the first time, according to the United Nations.
How can so many people be hungry when farmers produce enough food, at least in theory, to feed every person on the planet?
The answers are complex and involve everything from American farm politics and African corruption to war, poverty, climate change and drought, which is now the single most common cause of food shortages on the planet.
But David Beckmann, president of the antihunger group Bread for the World, boiled the causes down into one unifying theme — “a lack of give a damn.”
“It’s mainly neglect,” he said. “Political neglect.”
The yield gains of the last half-century, both in the developed and developing world, led to grain surpluses and low prices, creating a sense of complacency about agriculture and hunger.
“There was an attitude following the Green Revolution that the problem was solved,” said Gary H. Toenniessen of the Rockefeller Foundation.
So much grain was being produced so cheaply that Western leaders encouraged poor nations to buy grain on the world market rather than grow it themselves. Surplus was shipped to poor countries as food aid. But that aid system has often been ineffective in alleviating hunger in a timely way and in addressing broader agriculture problems facing impoverished countries. Support for agricultural research in developing countries was also cut back for other priorities. The result? While the food supply grew faster than the world’s population from 1970 to 1990, as the Green Revolution’s gains took hold, the situation has now reversed itself. Productivity gains in agriculture have slowed, and since 1990, the growth rate of food production has fallen below population growth.
The consequences have been particularly dire in sub-Saharan Africa, where the gains of the Green Revolution have been difficult to replicate. Among other problems, irrigation — which was key to the Green Revolution — is relatively scarce in Africa.
Few paid attention to these problems until last year, when a confluence of events caused food prices to spike to record levels. Riots erupted in many nations, and even American consumers felt pinched as prices soared.
Prices have come down in the United States, but the situation in Africa remains dismal due to an exploding population and now, a severe drought that threatens millions. The World Food Program says it is critically short of funds.
At a July summit meeting, President Obama and other leaders of industrialized nations pledged $20 billion for agricultural development in poor countries.
Activists say that some of the tools for success are within reach provided the financing and political will persist: those tools include seeds fine-tuned to local conditions, fertilizer and better roads and other infrastructure improvements.
The more difficult problems may lie within our borders. Farm programs are among the most entrenched entitlements in Washington. But crop subsidies and America’s habit of shipping grain to the poor tends to undermine robust markets in developing countries.
Dr. Borlaug, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, understood well the limitations of the Green Revolution’s success. After receiving the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007, he noted that the “battle to ensure food security for hundreds of millions of miserably poor people is far from won.”
“World peace will not be built on empty stomachs or human misery,” he said. “It is within America’s technical and financial power to help end this human tragedy and injustice, if we set our hearts and minds to the task.”
==================================================================================
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
September 13th, 2009
11:58 am
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/business/energy-environment/14borlaug.html?sort=oldest&offset=1
I am proud that I grew up as a schoolgirl in India knowing who Borlaug was. No, his name did not appear in my grievously irrelevant postcolonial high school curriculum, but in newspapers I read avidly even then.
Borlaug richly deserved his renown. He fed people. I salute Borlaug. He died yesterday in Texas, age 95. Bless him for working untiringly, and without exception, for the Greater Collective Good (GCG).
I quote from your NYTimes article to make 2 related points and assert that both Borlaug and his critics were wrong about the unprecedented Green Revolution ignited throughout the Global South, by him.
Your article states:
"The Green Revolution eventually came under attack from environmental and social critics who said it had created more difficulties than it had solved.
Dr. Borlaug responded that the real problem was not his agricultural techniques, but the runaway population growth that had made them necessary."
My Point #1:
The self-styled "social and environmental critics" were part of the problem. They represented the political class that, at least in India, cynically overturned many of the potential benefits of the Green Revolution,by preventing farmers from leading the GR, instead exploiting these innovative farmers, through middlemen who brokered speculation in grain prices and stockpiling grain instead of feeding the starving. So, blame the pols. and their client middlemen. These pols and middlemen are still causing farmer suicides in many parts of India. Go figure.
My Point #2
Borlaug was a plant geneticist, he was neither a politician nor a political sociologist. Borlaug mistakenly blamed accelerated population growth for the limited success of the Green Revolution. He blamed WE the People, the ordinary beneficiaries of his extraordinary accomplishment. I know I ate better because of Borlaug. Millions did.
Every study conducted in former colonized nation-states, shows that accelerated population growth is mainly the INTERIM (note interim) result of Social Justice indicators -- access to food, water and shelter, better healthcare, ergo freedom from famine, the chance to survive.
If these social goods CONTINUE and become PERMANENT, the rate of population growth will causally go DOWN, not up. Ordinary people are rational maximizers. Species including our own, adapt to survive, If a people's food supply is assured and their social wellbeing is assured, they will have fewer children, not more. It would not make sense to them to threaten their food supply by being prolific at reproduction. This is true from Sweden to Singapore, a fact based on evidence not opinion.
Social Justice impedes runaway population growth. Hunger (which is a core component of social INjustice) accelerates population growth. So, Borlaug was mistaken (though he saw the big picture on social justice) to blame a faster population growth before and during the GR.
Social Justice redistributive policies, (which are the responsibility of government not the obligation of individuals, that is precisely why we have govts) did NOT accompany the GR, hence populations (especially birth rates) continued to increase. More food through the GR, did not end up feeding timely all the people it was intended for.
Social Injustice breeds accelerates birth rates, which are of importance when studying population growth rates.
Don't Blame Borlaug & His Green Revolution.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------------------------------------------------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/business/energy-environment/14borlaug.html
Norman Borlaug, 95, Dies; Led Green Revolution
By JUSTIN GILLIS
A Nobel Peace Prize winner, he developed high-yielding crop varieties that helped to avert famines worldwide.
-----
NYtimes copyright
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/greatest-human-being-rip/?hp
--------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/weekinreview/20martin.html
Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
DINNERTIME Sudanese refugees unload bags of food at a camp in neighboring Chad. The refugees had fled the violence in Darfur.
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Article Tools Sponsored By
By ANDREW MARTIN
Published: September 19, 2009
This past week the world celebrated the life and achievements of Norman Borlaug, the Iowa-born plant scientist who created high-yielding wheat varieties to stave off famine.
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Norman Borlaug, Plant Scientist Who Fought Famine, Dies at 95 (September 14, 2009)
Dr. Borlaug, who died at age 95 on Sept. 12, led the so-called Green Revolution that created bumper crops in once impoverished countries like Mexico, India and Pakistan. In lauding Dr. Borlaug’s achievements, the United Nations’ World Food Program said he had saved more lives than any man in history.
But the eulogies for Dr. Borlaug often neglected an important and perplexing fact. Despite his accomplishments, more people are hungry today than ever and that total should exceed one billion people this year for the first time, according to the United Nations.
How can so many people be hungry when farmers produce enough food, at least in theory, to feed every person on the planet?
The answers are complex and involve everything from American farm politics and African corruption to war, poverty, climate change and drought, which is now the single most common cause of food shortages on the planet.
But David Beckmann, president of the antihunger group Bread for the World, boiled the causes down into one unifying theme — “a lack of give a damn.”
“It’s mainly neglect,” he said. “Political neglect.”
The yield gains of the last half-century, both in the developed and developing world, led to grain surpluses and low prices, creating a sense of complacency about agriculture and hunger.
“There was an attitude following the Green Revolution that the problem was solved,” said Gary H. Toenniessen of the Rockefeller Foundation.
So much grain was being produced so cheaply that Western leaders encouraged poor nations to buy grain on the world market rather than grow it themselves. Surplus was shipped to poor countries as food aid. But that aid system has often been ineffective in alleviating hunger in a timely way and in addressing broader agriculture problems facing impoverished countries. Support for agricultural research in developing countries was also cut back for other priorities. The result? While the food supply grew faster than the world’s population from 1970 to 1990, as the Green Revolution’s gains took hold, the situation has now reversed itself. Productivity gains in agriculture have slowed, and since 1990, the growth rate of food production has fallen below population growth.
The consequences have been particularly dire in sub-Saharan Africa, where the gains of the Green Revolution have been difficult to replicate. Among other problems, irrigation — which was key to the Green Revolution — is relatively scarce in Africa.
Few paid attention to these problems until last year, when a confluence of events caused food prices to spike to record levels. Riots erupted in many nations, and even American consumers felt pinched as prices soared.
Prices have come down in the United States, but the situation in Africa remains dismal due to an exploding population and now, a severe drought that threatens millions. The World Food Program says it is critically short of funds.
At a July summit meeting, President Obama and other leaders of industrialized nations pledged $20 billion for agricultural development in poor countries.
Activists say that some of the tools for success are within reach provided the financing and political will persist: those tools include seeds fine-tuned to local conditions, fertilizer and better roads and other infrastructure improvements.
The more difficult problems may lie within our borders. Farm programs are among the most entrenched entitlements in Washington. But crop subsidies and America’s habit of shipping grain to the poor tends to undermine robust markets in developing countries.
Dr. Borlaug, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, understood well the limitations of the Green Revolution’s success. After receiving the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007, he noted that the “battle to ensure food security for hundreds of millions of miserably poor people is far from won.”
“World peace will not be built on empty stomachs or human misery,” he said. “It is within America’s technical and financial power to help end this human tragedy and injustice, if we set our hearts and minds to the task.”
==================================================================================
A Grievious Wrong Wrought By The Brits
A Grievious Wrong Wrought By The Brits
The India-Pakistan Divide, the India-Pakistan-Bangladesh Divide, the Kashmir Accession, the Afghanistan Impasse, were 300 years in the making. It took a lot of doing.
The people of South Asia have inherited the Imperial Project. They have yet to move their leaders to dismantle and overturn the ideology and practice of that imperial Project. It took the British (and lesser colonial powers) that long, 300+ years, in days, months and years, in decades and centuries, to robustly execute their Oppress-Exploit-Divide-Rule strategy. This strategy is in stark evidence today throughout the Global South, Angola to Zimbabwe, Indonesia to Iran, Singapore to Seychelles.
Lest we forget, we in South Asia are still playing out that strategy in 2009, with real oppressors on the ground or in the air, and imagined enemies among our very own sisters, brothers and cousins. The Great South Asian Family Quarrel has transposed itself onto the emergent struggling nation-state, carefully fractured by our departing Brit masters. Pesky relatives believe the malicious gossip and decide to walk out of the door while tea is being poured and sweets are being distributed. The taste in our mouths is bitter, watered by tears over the days of bloody parting.
We ourselves have become master performers of that cynical strategy of our erstwhile masters. Ironically we have ourselves mastered that strategy, added new rules and regulations. We oppress each other. Our families have turned on their own members. So it is today in our region, South Asia.
So it will continue -- unless we reflect and return to ourselves, our deeper collective selves.
more...
The India-Pakistan Divide, the India-Pakistan-Bangladesh Divide, the Kashmir Accession, the Afghanistan Impasse, were 300 years in the making. It took a lot of doing.
The people of South Asia have inherited the Imperial Project. They have yet to move their leaders to dismantle and overturn the ideology and practice of that imperial Project. It took the British (and lesser colonial powers) that long, 300+ years, in days, months and years, in decades and centuries, to robustly execute their Oppress-Exploit-Divide-Rule strategy. This strategy is in stark evidence today throughout the Global South, Angola to Zimbabwe, Indonesia to Iran, Singapore to Seychelles.
Lest we forget, we in South Asia are still playing out that strategy in 2009, with real oppressors on the ground or in the air, and imagined enemies among our very own sisters, brothers and cousins. The Great South Asian Family Quarrel has transposed itself onto the emergent struggling nation-state, carefully fractured by our departing Brit masters. Pesky relatives believe the malicious gossip and decide to walk out of the door while tea is being poured and sweets are being distributed. The taste in our mouths is bitter, watered by tears over the days of bloody parting.
We ourselves have become master performers of that cynical strategy of our erstwhile masters. Ironically we have ourselves mastered that strategy, added new rules and regulations. We oppress each other. Our families have turned on their own members. So it is today in our region, South Asia.
So it will continue -- unless we reflect and return to ourselves, our deeper collective selves.
more...
