Donald Trump and Al Capone

The impeachment of Donald Trump will probably be a fait accompli by the time I post this essay. But the process has reminded me of the conviction of Al Capone.

Everyone knew that Capone was responsible for many serious offenses beyond bootlegging. He was clearly at the center of a web of extortion and murder. But the FBI and local authorities felt they had no hope of pinning any of these crimes on him. He existed behind a fog of contrived alibis and forced testimony. It’s been widely acknowledged that Capone ordered the notorious 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre in order to eliminate rival Bugs Moran whom he thought was encroaching on his territory. But once again, Capone was like Macavity in the play Cats. There’s a crash, a bang, a shattering of some prized possession. But when you go and look, once again, “Macavity’s not there.” In the same way, Capone was in Florida on that St. Valentine’s Day – nowhere near the scene of the crime.

However, public opinion did turn against Capone after the gruesome violence of the massacre. The FBI increased its push to depose Capone from his throne as kingpin of Chicago crime. They hit on the idea of examining his income tax returns. He could hardly report the millions he was raking in on a regular basis. He couldn’t believably be earning that sort of money by selling second-hand furniture, the profession he claimed on his business cards.

The FBI was able to demonstrate how Capone’s spending, how his lavish lifestyle – indeed couldn’t be accounted for by the returns he reported from his “furniture business.” And so Capone was convicted for tax evasion and was finally neutralized by being put away in federal prisons such as Alcatraz and serving seven years.

It seems to me that Al Capone’s tax evasion is Donald Trump’s Ukrainian bribe. Trump’s withholding of funds from the Ukrainian President contingent on his investigating Hunter Biden’s role on a Ukrainian gas company board is indeed reprehensible. It had some obvious negative consequences in compromising the Ukraine’s ability to combat Russian aggression. It could have had even farther-reaching consequences. Capone’s withholding of tax funds from the public was perhaps somewhat less consequential. Still, failure to pay such a large amount of taxes is reprehensible. Whatever money Capone gave to soup kitchens and to other charities was more than offset by the money he failed to put into public coffers where those funds might have gone much farther to support those in need.

But in neither case were the infractions that the men were charged with the worst of what they had done. In Capone’s case, there were all those intimidations, felonies, and murders. In Trump’s case, there has been the total lack of knowledge about geography, history, the U.S. Constitution, or what constitutes true statesmanship. There has been the rain of random, irrelevant tweets, the schoolyard name-calling, the inconsistency, the illogic, the arrogance, the stupidity.

But it was hard to convict a man of well-deflected crimes and hired hits. It would be almost impossible to convict a man of utter inanity. So in each case, the authorities had to focus on something smaller, something better defined. Your total failure as a human being isn’t prosecutable. The long arm of the law has to pick something graspable. And so the charges are reduced to tax evasion, and the demand of a quid pro quo from the Ukrainian President – respectively.

Isn’t that the way it is with life in general? You yell at your spouse for not putting the cap back on the toothpaste. Well, it’s possible that transgression can itself be a major annoyance. Paste can ooze out over your comb, down the side of the sink, onto the bathmat – necessitating a massive, time-consuming clean-up. But usually the toothpaste cap is just the tax evasion of each individual household.

You can’t yell at your spouse for never helping around the house, at least not with any reasonable expectation of effecting any reform. Although what you’re really angry about is your spouse’s lazy disregard, that’s too big a fault to prosecute.

Similarly, you burst out in grievance after your spouse absented himself and left you to deal on your own with the burly, pugnacious handyman who failed to sand the windowsill before slathering paint over its lumpiness. In that case, what has really disappointed you about your spouse is his cowardice. But that’s too unwieldy a charge to bring to court.

You can reproach your spouse for forgetting your birthday, or for telling a demeaning story about you at a party, or for cheating on you. But you can’t reasonably convict him or her on the vast, intangible basis of being a bad person. You have no recourse against your spouse for being incapable of love.