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Bloody Crossroads or Public Square?
Comment #59
NYTimes
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
September 8th, 2009
10:09 am
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
September 8th, 2009
5:30 am
David Brooks asks his own question:
" But how does government alter culture?" in reference to an article in the new magazine National Affairs that Brooks is showcasing in his Opinion piece today.
Fortunately, no narrowly self-defined set of intellectuals writing safely in a magazine can substantively shape a running cultural narrative in the streets, where Democracy lives (or dies).
It's not what you call the "Bloody Crossoards" that We the People seek, but the Public Square where Hearts and Minds can meet, not always amicably, but meet neveretheless.
US Culture of WE the People lives, albeit gasping now -- both geopolitically and fiscally.
Can we instead reverse Brooks' question and ask "How can Culture alter Government?"
Culture is the expanding totality of divergent, distributed, meaningful symbols, held and performed by a people, occupying a particular space, over a considerable period of time.
Assuredly, there are shifts of emphases in these divergent meaningful symbols in space over time -- freedom, liberty, happiness, dominance, violence, war, poverty, wealth, family, faith, state.
The US govt has consistently failed to listen to US Culture. The US Govt. has failed to hear its very own people as they experienced significant cultural shifts -- the 1900's and slavery, the 60's and Vietnam , for example. Equally, the US govt. has failed to keep its ear to the ground to hear cultural messages spoken in other voices, as also at home, in its continuing depredations around the globe.
The diverse, dynamic and vibrant culture of We the People can and must alter the US government, not the other way around.
Let us see if the culture of We the People will trump govt on healthcare and in Afghanistan, for a start.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------------------------------------
New York Times copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/opinion/08brooks.html
The Bloody Crossroads
By DAVID BROOKS
A new quarterly magazine called National Affairs occupies the bloody crossroads where social science and public policy meet matters of morality, culture and virtue.
NYTimes
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
September 8th, 2009
10:09 am
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
September 8th, 2009
5:30 am
David Brooks asks his own question:
" But how does government alter culture?" in reference to an article in the new magazine National Affairs that Brooks is showcasing in his Opinion piece today.
Fortunately, no narrowly self-defined set of intellectuals writing safely in a magazine can substantively shape a running cultural narrative in the streets, where Democracy lives (or dies).
It's not what you call the "Bloody Crossoards" that We the People seek, but the Public Square where Hearts and Minds can meet, not always amicably, but meet neveretheless.
US Culture of WE the People lives, albeit gasping now -- both geopolitically and fiscally.
Can we instead reverse Brooks' question and ask "How can Culture alter Government?"
Culture is the expanding totality of divergent, distributed, meaningful symbols, held and performed by a people, occupying a particular space, over a considerable period of time.
Assuredly, there are shifts of emphases in these divergent meaningful symbols in space over time -- freedom, liberty, happiness, dominance, violence, war, poverty, wealth, family, faith, state.
The US govt has consistently failed to listen to US Culture. The US Govt. has failed to hear its very own people as they experienced significant cultural shifts -- the 1900's and slavery, the 60's and Vietnam , for example. Equally, the US govt. has failed to keep its ear to the ground to hear cultural messages spoken in other voices, as also at home, in its continuing depredations around the globe.
The diverse, dynamic and vibrant culture of We the People can and must alter the US government, not the other way around.
Let us see if the culture of We the People will trump govt on healthcare and in Afghanistan, for a start.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------------------------------------
New York Times copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/opinion/08brooks.html
The Bloody Crossroads
By DAVID BROOKS
A new quarterly magazine called National Affairs occupies the bloody crossroads where social science and public policy meet matters of morality, culture and virtue.
Monday, September 7, 2009
UNESCO Deserves An Authentic PROVEN Leader, not a HATER
Comment #26.
New York Times
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
September 7th, 2009
9:23 am
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
September 7th, 2009
4:23 am
Quoting [my emphasis added] from Roger Cohen's valuable expose article on Farouk Hosny, Egypt's Culture Minister:
Questioned in Parliament [last year] about the presence of Israeli books in the Alexandria Library, the minister replied: “Let’s burn these books. If there are any, I will burn them myself before you.”
Did the devil make Hosny say it? Hosny blabbed himself into being unfit to head UNESCO. He has only himself to blame. Hosny is accountable for what he says. He said what he said, just last year.
Wowie, Hosny, what made you change your mind? Cheap ambition?
Now Hosny wants the plum, prestigious (hey I want it too, Farouk, doesn't mean I'll get it) UNESCO job, so he's disavowing his assertions before Egypt's Parliament, that is supposed to represent the PEOPLE of Egypt. Disavowal comes easy to a person from an intolerant, non-secular, religious and political culture in which blasphemy is a central tenet.
Worse, Hosny said it in Parliament, Farouk Hosny chose to lie to his own people, THE PEOPLE of Egypt. Should he then be given the opportunity to lie to all the peoples of the member-states that constitute UNESCO. Why?
This guy is even worse than Van Jones, Obama's green man, who rightly lost his job this week, even though he conveniently ate his incendiary words about the Bush administration's direct involvement in 9/11.
Farouk Hosny should get the Van Jones treatment and be booted out, not elevated. Hosny is a hater.
Hosny deserves to lose his present job as Egypt's C[Vulture] Minister, not promoted to head UNESCO. That would be an illustration of the Peter Principle in action.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------------------------------------
New York Times copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/opinion/07iht-edcohen.html
An Egyptian for UNESCO
By ROGER COHEN
Talk of naming Egypt’s culture minister, Farouk Hosny, to head Unesco raises issues of Arab prejudice and cultural bridge-building.
=====================================================================================
New York Times
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
September 7th, 2009
9:23 am
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
September 7th, 2009
4:23 am
Quoting [my emphasis added] from Roger Cohen's valuable expose article on Farouk Hosny, Egypt's Culture Minister:
Questioned in Parliament [last year] about the presence of Israeli books in the Alexandria Library, the minister replied: “Let’s burn these books. If there are any, I will burn them myself before you.”
Did the devil make Hosny say it? Hosny blabbed himself into being unfit to head UNESCO. He has only himself to blame. Hosny is accountable for what he says. He said what he said, just last year.
Wowie, Hosny, what made you change your mind? Cheap ambition?
Now Hosny wants the plum, prestigious (hey I want it too, Farouk, doesn't mean I'll get it) UNESCO job, so he's disavowing his assertions before Egypt's Parliament, that is supposed to represent the PEOPLE of Egypt. Disavowal comes easy to a person from an intolerant, non-secular, religious and political culture in which blasphemy is a central tenet.
Worse, Hosny said it in Parliament, Farouk Hosny chose to lie to his own people, THE PEOPLE of Egypt. Should he then be given the opportunity to lie to all the peoples of the member-states that constitute UNESCO. Why?
This guy is even worse than Van Jones, Obama's green man, who rightly lost his job this week, even though he conveniently ate his incendiary words about the Bush administration's direct involvement in 9/11.
Farouk Hosny should get the Van Jones treatment and be booted out, not elevated. Hosny is a hater.
Hosny deserves to lose his present job as Egypt's C[Vulture] Minister, not promoted to head UNESCO. That would be an illustration of the Peter Principle in action.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------------------------------------
New York Times copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/opinion/07iht-edcohen.html
An Egyptian for UNESCO
By ROGER COHEN
Talk of naming Egypt’s culture minister, Farouk Hosny, to head Unesco raises issues of Arab prejudice and cultural bridge-building.
=====================================================================================
Sunday, September 6, 2009
India a Democracy not a Feudal Theocracy
In India WOMEN and MEN have EQUAL rights. Period. End of story.
NO religious interpretation, or assertion, or belief ,can supersede the CORE guarantee of India's Constitution that women and men are EQUAL in the eyes of the law. That equality must be upheld by the apex court and ALL courts within India's judicial system.
Any woman can UNILATERALLY divorce her husband, under Indian constitutional law, if she so chooses. She can also unilaterally marry him without the permission of religious patriarchal authorities, her father, her uncle, her male goat, or whoever.
Patriarchal Religious extremists -- Go live in Saudi Arabia or go inhabit The South Pole, if you cannot follow India's constitution. Your citizenship in India carries rights as well as responsibilities. Citizenship does not come cheap. Your male patriarchal citizenship does not come at the expense of women. Your voting rights in a Democracy demands your compliance with Indian constitutional law. You do not have superior rights, just EQUAL rights. Same as women.
The all-MALE shariat court's decision (see link below) has absolutely no force in law, is cowardly and just plain illegal, and it should be appealed by the woman whose divorce was set aide by the shariat court.
The Indian nation-state and women advocates must protect this woman's life against male patriarchal violence and help her receive justice through the Rule of Law of courts of the Indian judicial system.
Women and Men are equal before the law in India, from cradle to grave.
Chithra Karunakaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
---------------------------------------------
http://www.garhwalpost.com/index.php?mod=article&cat=Saharanpur&article=1994
Garhwal Post copyright
Muslim clerics support court decision on divorce
Thursday, 13.08.2009, 11:43am (GMT+5.5)
By PRASHANT P SINGH
SAHARANPUR, 12 AUG: Several clerics at the renowned Islamic seminary Darul Uloom unanimously have upheld the decree given by a shariat court in Muzaffarnagar, where a husband, Shafiqullah, from Aligarh filed a lawsuit against his divorce saying that his wife forced him to sign on their divorce papers. The court annulled the divorce saying that Islam didn’t authenticate any divorce in which a wife pressurised her husband to sign divorce papers. All the fatwa Ulema supported the decision as fully justified.
Ustad Mufti Arif said to Garhwal Post that a woman in Islam wasn’t given any right to unilateral divorce. “The right is bestowed only on man. If a woman pressurises her husband to tender divorce, it would become null and void. It becomes ultra vires for the court as shariat recognises it as God’s will,” he added.
Nazim-ul-Wali, who heads the famous All India Al Quran Foundation, described divorce as Darul Qaza, which signifies that the matter goes beyond the jurisdiction of any man-made court. “Islam doesn’t give the right to wives to divorce their husbands. “Anything that coercively promotes a husband to divorce his wife is haram (sacrilege) in Shariat. Divorce is only admissible if husband allows it with mutual consent,” he added.
The judgment is likely to have serious repercussions as mutual consent is not appropriately defined by the clerics. People are likely to use it in the exploitation of women, added a lawyer on terms of anonymity.
NO religious interpretation, or assertion, or belief ,can supersede the CORE guarantee of India's Constitution that women and men are EQUAL in the eyes of the law. That equality must be upheld by the apex court and ALL courts within India's judicial system.
Any woman can UNILATERALLY divorce her husband, under Indian constitutional law, if she so chooses. She can also unilaterally marry him without the permission of religious patriarchal authorities, her father, her uncle, her male goat, or whoever.
Patriarchal Religious extremists -- Go live in Saudi Arabia or go inhabit The South Pole, if you cannot follow India's constitution. Your citizenship in India carries rights as well as responsibilities. Citizenship does not come cheap. Your male patriarchal citizenship does not come at the expense of women. Your voting rights in a Democracy demands your compliance with Indian constitutional law. You do not have superior rights, just EQUAL rights. Same as women.
The all-MALE shariat court's decision (see link below) has absolutely no force in law, is cowardly and just plain illegal, and it should be appealed by the woman whose divorce was set aide by the shariat court.
The Indian nation-state and women advocates must protect this woman's life against male patriarchal violence and help her receive justice through the Rule of Law of courts of the Indian judicial system.
Women and Men are equal before the law in India, from cradle to grave.
Chithra Karunakaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
---------------------------------------------
http://www.garhwalpost.com/index.php?mod=article&cat=Saharanpur&article=1994
Garhwal Post copyright
Muslim clerics support court decision on divorce
Thursday, 13.08.2009, 11:43am (GMT+5.5)
By PRASHANT P SINGH
SAHARANPUR, 12 AUG: Several clerics at the renowned Islamic seminary Darul Uloom unanimously have upheld the decree given by a shariat court in Muzaffarnagar, where a husband, Shafiqullah, from Aligarh filed a lawsuit against his divorce saying that his wife forced him to sign on their divorce papers. The court annulled the divorce saying that Islam didn’t authenticate any divorce in which a wife pressurised her husband to sign divorce papers. All the fatwa Ulema supported the decision as fully justified.
Ustad Mufti Arif said to Garhwal Post that a woman in Islam wasn’t given any right to unilateral divorce. “The right is bestowed only on man. If a woman pressurises her husband to tender divorce, it would become null and void. It becomes ultra vires for the court as shariat recognises it as God’s will,” he added.
Nazim-ul-Wali, who heads the famous All India Al Quran Foundation, described divorce as Darul Qaza, which signifies that the matter goes beyond the jurisdiction of any man-made court. “Islam doesn’t give the right to wives to divorce their husbands. “Anything that coercively promotes a husband to divorce his wife is haram (sacrilege) in Shariat. Divorce is only admissible if husband allows it with mutual consent,” he added.
The judgment is likely to have serious repercussions as mutual consent is not appropriately defined by the clerics. People are likely to use it in the exploitation of women, added a lawyer on terms of anonymity.
US, US-led NATO Presence in South Asia is the CORE Problem
NYTimes Comment #247.
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
September 6th, 2009
12:22 pm
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
September 6th, 2009
10:16 am
US Presence is the Core Problem
Quoting from the NYT article:
“Our policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in the Pashtun areas is the problem,”
That's the crux of the problem. The US and US-led NATO are not welcome in Afghanistan. You strike us and you strike out. (see Also AP story below of US and NATO storming a hospital run by a Swedish charity)
I'm sitting 2000 miles away in the deep south of India and guess what -- I and tens of thousands of Indians feel the same way as your quote above. So do my friends in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
South Asian nation-states are perfectly capable of working together to solve their local, national and regional problems.
US and NATO have no right or excuse to be in South Asia. Being here is a neo-imperial lose-lose strategy, a defeat the size of Vietnam for Obama.
The US has long been a state sponsor of Terror in our region. The US runs a highly profitable Weapons & Terror Complex in our South Asia region, reaping billions from armaments and drugs, while sowing death, destruction -- and inviting justified retaliation.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthcialDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/opinion/06kristof.html
The Afghanistan Abyss
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Sending more American troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban.
------------------
Associated Press copyright
Charity: US troops stormed through Afghan hospital
09/07/2009 3:24:32 AM
By KAY JOHNSON Associated Press Writer
A Swedish charity accused American troops Monday of storming through a hospital in central Afghanistan, breaking down doors and tying up staff in a search for militants. The U.S. military said it was investigating.
The allegation that soldiers violated the neutrality of a medical facility follows the reported deaths of Afghan civilians in a U.S. airstrike in the country's north last week. An Afghan human rights group said Monday the strike on two hijacked fuel tankers may have killed as many as 70 civilians in Kunduz province.
Civilian deaths and intrusive searches have bred resentment among the Afghan population nearly eight years after the U.S.-led coalition invaded to oust the Taliban's hard-line Islamist regime for sheltering al-Qaida terrorist leaders.
Foreign forces are working to persuade the population to support the Afghan government after last month's presidential election, which has yet to be decided amid allegations of vote-rigging.
On Monday, the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan said the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division entered the charity's hospital without permission to look for insurgents in Wardak province, southwest of Kabul.
"This is simply not acceptable," said Anders Fange, the charity's country director.
The U.S. troops came to the hospital looking for Taliban insurgents late at night last Wednesday. Fange said they kicked in doors, tied up four hospital employees and two family members of patients, and forced patients out of beds during their search.
When they left two hours later, the unit ordered hospital staff to inform coalition forces if any wounded militants were admitted, and the military would decide if they could be treated, Fange said.
The staff refused, he said. "That would put our staff at risk and make the hospital a target."
The charity said on its Web site that the troops' actions were not only a violation of humanitarian principles but also went against an agreement between NATO forces and charities working in the area.
"We demand guarantees ... that such violations will not be repeated and that this is made clear to commanders in the field," a statement said.
U.S. military spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker confirmed that the hospital was searched last week but had no other details. She said the military was looking into the incident.
"We are investigating and we take allegations like this seriously," she said. "Complaints like this are rare."
Violence has surged across much of Afghanistan since President Barack Obama ordered 21,000 more U.S. troops to the country this year. Two foreign troops were killed Sunday when their patrol hit a roadside bomb in the country's south, NATO said without giving their nationalities.
NATO was also investigating last week's U.S. airstrike. The strike came despite new rules for foreign forces limiting use of airpower to avoid civilian casualties.
The provincial government said most of the dead were militants, but on Monday, the Afghan Rights Monitor said interviews with 15 villagers indicate that only a dozen gunmen died and 60-70 villagers were killed. The group called for further investigations.
"Even if all the victims were supporters of the Taliban, the fact that most of them were unarmed and were not engaged in any combat activity does not warrant their mass killing," said Ajmal Samadi, the rights group's director.
A spokesman for the provincial government, Ahmad Sami Yawar, said Monday that only five of the estimated 70 killed were civilians.
The increasingly violent insurgents have killed more civilians in bombings and other attacks. On Monday, the government said three militant rockets landed overnight in the capital, Kabul, hitting a house and killing three people. In central Uruzgan province, a remote-controlled bomb targeting a police vehicle exploded in a busy market, killing two children and wounding 16 other people, according to local police official Gulab Khan.
A United Nations report in July said the number of civilians killed in conflict in Afghanistan has jumped 24 percent this year, with bombings by insurgents and airstrikes by international forces the biggest killers. The report said 1,013 civilians were killed in the first half of 2009, 59 percent in insurgent attacks and 30.5 percent by foreign and Afghan government forces. The rest were undetermined.
___
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/world/asia/08kabul.html?ref=global-home
Associated Press Writer Rahim Faiez in Kabul contributed to this report.
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
September 6th, 2009
12:22 pm
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
September 6th, 2009
10:16 am
US Presence is the Core Problem
Quoting from the NYT article:
“Our policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in the Pashtun areas is the problem,”
That's the crux of the problem. The US and US-led NATO are not welcome in Afghanistan. You strike us and you strike out. (see Also AP story below of US and NATO storming a hospital run by a Swedish charity)
I'm sitting 2000 miles away in the deep south of India and guess what -- I and tens of thousands of Indians feel the same way as your quote above. So do my friends in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
South Asian nation-states are perfectly capable of working together to solve their local, national and regional problems.
US and NATO have no right or excuse to be in South Asia. Being here is a neo-imperial lose-lose strategy, a defeat the size of Vietnam for Obama.
The US has long been a state sponsor of Terror in our region. The US runs a highly profitable Weapons & Terror Complex in our South Asia region, reaping billions from armaments and drugs, while sowing death, destruction -- and inviting justified retaliation.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthcialDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/opinion/06kristof.html
The Afghanistan Abyss
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Sending more American troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban.
------------------
Associated Press copyright
Charity: US troops stormed through Afghan hospital
09/07/2009 3:24:32 AM
By KAY JOHNSON Associated Press Writer
A Swedish charity accused American troops Monday of storming through a hospital in central Afghanistan, breaking down doors and tying up staff in a search for militants. The U.S. military said it was investigating.
The allegation that soldiers violated the neutrality of a medical facility follows the reported deaths of Afghan civilians in a U.S. airstrike in the country's north last week. An Afghan human rights group said Monday the strike on two hijacked fuel tankers may have killed as many as 70 civilians in Kunduz province.
Civilian deaths and intrusive searches have bred resentment among the Afghan population nearly eight years after the U.S.-led coalition invaded to oust the Taliban's hard-line Islamist regime for sheltering al-Qaida terrorist leaders.
Foreign forces are working to persuade the population to support the Afghan government after last month's presidential election, which has yet to be decided amid allegations of vote-rigging.
On Monday, the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan said the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division entered the charity's hospital without permission to look for insurgents in Wardak province, southwest of Kabul.
"This is simply not acceptable," said Anders Fange, the charity's country director.
The U.S. troops came to the hospital looking for Taliban insurgents late at night last Wednesday. Fange said they kicked in doors, tied up four hospital employees and two family members of patients, and forced patients out of beds during their search.
When they left two hours later, the unit ordered hospital staff to inform coalition forces if any wounded militants were admitted, and the military would decide if they could be treated, Fange said.
The staff refused, he said. "That would put our staff at risk and make the hospital a target."
The charity said on its Web site that the troops' actions were not only a violation of humanitarian principles but also went against an agreement between NATO forces and charities working in the area.
"We demand guarantees ... that such violations will not be repeated and that this is made clear to commanders in the field," a statement said.
U.S. military spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker confirmed that the hospital was searched last week but had no other details. She said the military was looking into the incident.
"We are investigating and we take allegations like this seriously," she said. "Complaints like this are rare."
Violence has surged across much of Afghanistan since President Barack Obama ordered 21,000 more U.S. troops to the country this year. Two foreign troops were killed Sunday when their patrol hit a roadside bomb in the country's south, NATO said without giving their nationalities.
NATO was also investigating last week's U.S. airstrike. The strike came despite new rules for foreign forces limiting use of airpower to avoid civilian casualties.
The provincial government said most of the dead were militants, but on Monday, the Afghan Rights Monitor said interviews with 15 villagers indicate that only a dozen gunmen died and 60-70 villagers were killed. The group called for further investigations.
"Even if all the victims were supporters of the Taliban, the fact that most of them were unarmed and were not engaged in any combat activity does not warrant their mass killing," said Ajmal Samadi, the rights group's director.
A spokesman for the provincial government, Ahmad Sami Yawar, said Monday that only five of the estimated 70 killed were civilians.
The increasingly violent insurgents have killed more civilians in bombings and other attacks. On Monday, the government said three militant rockets landed overnight in the capital, Kabul, hitting a house and killing three people. In central Uruzgan province, a remote-controlled bomb targeting a police vehicle exploded in a busy market, killing two children and wounding 16 other people, according to local police official Gulab Khan.
A United Nations report in July said the number of civilians killed in conflict in Afghanistan has jumped 24 percent this year, with bombings by insurgents and airstrikes by international forces the biggest killers. The report said 1,013 civilians were killed in the first half of 2009, 59 percent in insurgent attacks and 30.5 percent by foreign and Afghan government forces. The rest were undetermined.
___
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/world/asia/08kabul.html?ref=global-home
Associated Press Writer Rahim Faiez in Kabul contributed to this report.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
India's Farmers TLTL -- Too Little Too Late
EthicalDemocracy
New York, NY
September 5th, 2009
7:32 am
Comment #17
New York Times
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
September 5th, 2009
10:13 am
India TLTL -- Too Little Too Late
I have just returned to my teaching job in New York after three months conducting research in India. I traveled by bus and second class sleeper coaches on the Indian Railways and State buses, from Kerala to Kashmir, as I do twice a year, every year.
Caste-driven Psychopath as Finance Minister:Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee's statement, (see his quote in NYTimes link below), is criminally irresponsible). This is the same political psychopath who, during this Monsoon Session of the Lok Sabha said \"In order to distribute wealth in India, we must first create it.\"
Mukherjee and his family undoubtedly eat at least three meals a day, grown mainly by India's impoverished, marginalized, landless sharecroppers.
Mukherjee represents that dominant pervasive caste ideology (he is a Brahmin) that derails at every step, any radical-progressive path to social justice for the poorest, most vulnerable, most hardworking Indians.
Cheating Our Farmers: Our Indian farmers, among our poorest, get virtually no assistance, in the form of usable, timely, inputs and price supports, from India's caste-driven political elites in govt. Suicides have long been disproportionately prevalent among our farmers.
Caste Mindset Foments Inequality: Systemic Casteness, the root cause of India's entrenched socio-economic inequality, is pervasive throughout India, despite vigorous denial of this incontrovertible fact everywhere in India.
No Water/Food Security Policy: India does not have a national enforceable policy of rainwater harvesting. All of Kerala's abundant monsoon, for example, runs off into the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, after watering family fields.
Instead, that monsoon runoff in Kerala could become groundwater for the entire Southern grid. India has no fully articulated, benchmarked, accountability-driven, PRO-POOR food security or water security policy. India needs to speedily develop and enforce a water security policy in which unused monsoon rains become groundwater. Failure to conserve water must become a criminal offence, starting with our criminally negligent netas, both politicians and civil service bureaucrats with their guaranteed lifetime jobs.
Caste, Corruption, Apathy: Caste ideology combines with corruption-ridden, feudal and postcolonial dependency mindsets, to deliver a vast middleclass and dominant-caste apathy towards the masses of the poor. This caste ideology is so powerful that it has shown itself to be capable of recruiting across the social spectrum -- example, self-styled Dalit-ki-beti Mayawati of Uttar Pradesh who recently developed delusions of dominant-caste grandeur and wasted millions of taxpayer rupees to construct statues of herself across her state which leads in illiteracy, hunger and unemployment. That's caste performance and it punishes the poorest.
This blighted mindset makes it almost impossible to address food/water security issues using effective practical, commonsense strategies
The Drought/Flood Industry: Let's take India's desperate water insecurity. To be sure, there are monsoon shortfalls. But abundant monsoon years are not seen as periods of water conservation. Instead, heavy monsoons are bemoaned as floods, period of havoc and destruction. There is no concerted national policy fostering local community initiatives to dig wells and channels, sink borewells and distribute pumpsets, in anticipation of flood years.
Q.What makes a district droughted or flooded? Poor conservation, monoculture, loss of topsoil, reckless clearing of forest and tree cover. Droughts (and floods) for the most part are not naturally occurring events, not acts of nature, but the direct consequence of poor conservation, extraction, exploitation. Ideology becomes practice.
India therefore is not that much-touted India Inc. -- but India TLTL. Too Little Too Late. It's an ongoing tragedy.
Our unprecedented, deeply flawed democracy can and must do more for our most disadvantaged. Now not later.
Chithra Karunakaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-----------------------------------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/world/asia/05drought.html
Drought Puts Focus on a Side of India Left Out of ProgressBack to Article »
By JIM YARDLEY
The crisis has underscored the problems facing Indian agriculture as the population expands at the same time that water resources come under greater pressure.
=====================================================================================
New York, NY
September 5th, 2009
7:32 am
Comment #17
New York Times
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
September 5th, 2009
10:13 am
India TLTL -- Too Little Too Late
I have just returned to my teaching job in New York after three months conducting research in India. I traveled by bus and second class sleeper coaches on the Indian Railways and State buses, from Kerala to Kashmir, as I do twice a year, every year.
Caste-driven Psychopath as Finance Minister:Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee's statement, (see his quote in NYTimes link below), is criminally irresponsible). This is the same political psychopath who, during this Monsoon Session of the Lok Sabha said \"In order to distribute wealth in India, we must first create it.\"
Mukherjee and his family undoubtedly eat at least three meals a day, grown mainly by India's impoverished, marginalized, landless sharecroppers.
Mukherjee represents that dominant pervasive caste ideology (he is a Brahmin) that derails at every step, any radical-progressive path to social justice for the poorest, most vulnerable, most hardworking Indians.
Cheating Our Farmers: Our Indian farmers, among our poorest, get virtually no assistance, in the form of usable, timely, inputs and price supports, from India's caste-driven political elites in govt. Suicides have long been disproportionately prevalent among our farmers.
Caste Mindset Foments Inequality: Systemic Casteness, the root cause of India's entrenched socio-economic inequality, is pervasive throughout India, despite vigorous denial of this incontrovertible fact everywhere in India.
No Water/Food Security Policy: India does not have a national enforceable policy of rainwater harvesting. All of Kerala's abundant monsoon, for example, runs off into the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, after watering family fields.
Instead, that monsoon runoff in Kerala could become groundwater for the entire Southern grid. India has no fully articulated, benchmarked, accountability-driven, PRO-POOR food security or water security policy. India needs to speedily develop and enforce a water security policy in which unused monsoon rains become groundwater. Failure to conserve water must become a criminal offence, starting with our criminally negligent netas, both politicians and civil service bureaucrats with their guaranteed lifetime jobs.
Caste, Corruption, Apathy: Caste ideology combines with corruption-ridden, feudal and postcolonial dependency mindsets, to deliver a vast middleclass and dominant-caste apathy towards the masses of the poor. This caste ideology is so powerful that it has shown itself to be capable of recruiting across the social spectrum -- example, self-styled Dalit-ki-beti Mayawati of Uttar Pradesh who recently developed delusions of dominant-caste grandeur and wasted millions of taxpayer rupees to construct statues of herself across her state which leads in illiteracy, hunger and unemployment. That's caste performance and it punishes the poorest.
This blighted mindset makes it almost impossible to address food/water security issues using effective practical, commonsense strategies
The Drought/Flood Industry: Let's take India's desperate water insecurity. To be sure, there are monsoon shortfalls. But abundant monsoon years are not seen as periods of water conservation. Instead, heavy monsoons are bemoaned as floods, period of havoc and destruction. There is no concerted national policy fostering local community initiatives to dig wells and channels, sink borewells and distribute pumpsets, in anticipation of flood years.
Q.What makes a district droughted or flooded? Poor conservation, monoculture, loss of topsoil, reckless clearing of forest and tree cover. Droughts (and floods) for the most part are not naturally occurring events, not acts of nature, but the direct consequence of poor conservation, extraction, exploitation. Ideology becomes practice.
India therefore is not that much-touted India Inc. -- but India TLTL. Too Little Too Late. It's an ongoing tragedy.
Our unprecedented, deeply flawed democracy can and must do more for our most disadvantaged. Now not later.
Chithra Karunakaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-----------------------------------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/world/asia/05drought.html
Drought Puts Focus on a Side of India Left Out of ProgressBack to Article »
By JIM YARDLEY
The crisis has underscored the problems facing Indian agriculture as the population expands at the same time that water resources come under greater pressure.
=====================================================================================
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Boneheaded RNC Sets Up Obama to Fail in Diplomacy in South Asia
Comment #133.
New York Times
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
September 3rd, 2009
12:27 pm
The strategy of the faux patriots among the self-ascribed national security hawks in the Republican Party, is to ensure Obama fails in his diplomatic efforts in the South Asia region.
By ratcheting up their calls for increasing militarization, rather than diplomacy, in Afghanistan, the Republican National Committee and leading Republican members in the US Congress, hope to set up and ambush Obama , divide the Democrats, deflect the Congress from urgent and attainable domestic policy goals of universal healthcare and jobs, and instead, hand the U.S.President a spectacular failure, the size of Vietnam.
That's the RNC/GOP's only hope of turning Obama into a one-term President at the polls in 2012.
If Obama goes with the ethically and politically bankrupt RNC/GOP, drones on in protracted and deadly fashion in Afghanistan, then Obama fully deserves to be a one-term Prez.
I would then regret I voted for him. I hope not to have that regret.
Comment # 32
New York Times
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
September 3rd, 2009
0:45 am
The strategy of the faux patriots among the self-ascribed national security hawks in the Republican Party, is to ensure Obama fails in his diplomatic efforts in the South Asia region.
By ratcheting up their calls for increasing militarization, rather than diplomacy, in Afghanistan, the Republican National Committee and leading Republican members in the US Congress, hope to set up and ambush Obama , divide the Democrats, deflect the Congress from urgent and attainable domestic policy goals of universal healthcare and jobs, and instead, hand the U.S.President a spectacular failure, the size of Vietnam.
That's the RNC/GOP's only hope of turning Obama into a one-term President at the polls in 2012.
If Obama goes with the ethically and politically bankrupt RNC/GOP, drones on in protracted and deadly fashion in Afghanistan, then Obama fully deserves to be a one-term Prez.
I would then regret I voted for him. I hope not to have that regret.
It's not all about US interests all the time, everywhere.
No nation-state has done more damage to the South Asia region for the past 55 years, than the US.
Time to get out, USA, especially if the bone-headed, ethically bankrupt RNC insists you stay.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------
NYTimes copyright
G.O.P. May Be Vital to Obama on Afghan War
By HELENE COOPER
Congressional Democrats are reporting disenchantment among constituents with a long Afghanistan conflict.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/world/asia/03policy.html?hp
New York Times
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
September 3rd, 2009
12:27 pm
The strategy of the faux patriots among the self-ascribed national security hawks in the Republican Party, is to ensure Obama fails in his diplomatic efforts in the South Asia region.
By ratcheting up their calls for increasing militarization, rather than diplomacy, in Afghanistan, the Republican National Committee and leading Republican members in the US Congress, hope to set up and ambush Obama , divide the Democrats, deflect the Congress from urgent and attainable domestic policy goals of universal healthcare and jobs, and instead, hand the U.S.President a spectacular failure, the size of Vietnam.
That's the RNC/GOP's only hope of turning Obama into a one-term President at the polls in 2012.
If Obama goes with the ethically and politically bankrupt RNC/GOP, drones on in protracted and deadly fashion in Afghanistan, then Obama fully deserves to be a one-term Prez.
I would then regret I voted for him. I hope not to have that regret.
Comment # 32
New York Times
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
September 3rd, 2009
0:45 am
The strategy of the faux patriots among the self-ascribed national security hawks in the Republican Party, is to ensure Obama fails in his diplomatic efforts in the South Asia region.
By ratcheting up their calls for increasing militarization, rather than diplomacy, in Afghanistan, the Republican National Committee and leading Republican members in the US Congress, hope to set up and ambush Obama , divide the Democrats, deflect the Congress from urgent and attainable domestic policy goals of universal healthcare and jobs, and instead, hand the U.S.President a spectacular failure, the size of Vietnam.
That's the RNC/GOP's only hope of turning Obama into a one-term President at the polls in 2012.
If Obama goes with the ethically and politically bankrupt RNC/GOP, drones on in protracted and deadly fashion in Afghanistan, then Obama fully deserves to be a one-term Prez.
I would then regret I voted for him. I hope not to have that regret.
It's not all about US interests all the time, everywhere.
No nation-state has done more damage to the South Asia region for the past 55 years, than the US.
Time to get out, USA, especially if the bone-headed, ethically bankrupt RNC insists you stay.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------
NYTimes copyright
G.O.P. May Be Vital to Obama on Afghan War
By HELENE COOPER
Congressional Democrats are reporting disenchantment among constituents with a long Afghanistan conflict.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/world/asia/03policy.html?hp
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
US Bloodletting in MY South Asia
Comment #214.
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
September 1st, 2009
9:22 am
US Bloodletting in MY South Asia
Yeah folks its my place, where I was born and raised. South Asia which the US has turned into hills of blood.
The US Govt. since the inception of the US nation-state, has been bloodthirsty and trigger happy. That's the incontrovertible evidence. This does not means the US has not stood, at times, for individual liberty, mostly for its own citizens at home. Freedom to shop, unlimited amounts of time to cruise the aisles to choose among 20 brands of toilet paper. Great. Whatever works for you.
But US state-sponsored violence and terror -- whether against Native American or Blacks or Vietnamese or Iraqis or Palestinians or now, Afghans or Pakistanis -- that's the name of the game for US loose cannon foreign policy.
General McChrystal, despite his name, lacks lucidity, acuity and clarity. More troops? when the US is already foolhardily pursuing a failing AfPak strategy.
Obama like every white male occupant of the Whites' (yes) House will predictably continue the bloodletting, just like his predecessors. To achieve "strategic depth" in South Asia, to further the US's continuing, unfulfilled fantasy of global dominance in an increasingly multipolar, diverse world that has highly differentiated regional and global strategic interests.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------------------------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/world/asia/01military.html
Groundwork Is Laid for New Troops in Afghanistan
By PETER BAKER and DEXTER FILKINS
Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s revised strategy would invest the U.S. extensively in stabilizing Afghanistan.
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
September 1st, 2009
9:22 am
US Bloodletting in MY South Asia
Yeah folks its my place, where I was born and raised. South Asia which the US has turned into hills of blood.
The US Govt. since the inception of the US nation-state, has been bloodthirsty and trigger happy. That's the incontrovertible evidence. This does not means the US has not stood, at times, for individual liberty, mostly for its own citizens at home. Freedom to shop, unlimited amounts of time to cruise the aisles to choose among 20 brands of toilet paper. Great. Whatever works for you.
But US state-sponsored violence and terror -- whether against Native American or Blacks or Vietnamese or Iraqis or Palestinians or now, Afghans or Pakistanis -- that's the name of the game for US loose cannon foreign policy.
General McChrystal, despite his name, lacks lucidity, acuity and clarity. More troops? when the US is already foolhardily pursuing a failing AfPak strategy.
Obama like every white male occupant of the Whites' (yes) House will predictably continue the bloodletting, just like his predecessors. To achieve "strategic depth" in South Asia, to further the US's continuing, unfulfilled fantasy of global dominance in an increasingly multipolar, diverse world that has highly differentiated regional and global strategic interests.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------------------------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/world/asia/01military.html
Groundwork Is Laid for New Troops in Afghanistan
By PETER BAKER and DEXTER FILKINS
Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s revised strategy would invest the U.S. extensively in stabilizing Afghanistan.
Not India Inc. but India TLTL
SOCIAL JUSTICE is the paramount, imperative, immediate need in India.
Every Indian, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, is entitled to food and water security -- freedom from hunger and malnutrition, safe water for drinking, cooking, bathing and washing.
If we can get this right, other civil society benefits will likely accrue:
* Food and clean water will go a very long way to make disease prevention a reality and give us a better rate of return on investment in public health.
*I've always thought we need a Cabinet level post -- A Union Minister for Soap and Latrines, preferably Brahmin. Preferable a He.
What would this esteemed individual, paid out of public monies, do?
1.Install free public toilets nation-wide at the same frequency as STD kiosks. Learn from Pitroda.
Public defecation (usually male) would go out of fashion throughout India, every city and town would stop being a vast urinal.
2. Provide free soap to every household and school, to cut down on the proliferation of ecoli bacteria and GE-related ilnesses.
3. Conduct massive public health awareness campaigns on handwashing, inflict fines for spitting.
Ok, more to follow but you get my drift. We have to do this first b4 we can move onto questions like why Kerala and Cherapunji, and every district in the nation, has not yet been ordered by the Supreme Court to save ALL monsoon water runoff and send it underground aka rainwater harvesting. Of course, the Centre should pay for it. But the netas at the Centre have to first develop and implement a benchmarked National Water Policy. We don't have one. Our India does not have a National Food and Water Security Guarantee for every Indian. Shame on our netas.
Netas' heads must roll if the policy is not effectively implemented under their watch.
Enough India TLTL. Too Little Too Late serves only the cynical and dehumanized interests of the powerful in our unprecedented, flawed democracy.
SOCIAL JUSTICE is the paramount, imperative, immediate need in India. But is that a priority for our leaders? Recently, during the monsoon Budget session, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee is quoted as having said " In order to distribute wealth we must first create it." Is Mukherjee arguing, without a shred of evidence, that India does not have sufficient created wealth that can be fairly redistributed, right now?
Spoken like an authentic privileged dominant caste Hindu. Which Pranab Mukherjee is.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
==================================================================================
Every Indian, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, is entitled to food and water security -- freedom from hunger and malnutrition, safe water for drinking, cooking, bathing and washing.
If we can get this right, other civil society benefits will likely accrue:
* Food and clean water will go a very long way to make disease prevention a reality and give us a better rate of return on investment in public health.
*I've always thought we need a Cabinet level post -- A Union Minister for Soap and Latrines, preferably Brahmin. Preferable a He.
What would this esteemed individual, paid out of public monies, do?
1.Install free public toilets nation-wide at the same frequency as STD kiosks. Learn from Pitroda.
Public defecation (usually male) would go out of fashion throughout India, every city and town would stop being a vast urinal.
2. Provide free soap to every household and school, to cut down on the proliferation of ecoli bacteria and GE-related ilnesses.
3. Conduct massive public health awareness campaigns on handwashing, inflict fines for spitting.
Ok, more to follow but you get my drift. We have to do this first b4 we can move onto questions like why Kerala and Cherapunji, and every district in the nation, has not yet been ordered by the Supreme Court to save ALL monsoon water runoff and send it underground aka rainwater harvesting. Of course, the Centre should pay for it. But the netas at the Centre have to first develop and implement a benchmarked National Water Policy. We don't have one. Our India does not have a National Food and Water Security Guarantee for every Indian. Shame on our netas.
Netas' heads must roll if the policy is not effectively implemented under their watch.
Enough India TLTL. Too Little Too Late serves only the cynical and dehumanized interests of the powerful in our unprecedented, flawed democracy.
SOCIAL JUSTICE is the paramount, imperative, immediate need in India. But is that a priority for our leaders? Recently, during the monsoon Budget session, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee is quoted as having said " In order to distribute wealth we must first create it." Is Mukherjee arguing, without a shred of evidence, that India does not have sufficient created wealth that can be fairly redistributed, right now?
Spoken like an authentic privileged dominant caste Hindu. Which Pranab Mukherjee is.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
==================================================================================
Monday, August 31, 2009
Barefoot Justices for Ethical Democracy
Barefoot Justices for Ethical Democracy
WE the People of India display a national motto that we can be unabashedly proud of. No nation-state in the world can top the powerful appeal of Satyameva Jayate.
Truth is the vehicle of Ethical Democracy.
Ethical Democracy is secular worship of the attainable ideal of SOCIAL JUSTICE through the path of Truth. Truth is not some lofty abstraction.
Gandhiji vividly demonstrated the dynamic, pragmatic imperative of Truth. Truth is often inconvenient, contingent, relative, subtle, blatant, slow, fast. But most important, it is irresistible to humans in groups. Societies depend for their survival, on their frequently faltering pursuit of truth. Even a halting and flawed pursuit is better then none.
In the diverse, secular Indian nation-state, The search for Truth is placed higher than the search for God. Not "In God we Trust" or even " pluribus e unum" as in the US, but "Satyameva Jayate." Truth is the victor. The victor is not you or me or any individual but Truth. Way to go, Republic of India. Excellent start. But we still have a very long row to hoe.
Now, among a host of other priorities, We, the People, urgently need a transformed national, state, and local court system to stand up and deliver those high ideals and aspirations expressed in "Satyameva Jayate."
The issue of publicizing assets held by Supreme Court justices will now be placed before the public, on a website. That is a welcome and necessary development in our unfolding democracy. Hidden assets are completely incompatible with democracy, in which EVERYONE, each citizen is accountable and exercises both rights and responsibilities. Therefore, the CJI Chief Justice of India is not exempt -- and neither am I.
Public pressure from We the People, NOT only judicial activism, beginning with former CJI Verma in 1997, has finally succeeded in making those assets transparent on a website. It's taken 12 long years. TLTL. Too Little Too Late. Still, it's a laggardly triumph for ethical democracy. We can see the powerful efficacy of the public use of RTI Right to Information, in this victory for civil society (that's US, you and me working together) to MAKE democracy.
Wanted: A Justice System for a Postcolonial Democracy: Our justice system needs to swiftly become more relevant to the unique requirements of a postcolonial democracy, instead of merely aping other systems in national-states with a completely different socio-historical trajectory. The colonial oppressors and their formerly oppressed subjects cannot possibly have identical or even similar justice systems. India needs its very own unique justice system, flowing from the demands and needs of its vibrantly emergent democratic polity.
Wanted: A ProPoor Social Justice System --
Our justice system must be continually proactive and preemptive to deliver SOCIAL JUSTICE to our most oppressed, our most marginalized, our most disadvantaged.
Redistributive justice accomplished through and by the courts is an imperative in an expanding democracy.
Wanted: Barefoot Justices -- We desperately need vigorous, erudite, dedicated BAREFOOT JUSTICES who can leave their hallowed chambers in New Delhi or Chennai and uphold the rule of law in every hamlet of our vast country. These hamlets and outposts are not remote, they have been made remote by judicial officialdom. Judicial bureaucrats on the bench don't fit the bill in a vibrant, aspirational democracy. Justice delayed is Justice denied. The court system has the solemn and fully accountable obligation to deliver justice, not later but NOW.
Our justice justice system needs to break free from TLTL Syndrome. Too Little Too Late simply will not do.
We need pro-civil society justices and a justice system worthy of our unprecedented, vibrantly unfolding democracy, the bewildered envy of the world. Our Indian democracy is a magnificent, seriously flawed work in progress. We need justices who recognize this fact and can act on that fact.
Get off the bench, lose your wigs, drop your robes, hit the streets..
Justice is waiting to be dispensed. And that delay is not good for democracy.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Times of India copyright
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/india/Supreme-Court-judges-agree-to-disclose-assets/articleshow/4937780.cms
NEW DELHI: Under mounting public pressure, the judges of the Supreme Court on Wednesday decided to make public their assets, an issue that had
been haunting higher judiciary for quite some time. ( Watch Video )
"A decision in principle has been taken on the issue at a meeting convened by Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan and the details of the assets to be declared by the judges would be put on the Supreme Court website," a top apex court source said after the two-hour deliberations.
The decision comes after months of public debate over making public the details of higher judiciary, especially the apex court judges and their families ever since the Right to Information law triggered the issue.
The source said the decision, adopted in the form of a resolution, would be effective only after the minutes are signed by all the judges.
"Once the minutes are recorded the assets would be made public and would be posted on the Supreme Court website," the source said.
The decision was immediately welcomed by senior advocates Soli Sorabjee and Prashant Bhushan, who has been campaigning on the subject.
Sorabjee said it was a decision in the right direction. He said it was not not so much judicial corruption and that they had something to hide but it was due to some misgivings.
The issue of declaration of assets had also led to a spat with Karnataka High Court judge Justice D V Shylendra Kumar, who questioned Balakrishnan's authority to speak on behalf of all judges. The CJI hit back saying the judge was "publicity crazy".
A couple of days ago, the CJI, however, had maintained that judges were free to disclose their assets and nothing prevented them from doing so. Only there was a lack of consensus, which he said was being worked out.
In between, Justice M K Kannan, a judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, and Justice Kumar declared their assets while Justice K Chandru of the Madras High Court expressed his inclination to do so.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
WE the People of India display a national motto that we can be unabashedly proud of. No nation-state in the world can top the powerful appeal of Satyameva Jayate.
Truth is the vehicle of Ethical Democracy.
Ethical Democracy is secular worship of the attainable ideal of SOCIAL JUSTICE through the path of Truth. Truth is not some lofty abstraction.
Gandhiji vividly demonstrated the dynamic, pragmatic imperative of Truth. Truth is often inconvenient, contingent, relative, subtle, blatant, slow, fast. But most important, it is irresistible to humans in groups. Societies depend for their survival, on their frequently faltering pursuit of truth. Even a halting and flawed pursuit is better then none.
In the diverse, secular Indian nation-state, The search for Truth is placed higher than the search for God. Not "In God we Trust" or even " pluribus e unum" as in the US, but "Satyameva Jayate." Truth is the victor. The victor is not you or me or any individual but Truth. Way to go, Republic of India. Excellent start. But we still have a very long row to hoe.
Now, among a host of other priorities, We, the People, urgently need a transformed national, state, and local court system to stand up and deliver those high ideals and aspirations expressed in "Satyameva Jayate."
The issue of publicizing assets held by Supreme Court justices will now be placed before the public, on a website. That is a welcome and necessary development in our unfolding democracy. Hidden assets are completely incompatible with democracy, in which EVERYONE, each citizen is accountable and exercises both rights and responsibilities. Therefore, the CJI Chief Justice of India is not exempt -- and neither am I.
Public pressure from We the People, NOT only judicial activism, beginning with former CJI Verma in 1997, has finally succeeded in making those assets transparent on a website. It's taken 12 long years. TLTL. Too Little Too Late. Still, it's a laggardly triumph for ethical democracy. We can see the powerful efficacy of the public use of RTI Right to Information, in this victory for civil society (that's US, you and me working together) to MAKE democracy.
Wanted: A Justice System for a Postcolonial Democracy: Our justice system needs to swiftly become more relevant to the unique requirements of a postcolonial democracy, instead of merely aping other systems in national-states with a completely different socio-historical trajectory. The colonial oppressors and their formerly oppressed subjects cannot possibly have identical or even similar justice systems. India needs its very own unique justice system, flowing from the demands and needs of its vibrantly emergent democratic polity.
Wanted: A ProPoor Social Justice System --
Our justice system must be continually proactive and preemptive to deliver SOCIAL JUSTICE to our most oppressed, our most marginalized, our most disadvantaged.
Redistributive justice accomplished through and by the courts is an imperative in an expanding democracy.
Wanted: Barefoot Justices -- We desperately need vigorous, erudite, dedicated BAREFOOT JUSTICES who can leave their hallowed chambers in New Delhi or Chennai and uphold the rule of law in every hamlet of our vast country. These hamlets and outposts are not remote, they have been made remote by judicial officialdom. Judicial bureaucrats on the bench don't fit the bill in a vibrant, aspirational democracy. Justice delayed is Justice denied. The court system has the solemn and fully accountable obligation to deliver justice, not later but NOW.
Our justice justice system needs to break free from TLTL Syndrome. Too Little Too Late simply will not do.
We need pro-civil society justices and a justice system worthy of our unprecedented, vibrantly unfolding democracy, the bewildered envy of the world. Our Indian democracy is a magnificent, seriously flawed work in progress. We need justices who recognize this fact and can act on that fact.
Get off the bench, lose your wigs, drop your robes, hit the streets..
Justice is waiting to be dispensed. And that delay is not good for democracy.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Times of India copyright
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/india/Supreme-Court-judges-agree-to-disclose-assets/articleshow/4937780.cms
NEW DELHI: Under mounting public pressure, the judges of the Supreme Court on Wednesday decided to make public their assets, an issue that had
been haunting higher judiciary for quite some time. ( Watch Video )
"A decision in principle has been taken on the issue at a meeting convened by Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan and the details of the assets to be declared by the judges would be put on the Supreme Court website," a top apex court source said after the two-hour deliberations.
The decision comes after months of public debate over making public the details of higher judiciary, especially the apex court judges and their families ever since the Right to Information law triggered the issue.
The source said the decision, adopted in the form of a resolution, would be effective only after the minutes are signed by all the judges.
"Once the minutes are recorded the assets would be made public and would be posted on the Supreme Court website," the source said.
The decision was immediately welcomed by senior advocates Soli Sorabjee and Prashant Bhushan, who has been campaigning on the subject.
Sorabjee said it was a decision in the right direction. He said it was not not so much judicial corruption and that they had something to hide but it was due to some misgivings.
The issue of declaration of assets had also led to a spat with Karnataka High Court judge Justice D V Shylendra Kumar, who questioned Balakrishnan's authority to speak on behalf of all judges. The CJI hit back saying the judge was "publicity crazy".
A couple of days ago, the CJI, however, had maintained that judges were free to disclose their assets and nothing prevented them from doing so. Only there was a lack of consensus, which he said was being worked out.
In between, Justice M K Kannan, a judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, and Justice Kumar declared their assets while Justice K Chandru of the Madras High Court expressed his inclination to do so.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday, August 30, 2009
US Destabilizes South Asia w/ Weapons & Presence
NYTimes Comment #56.
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
August 30th, 2009
11:22 am
------
US DESTABILIZES PAKISTAN and ALL of SOUTH ASIA with WEAPONS and PRESENCE. That's the real story behind the NYT article.
Your latest article,(see link below) about Pakistan modifying weapons supplied to it, BY the US, comes as absolutely no surprise.
But the point is, should Pakistan be blamed? No. Successive US govts. have played a dangerous role in South Asia, particularly by subjugating Pakistan for over 55 years, to selfish US interests, beginning with the John Foster Dulles era of the US. State Dept. Pakistan became a pawn in the US machinations against the former USSR, in the Cold War which the US invented against the Soviets. Now the US is the world's largest Centrally Planned Economy(CPE), how ironic.
The US's South Asia policy under Obama is no exception. That policy is controlled, not by the White House, but by a long established State Department/Pentagon/ CIA policy of US dominance and control and consequent disaster, through the double deployment of weapons and capital, by the US, over certain regions at certain points in time.
For 55 plus years, South Asia has been an area in which the US has meddled. Now, with its diminished stature in the so-called Middle East, the US is trying, and to a large measure has succeeded, in accomplishing strategic depth in South Asia.
The US is both an ally and a partner of hapless, dependent and bankrupt Pakistan. A weak still largely feudal but dangerously US-weaponized Pakistan is no match in this equation.
Instead of helping Pakistan's ordinary people to accomplish SOCIAL JUSTICE through food security, education, healthcare, industrial and trade relations, the US has brutally attacked ordinary Pakistanis' aspirations for a better life, by weaponizing and destroying Pakistan's already fragile sovereignty.
It suits Pakistan's feudal/military leaders to depict India as the enemy. But ordinary Pakistan know that Indians and Pakistanis are sisters and brothers whose oppressor is the US, and before them, the Brits, not to mention our own national elites in our respective countries.
Such is the aftermath of the colonial -- and now neo-imperial conundrum we South Asians face at the present time.
Only India and Pakistan can resolve their disagreements. The determined and largely successful effort of the US to become a geopolitical player MUST fail, if South Asia's sovereign nation-states are to succeed, on behalf of their own diverse and long suffering peoples. The US has got to go.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------
NYTimes copyright
U.S. Says Pakistan Made Changes to Missiles Sold for Defense
By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGER
The U.S. has accused Pakistan of illegally modifying American-made missiles to expand its capability to strike land targets, a potential threat to India, officials said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/world/asia/30missile.html?_r=1
=====================================================================================
EthicalDemocracy
Chennai, Tamil Nadu India
August 30th, 2009
11:22 am
------
US DESTABILIZES PAKISTAN and ALL of SOUTH ASIA with WEAPONS and PRESENCE. That's the real story behind the NYT article.
Your latest article,(see link below) about Pakistan modifying weapons supplied to it, BY the US, comes as absolutely no surprise.
But the point is, should Pakistan be blamed? No. Successive US govts. have played a dangerous role in South Asia, particularly by subjugating Pakistan for over 55 years, to selfish US interests, beginning with the John Foster Dulles era of the US. State Dept. Pakistan became a pawn in the US machinations against the former USSR, in the Cold War which the US invented against the Soviets. Now the US is the world's largest Centrally Planned Economy(CPE), how ironic.
The US's South Asia policy under Obama is no exception. That policy is controlled, not by the White House, but by a long established State Department/Pentagon/ CIA policy of US dominance and control and consequent disaster, through the double deployment of weapons and capital, by the US, over certain regions at certain points in time.
For 55 plus years, South Asia has been an area in which the US has meddled. Now, with its diminished stature in the so-called Middle East, the US is trying, and to a large measure has succeeded, in accomplishing strategic depth in South Asia.
The US is both an ally and a partner of hapless, dependent and bankrupt Pakistan. A weak still largely feudal but dangerously US-weaponized Pakistan is no match in this equation.
Instead of helping Pakistan's ordinary people to accomplish SOCIAL JUSTICE through food security, education, healthcare, industrial and trade relations, the US has brutally attacked ordinary Pakistanis' aspirations for a better life, by weaponizing and destroying Pakistan's already fragile sovereignty.
It suits Pakistan's feudal/military leaders to depict India as the enemy. But ordinary Pakistan know that Indians and Pakistanis are sisters and brothers whose oppressor is the US, and before them, the Brits, not to mention our own national elites in our respective countries.
Such is the aftermath of the colonial -- and now neo-imperial conundrum we South Asians face at the present time.
Only India and Pakistan can resolve their disagreements. The determined and largely successful effort of the US to become a geopolitical player MUST fail, if South Asia's sovereign nation-states are to succeed, on behalf of their own diverse and long suffering peoples. The US has got to go.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------
NYTimes copyright
U.S. Says Pakistan Made Changes to Missiles Sold for Defense
By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGER
The U.S. has accused Pakistan of illegally modifying American-made missiles to expand its capability to strike land targets, a potential threat to India, officials said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/world/asia/30missile.html?_r=1
=====================================================================================
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
HyperMilitarism vs. Social Justice
1. July 30, 2009 2:24 am Link
NYTimes
Hypermilitarism vs. Social Justice
More than anything else, this news analysis (See link below) tells us how profoundly affected contemporary South Asian nation-states are, by the centuries-long divide and rule legacy of British colonialism and imperialism.
The cooked-up borders devised and imposed by the Brits still haunt us today. Millions of innocents died during “partition”. The sores fester, the scars remain. This dehumanizing colonial legacy still affects every action by our indigenous neo-colonial elites, most of whom have inherited the mindset of those who colluded with, and profited from, the British Divide and Rule strategy.
The challenge for our leaders today is to give up the colonial dependency mindset of hypermilitarism as illustrated by your report on the new female recruits to India's BSF. Our colonial dependency mindset has been compounded by the neo-imperial projects of the US and US-led NATO in our region.
However, our leaders have no incentive to reverse direction and change course. There are limitless profits and political capital to be made, from hypermilitarism. Our leaders can only be held accountable by We the People. Our democracies are fragile and flawed but our civil society is still our best hope against the colonial ideology that continues to favor militaristic solutions to social justice problems.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------------
NYTimes Copyright
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/women-deployed-to-indias-wall-of-death/#comment-341587
NYTimes
Hypermilitarism vs. Social Justice
More than anything else, this news analysis (See link below) tells us how profoundly affected contemporary South Asian nation-states are, by the centuries-long divide and rule legacy of British colonialism and imperialism.
The cooked-up borders devised and imposed by the Brits still haunt us today. Millions of innocents died during “partition”. The sores fester, the scars remain. This dehumanizing colonial legacy still affects every action by our indigenous neo-colonial elites, most of whom have inherited the mindset of those who colluded with, and profited from, the British Divide and Rule strategy.
The challenge for our leaders today is to give up the colonial dependency mindset of hypermilitarism as illustrated by your report on the new female recruits to India's BSF. Our colonial dependency mindset has been compounded by the neo-imperial projects of the US and US-led NATO in our region.
However, our leaders have no incentive to reverse direction and change course. There are limitless profits and political capital to be made, from hypermilitarism. Our leaders can only be held accountable by We the People. Our democracies are fragile and flawed but our civil society is still our best hope against the colonial ideology that continues to favor militaristic solutions to social justice problems.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------------
NYTimes Copyright
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/women-deployed-to-indias-wall-of-death/#comment-341587
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
The Burqa in Democracy: Facing, Gazing & Civil Discourse for Social Justice
The Burqa in Democracy: Facing, Gazing & Speaking To Secure Social Justice
Q. Is wearing the face covering of burqa/niqab, or any other garment covering the face, a socially responsible act by a woman in a public democratic space? I say NO.
Secular Democracy can and must trump patriarchy, religion, culture, tradition, custom, belief in order to deliver Secular Democracy's prime commitment to SOCIAL JUSTICE.
French President Sarkozy recently gave fundamentalist feudal religionists as well as fundamentalist contemporary civil libertarians, a distracting opportunity to argue respectively 1) that face covering is a religious act or 2) face covering is a private individual choice, like free speech, free assembly, etc.
Sarkozy is gravely mistaken and has done serious damage to democratic processes, by his ignorant, dismissive and demeaning mis-characterization of the Burqa/niqab
However, Sarkozy has the right intent but the wrong argument. His comments are logically flawed and fail to defend civil society, in France and elsewhere.
How?
Because Sarkozy, in his speech to France's Parliament in June, completely failed to address the core problem for secular democracy, arising from covering the face in public spaces.
Look, it's not that complicated -- Democracy cannot express with faces covered. Any face covered in public discourse, is an impediment to democracy.
Q. Let's focus on patriarchy and its prescription of face covering for women. Can we see the blatant unequal and oppressive hand of patriarchy in imposing face covering exclusively on women?
Q.Is there even one culture of the 4000+ known distinct cultures in the entire world, that prescribes face-covering for men? NO. Therefore the driving force orchestrating face covering for women, but not for men, is patriarchy, not Culture or religion or ethnicity, or language.
Even Sarkozy's neoliberal argument against the burqa is patriarchal, exposing his unearned privileged membership in male dominant French society.
Patriarchy is a universal impediment to social progress and needs to be challenged everywhere, most especially in the multiple contexts of secular democracy.
Sarkozy is not so much concerned with women's equal empowerment.
Instead, Sarkozy is more concerned with overturning prescriptive cultural beliefs which are private ones, in which the nation-state has no role.
Sarkozy has the right intent but the wrong argument.
Sarkozy is arguing AGAINST religion and culture.
Instead Sarkozy should argue FOR Democracy.
Let me raise some commonsense practical objections to face covering:
Q. How can women equally participate in public discourse in civil society when some of their faces are hidden?
Q. How can others, including other women, who participate in the public sphere with face-covered women, know who they are talking to, read their faces, understand their words, if those same faces are hidden?
Q. Why is it Ok for face-covered women to see the faces of others, including men, but deny others the opportunity to look at their faces while they are participating in the public sphere of secular democracy?
Such women have an unearned advantage, retained for them by their male patriarchal handlers and exploiters, whether these handlers are their fathers, husbands or clerics or the nation-state. The face coverers can see us but we can't see them!
Therefore face-covering women are not the victims, they are the patriarchy--enabled perpetrators of social and political inequality in the secular democratic public sphere.
Face-coverers, Wear your burqa in your kitchen, in bed, in the bath, on the toilet, but once you leave your home and step out on a public road paid for by public funds in a democracy, a road paid for by the productive labor of We the People, show your face!
Face-coverers, You cannot be a beneficiary of secular democracy by hiding your face from others. Your face does not belong to your husband or the Prophet except in the private realm of your private domestic space. In the Public Sphere of Secular Democracy show your face! My taxes require you to show your face! If you live in atheocrayic, feudal nation-state, follow the prescriptions of our patriarchal male handlers. But in secular democracy you owe your face to the public gaze.
Facial identity and social recognition are essential for the workplace,the market place, the ballot box, the driver's licence, the marriage license, the divorce certificate, school attendance, walking in the street, using an ATM, participation in the street protest, taking a plane trip, paying for groceries at the checkout counter, receiving treatment in a hospital -- in short all PUBLIC ACTS in public democratic spaces.
As a public leader of a democracy, the use of face covering in the PUBLIC SPHERE is precisely the arena Sarkozy needed to focus on, NOT private arguably prescriptive religious and cultural aspects. Sarkozy criticized women NOT Patriarchy. Because he is a patriarch and enjoys the privileges of patriarchy.
Quoting Sarkozy (my emphasis added to text):
In our country (France), we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity," Sarkozy said to extended applause of lawmakers. {Sarkozy is wrong, the burqa does confer identity} but in the private. domestic realm.
"The burqa is not a religious sign, it's a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement _ I want to say it solemnly," he said. "It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic...." {Sarkozy is wrong, covering your face cannot be simplisticaly interpreted to be a sign or debasement the burqa is not any of the things he alludes to here. He is right, the burqa should not be welcome in France (On France's streets and other public discursive spaces but fine in France's kitchens and domestic spaces). Sarkozy cites the wrong reasons for making the burqa "unwelcome."]
In a few months French lawmakers, presumably after due deliberation, will pronounce some form of legislation on the burqa.
I am not holding my breath on what the Sarkozy-led postcolonial, post=imperial French patriarchy in Parliament is about to say or do.
Currently, France has an unenviable record on immigrant opportunity. Therefore, It is not women covering their faces in burqa that are impeding immigrant opportunity, but French racism stemming from France's ugly colonial/imperial history of oppression and grabbing resources of peoples of the Global South, represented by contemporary inequality in France, of access to civil rights, economic parity -- in short, social justice.
I am more interested in the implications of any woman covering her face in the public sphere of democratic societies.
Q. Is wearing the burqa a socially responsible act by a woman in a democratic space. I say NO.
Democratic spaces -- public squares, the marketplace, the school, the parliament, the ballot box, by their very definition depend for their continuation and enrichment on public discourse.
Public discourse, based on a public visible presence, necessarily involves women and men facing [yes facing, language is a powerful vehicle for public expression] one another in persuasive, reasoned argument, to convey and implement the deliberative collective will of civil society.
Such discursive exchanges are the bedrock from which public policy ought to shape and influence the course of a nation-state. Not party mobocracy, not dynastic leadership, but civil society.
It's that simple -- I have to see your face at the same time as you have to see mine -- facing cannot be unequal, asymmetrical, a one way cul de sac, where you can see me but I cant see you, face to face. Facing is gazing, nuanced verbal expression, an indispensable part of public argument on the way to delivering social justice for the Greater Collective Good (GCG).
It's that simple but it's also deeply complex. From an evolutionary perspective, humans come evolutionarily equipped to recognize and seek meaning from faces. That is why human babies gaze at their caregivers. That is also why we can better remmeber a face than a name. Our brains have evolved to optimize facial recognition as a cue to survival of our species. Face covering impedes facial recognition in social transactions. Facial recognition aids democracy!
Democracy demands a higher eligibility threshold for participation, than the clan, the tribe, the guild, the caste, the feudal landlord or warlord, or the theocracy.
Face it -- The Burqa makes facing, gazing, straightforward full frontal DISCUSSION to secure social justice, impossible for women. The burqa or ANY other form of face covering, does not meet the minimum eligibility requirement for participation in the PUBLIC SPHERE of Secular Democracy.
Chithra KarunaKaran
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
NYTimes copyright
Burqa Furor Scrambles the Political Debate in France
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: August 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/world/europe/01france.html?emc=eta1
Burqa Furor Scrambles the Political Debate in France
Joel Robine/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A woman wearing a niqab passed a bookstore at the annual meeting of the Islamic Organizations Union in Le Bourget, in the northeastern suburbs of Paris in 2005.
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: August 31, 2009
PARIS — It is a measure of France’s confusion about Islam and its own Muslim citizens that in the political furor here over “banning the burqa,” as the argument goes, the garment at issue is not really the burqa at all, but the niqab.
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Times Topics: France
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Mehdi Fedouach/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Women at the annual meeting of French Muslims organized by the Union of Islamic Organizations of France in Le Bourget, outside Paris, in April.
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Abbas/Magnum
Two veiled Muslim women carrying the French flag during a march against Islamophobia and in favour of the veil in schools, in Paris in 2004.
A burqa is the all-enveloping cloak, often blue, with a woven grill over the eyes, that many Afghan women wear, and it is almost never seen in France. The niqab, often black, leaves the eyes uncovered.
Still, a movement against it that started with a Communist mayor near Lyon has gotten traction within France’s ruling center-right party, which claims to be defending French values, and among many on the left, who say they are defending women’s rights. A parliamentary commission will soon meet to investigate whether to ban the burqa — in other words, any cloak that covers most of the face.
The debate is indicative of the deep ambivalence about social customs among even a small minority of France’s Muslim citizens, and of the signal fear that France’s principles of citizens’ rights, equality and secularism are being undermined.
French discomfort with organized religion, dating from the 1789 revolution and the disestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church, is aggravated by these foreign customs, which are associated in the Western mind with repression of women.
André Gerin, a Communist Party legislator and mayor of Vénissieux, a Lyon suburb with many Muslims from North Africa, began the affair in late June by initiating a motion, signed by 57 other legislators, calling for the parliamentary commission.
“The burqa is the tip of the iceberg,” Mr. Gerin said. “Islamism really threatens us.” In a letter to the government, he wrote: “It is time to take a stand on this issue that concerns thousands of citizens who are worried to see imprisoned, totally veiled women.”
A few days later, President Nicolas Sarkozy said that “the burqa is not welcome on the territory of the French Republic.” He did not say how it would be made unwelcome, however, or whether he intended to extend existing laws that already ban head scarves or any other religious symbol from public schools.
For Mr. Sarkozy, who defends participation in the Afghan war as a matter of women’s rights, “the problem of the burqa is not a religious problem,” he said. “It is a problem of liberty and the dignity of women. It is a sign of servitude and degradation.”
There is a strong suspicion that Mr. Sarkozy, who has supported religious freedom, is playing politics in a time of economic unhappiness and social anxiety. But he also seems to want to restrict more radical and puritanical forms of Islam from gaining further hold here.
The French press has been full of heated opinion pieces, charts about different Islamic veils, stories about public swimming pools and the burqini, an Islamic swimsuit that covers the body and the hair (but not the face). Women wearing the niqab, many of them French converts to Islam, have said that they have freely chosen to cover themselves after marriage. Others say solemnly that to stigmatize or ban the veil would only cause more women to wear it, out of protest.
Last year, Faiza Silmi, now 33, was denied French citizenship in part for wearing the niqab, bringing a legal judgment about personal dress into the home. In an interview with Le Monde, Ms. Silmi said that she chose to wear the niqab after her marriage, even if her own mother thought it was “a little too much.”
“Don’t believe for a moment that I am submissive to my husband!” she said. “I’m the one who takes care of the documents and the money.”
Passions have been so high that when domestic intelligence issued a report saying that only 367 women in France wore a full veil, it seemed to make no difference.
For many French Muslims, the entire discussion is an embarrassment and an incitement to racial and religious hatred.
M’hammed Henniche is the secretary for the private Union of Muslim Associations of Seine-Saint-Denis. He is French first of all, he said, and he is appalled.
“There’s nothing but confusion,” he said. “What they’re talking about is the niqab, but I think choosing to use burqa instead is not an accident. They chose a word that is associated with Afghanistan, and that spreads a negative, scary image.
“There are laws in France that force women to show their face, in certain situations, at the town hall, at the bank,” Mr. Henniche added. “Women who wear niqab take it off when they must. But in the streets, everyone is free. They’re spinning this story in order to stigmatize a community.”
Even existing laws are misunderstood, he said, with a woman refused entry to a bank because employees thought a head scarf was illegal. “It’s a dangerous slip, going from a ban in school to a ban in the streets,” he said.
John R. Bowen, who wrote “Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State and Public Space,” has been asked to testify by the parliamentary commission.
“French political discourse is internally conflicted,” said Mr. Bowen, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. There is confusion about different kinds of public space, he said — the street, and places that belong to the state but are not freely open to the public, like schools.
France took from Rousseau the principle that no intermediate group or affiliation should stand between the citizen and the state, which represents the general interest, Mr. Bowen said. But Rousseau also championed the right to form private associations, or clubs. It was not until 1901, however, that the state allowed some unions or associations, Mr. Bowen said, and not until 1981 that foreigners could form them.
Muslim groups then started religious tutoring, seen as promoting Islam, and clubs based on ethnicity or religion are viewed with great suspicion, Mr. Bowen said. “There is a sense that people who are publicly displaying their religious or ethnic characteristics are a slap in the face of French applied political theory.”
Mr. Bowen does not think there will be a law banning the niqab. Nor does Yazid Sabeg, Mr. Sarkozy’s commissioner for diversity and equal opportunity, who said it would be unenforceable.
“Even if they ban the burqa, it will not stop there,” Mr. Henniche, of the Muslim group, said. “There is a permanent demand for legislating against Muslims. This could go really bad, and I’m scared of it. I feel like they’re turning the screws on us.”
Nadim Audi contributed reporting from Paris.
---------------
Q. Is wearing the face covering of burqa/niqab, or any other garment covering the face, a socially responsible act by a woman in a public democratic space? I say NO.
Secular Democracy can and must trump patriarchy, religion, culture, tradition, custom, belief in order to deliver Secular Democracy's prime commitment to SOCIAL JUSTICE.
French President Sarkozy recently gave fundamentalist feudal religionists as well as fundamentalist contemporary civil libertarians, a distracting opportunity to argue respectively 1) that face covering is a religious act or 2) face covering is a private individual choice, like free speech, free assembly, etc.
Sarkozy is gravely mistaken and has done serious damage to democratic processes, by his ignorant, dismissive and demeaning mis-characterization of the Burqa/niqab
However, Sarkozy has the right intent but the wrong argument. His comments are logically flawed and fail to defend civil society, in France and elsewhere.
How?
Because Sarkozy, in his speech to France's Parliament in June, completely failed to address the core problem for secular democracy, arising from covering the face in public spaces.
Look, it's not that complicated -- Democracy cannot express with faces covered. Any face covered in public discourse, is an impediment to democracy.
Q. Let's focus on patriarchy and its prescription of face covering for women. Can we see the blatant unequal and oppressive hand of patriarchy in imposing face covering exclusively on women?
Q.Is there even one culture of the 4000+ known distinct cultures in the entire world, that prescribes face-covering for men? NO. Therefore the driving force orchestrating face covering for women, but not for men, is patriarchy, not Culture or religion or ethnicity, or language.
Even Sarkozy's neoliberal argument against the burqa is patriarchal, exposing his unearned privileged membership in male dominant French society.
Patriarchy is a universal impediment to social progress and needs to be challenged everywhere, most especially in the multiple contexts of secular democracy.
Sarkozy is not so much concerned with women's equal empowerment.
Instead, Sarkozy is more concerned with overturning prescriptive cultural beliefs which are private ones, in which the nation-state has no role.
Sarkozy has the right intent but the wrong argument.
Sarkozy is arguing AGAINST religion and culture.
Instead Sarkozy should argue FOR Democracy.
Let me raise some commonsense practical objections to face covering:
Q. How can women equally participate in public discourse in civil society when some of their faces are hidden?
Q. How can others, including other women, who participate in the public sphere with face-covered women, know who they are talking to, read their faces, understand their words, if those same faces are hidden?
Q. Why is it Ok for face-covered women to see the faces of others, including men, but deny others the opportunity to look at their faces while they are participating in the public sphere of secular democracy?
Such women have an unearned advantage, retained for them by their male patriarchal handlers and exploiters, whether these handlers are their fathers, husbands or clerics or the nation-state. The face coverers can see us but we can't see them!
Therefore face-covering women are not the victims, they are the patriarchy--enabled perpetrators of social and political inequality in the secular democratic public sphere.
Face-coverers, Wear your burqa in your kitchen, in bed, in the bath, on the toilet, but once you leave your home and step out on a public road paid for by public funds in a democracy, a road paid for by the productive labor of We the People, show your face!
Face-coverers, You cannot be a beneficiary of secular democracy by hiding your face from others. Your face does not belong to your husband or the Prophet except in the private realm of your private domestic space. In the Public Sphere of Secular Democracy show your face! My taxes require you to show your face! If you live in atheocrayic, feudal nation-state, follow the prescriptions of our patriarchal male handlers. But in secular democracy you owe your face to the public gaze.
Facial identity and social recognition are essential for the workplace,the market place, the ballot box, the driver's licence, the marriage license, the divorce certificate, school attendance, walking in the street, using an ATM, participation in the street protest, taking a plane trip, paying for groceries at the checkout counter, receiving treatment in a hospital -- in short all PUBLIC ACTS in public democratic spaces.
As a public leader of a democracy, the use of face covering in the PUBLIC SPHERE is precisely the arena Sarkozy needed to focus on, NOT private arguably prescriptive religious and cultural aspects. Sarkozy criticized women NOT Patriarchy. Because he is a patriarch and enjoys the privileges of patriarchy.
Quoting Sarkozy (my emphasis added to text):
In our country (France), we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity," Sarkozy said to extended applause of lawmakers. {Sarkozy is wrong, the burqa does confer identity} but in the private. domestic realm.
"The burqa is not a religious sign, it's a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement _ I want to say it solemnly," he said. "It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic...." {Sarkozy is wrong, covering your face cannot be simplisticaly interpreted to be a sign or debasement the burqa is not any of the things he alludes to here. He is right, the burqa should not be welcome in France (On France's streets and other public discursive spaces but fine in France's kitchens and domestic spaces). Sarkozy cites the wrong reasons for making the burqa "unwelcome."]
In a few months French lawmakers, presumably after due deliberation, will pronounce some form of legislation on the burqa.
I am not holding my breath on what the Sarkozy-led postcolonial, post=imperial French patriarchy in Parliament is about to say or do.
Currently, France has an unenviable record on immigrant opportunity. Therefore, It is not women covering their faces in burqa that are impeding immigrant opportunity, but French racism stemming from France's ugly colonial/imperial history of oppression and grabbing resources of peoples of the Global South, represented by contemporary inequality in France, of access to civil rights, economic parity -- in short, social justice.
I am more interested in the implications of any woman covering her face in the public sphere of democratic societies.
Q. Is wearing the burqa a socially responsible act by a woman in a democratic space. I say NO.
Democratic spaces -- public squares, the marketplace, the school, the parliament, the ballot box, by their very definition depend for their continuation and enrichment on public discourse.
Public discourse, based on a public visible presence, necessarily involves women and men facing [yes facing, language is a powerful vehicle for public expression] one another in persuasive, reasoned argument, to convey and implement the deliberative collective will of civil society.
Such discursive exchanges are the bedrock from which public policy ought to shape and influence the course of a nation-state. Not party mobocracy, not dynastic leadership, but civil society.
It's that simple -- I have to see your face at the same time as you have to see mine -- facing cannot be unequal, asymmetrical, a one way cul de sac, where you can see me but I cant see you, face to face. Facing is gazing, nuanced verbal expression, an indispensable part of public argument on the way to delivering social justice for the Greater Collective Good (GCG).
It's that simple but it's also deeply complex. From an evolutionary perspective, humans come evolutionarily equipped to recognize and seek meaning from faces. That is why human babies gaze at their caregivers. That is also why we can better remmeber a face than a name. Our brains have evolved to optimize facial recognition as a cue to survival of our species. Face covering impedes facial recognition in social transactions. Facial recognition aids democracy!
Democracy demands a higher eligibility threshold for participation, than the clan, the tribe, the guild, the caste, the feudal landlord or warlord, or the theocracy.
Face it -- The Burqa makes facing, gazing, straightforward full frontal DISCUSSION to secure social justice, impossible for women. The burqa or ANY other form of face covering, does not meet the minimum eligibility requirement for participation in the PUBLIC SPHERE of Secular Democracy.
Chithra KarunaKaran
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
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NYTimes copyright
Burqa Furor Scrambles the Political Debate in France
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: August 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/world/europe/01france.html?emc=eta1
Burqa Furor Scrambles the Political Debate in France
Joel Robine/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A woman wearing a niqab passed a bookstore at the annual meeting of the Islamic Organizations Union in Le Bourget, in the northeastern suburbs of Paris in 2005.
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: August 31, 2009
PARIS — It is a measure of France’s confusion about Islam and its own Muslim citizens that in the political furor here over “banning the burqa,” as the argument goes, the garment at issue is not really the burqa at all, but the niqab.
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Times Topics: France
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Mehdi Fedouach/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Women at the annual meeting of French Muslims organized by the Union of Islamic Organizations of France in Le Bourget, outside Paris, in April.
Enlarge This Image
Abbas/Magnum
Two veiled Muslim women carrying the French flag during a march against Islamophobia and in favour of the veil in schools, in Paris in 2004.
A burqa is the all-enveloping cloak, often blue, with a woven grill over the eyes, that many Afghan women wear, and it is almost never seen in France. The niqab, often black, leaves the eyes uncovered.
Still, a movement against it that started with a Communist mayor near Lyon has gotten traction within France’s ruling center-right party, which claims to be defending French values, and among many on the left, who say they are defending women’s rights. A parliamentary commission will soon meet to investigate whether to ban the burqa — in other words, any cloak that covers most of the face.
The debate is indicative of the deep ambivalence about social customs among even a small minority of France’s Muslim citizens, and of the signal fear that France’s principles of citizens’ rights, equality and secularism are being undermined.
French discomfort with organized religion, dating from the 1789 revolution and the disestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church, is aggravated by these foreign customs, which are associated in the Western mind with repression of women.
André Gerin, a Communist Party legislator and mayor of Vénissieux, a Lyon suburb with many Muslims from North Africa, began the affair in late June by initiating a motion, signed by 57 other legislators, calling for the parliamentary commission.
“The burqa is the tip of the iceberg,” Mr. Gerin said. “Islamism really threatens us.” In a letter to the government, he wrote: “It is time to take a stand on this issue that concerns thousands of citizens who are worried to see imprisoned, totally veiled women.”
A few days later, President Nicolas Sarkozy said that “the burqa is not welcome on the territory of the French Republic.” He did not say how it would be made unwelcome, however, or whether he intended to extend existing laws that already ban head scarves or any other religious symbol from public schools.
For Mr. Sarkozy, who defends participation in the Afghan war as a matter of women’s rights, “the problem of the burqa is not a religious problem,” he said. “It is a problem of liberty and the dignity of women. It is a sign of servitude and degradation.”
There is a strong suspicion that Mr. Sarkozy, who has supported religious freedom, is playing politics in a time of economic unhappiness and social anxiety. But he also seems to want to restrict more radical and puritanical forms of Islam from gaining further hold here.
The French press has been full of heated opinion pieces, charts about different Islamic veils, stories about public swimming pools and the burqini, an Islamic swimsuit that covers the body and the hair (but not the face). Women wearing the niqab, many of them French converts to Islam, have said that they have freely chosen to cover themselves after marriage. Others say solemnly that to stigmatize or ban the veil would only cause more women to wear it, out of protest.
Last year, Faiza Silmi, now 33, was denied French citizenship in part for wearing the niqab, bringing a legal judgment about personal dress into the home. In an interview with Le Monde, Ms. Silmi said that she chose to wear the niqab after her marriage, even if her own mother thought it was “a little too much.”
“Don’t believe for a moment that I am submissive to my husband!” she said. “I’m the one who takes care of the documents and the money.”
Passions have been so high that when domestic intelligence issued a report saying that only 367 women in France wore a full veil, it seemed to make no difference.
For many French Muslims, the entire discussion is an embarrassment and an incitement to racial and religious hatred.
M’hammed Henniche is the secretary for the private Union of Muslim Associations of Seine-Saint-Denis. He is French first of all, he said, and he is appalled.
“There’s nothing but confusion,” he said. “What they’re talking about is the niqab, but I think choosing to use burqa instead is not an accident. They chose a word that is associated with Afghanistan, and that spreads a negative, scary image.
“There are laws in France that force women to show their face, in certain situations, at the town hall, at the bank,” Mr. Henniche added. “Women who wear niqab take it off when they must. But in the streets, everyone is free. They’re spinning this story in order to stigmatize a community.”
Even existing laws are misunderstood, he said, with a woman refused entry to a bank because employees thought a head scarf was illegal. “It’s a dangerous slip, going from a ban in school to a ban in the streets,” he said.
John R. Bowen, who wrote “Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State and Public Space,” has been asked to testify by the parliamentary commission.
“French political discourse is internally conflicted,” said Mr. Bowen, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. There is confusion about different kinds of public space, he said — the street, and places that belong to the state but are not freely open to the public, like schools.
France took from Rousseau the principle that no intermediate group or affiliation should stand between the citizen and the state, which represents the general interest, Mr. Bowen said. But Rousseau also championed the right to form private associations, or clubs. It was not until 1901, however, that the state allowed some unions or associations, Mr. Bowen said, and not until 1981 that foreigners could form them.
Muslim groups then started religious tutoring, seen as promoting Islam, and clubs based on ethnicity or religion are viewed with great suspicion, Mr. Bowen said. “There is a sense that people who are publicly displaying their religious or ethnic characteristics are a slap in the face of French applied political theory.”
Mr. Bowen does not think there will be a law banning the niqab. Nor does Yazid Sabeg, Mr. Sarkozy’s commissioner for diversity and equal opportunity, who said it would be unenforceable.
“Even if they ban the burqa, it will not stop there,” Mr. Henniche, of the Muslim group, said. “There is a permanent demand for legislating against Muslims. This could go really bad, and I’m scared of it. I feel like they’re turning the screws on us.”
Nadim Audi contributed reporting from Paris.
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