And so the argument revolves around toothpaste – or a failure to pay taxes – or dishonorable actions in the Ukraine. 

Miraculous Transformation

I went to a performance of a new musical play, Parcel from America, at the Irish Heritage Center in Chicago last weekend. It had a heartwarming resolution, perfect for the Holidays, likely to become a kind of It’s A Wonderful Life tradition for smaller theaters around town.

I had a little trouble getting into the spirit of the afternoon though. Before the performance started, I was put in a grumpy mood by the gyrations of one of the audience members. I recognized her as being one of the regular hosts of PBS-TV’s pledge nights. Her appearances there irritated me. She always seemed to be so mindlessly bubbly as she solicited funds and introduced each new segment of the special programming. Her uniform boosterism and effervescence often seemed out of place. She would burst into the midst of a program about the Holocaust with her usual hyper enthusiasm. She’d gush, “Wow! Isn’t that great! What an important history lesson!”

None of the solemnity or grandeur of any of the programming ever seemed to register with her. Her predictable “Wows!” always smacked of a teenager’s babblings about who-likes-who in 5^th period English class. Now here was this woman again, characteristically flitting around the auditorium, greeting people in rapid succession, supervising who should sit where, changing her own seat repeatedly, laughing, shuffling people’s coats here and there. Just as her bubbly appearances on TV exhausted me, the woman was exhausting me here in person.

Her skimming flightiness was turning me into the perfect Scrooge. I was mentally grumbling “What an airhead! Sit down and relax already! Silent night, please!”

But then, a Christmas miracle. The woman oddly paused in mid-sweep down the aisle next to me. She paused, and looked down with intent friendliness at me for a moment. It wasn’t as if she seemed to think she knew me. We’d never met. I’d never volunteered at the local PBS station on any of the nights when she was hosting. But it was as if she suddenly realized some transcendent kinship between us. She paused – and lit up with a sincere, staying smile.

When she moved on, resuming her social butterfly briefness, I thought, “What a nice woman!”

Taking a Dim View - Part III

In Parts I and II of this series, I mentioned how I make a point of watching The View as often as possible. The women are well-informed about many facets of the political/social scene that I don’t follow on my own. However, the women consistently demonstrate blind spots in their discussions. In the previous essays, I focused on lapses that occurred in the panel members’ thinking on the issue of abortion and on the issue of celebrating our true selves. Here I consider how dangerous their support of political correctness has become.

The women often deplore the excesses of political correctness (PC) that characterize our society. But then they go on to indulge in some of those excesses themselves. Some of what I regard as the worst and most dangerous examples of their commitment to PC involve their calls for various people to apologize for saying something viewed as being insensitive or reflective of a prejudiced attitude. All sorts of people from cooking show host Paula Deen to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have been called upon by panel members to apologize for having made insensitive, racist remarks or for having engaged in behavior seen as demeaning to people of color.

One of the panel’s most insistent calls for an apology involved Don Sterling, owner of the LA Clippers Basketball Team. A conversation that Sterling had on the phone with his mistress was recorded and eventually got aired by that mistress. In the conversation, Sterling asked that this off-again/on-again lady friend (herself of black ancestry) not bring any black people to his games. He apparently was saying this in the context of objecting to her flaunting her relationships with black men publicly in front of him.

No one comes off looking good in this exchange. Sterling’s attitude is plainly a narrow, dreary one. His mistress’ penchant for showing off her alliances with other men and then making public a private conversation in which Sterling objected to that, particularly when it came to black men – shows a relationship devoid of any love or regard on either side. The League officials’ resultant ousting of Sterling from his team ownership shows an over-reaction to a dim, befuddled fellow’s errant remark. It was an over-reaction prompted by society’s current irrationally punishing impulse towards anything deemed politically incorrect.

But it was The View panel’s indignant insistence that Sterling be made to abjectly apologize that represented the most disturbing aspect of PC. Haven’t any of the people demanding such apologies read the classic novel Darkness at Noon? In that book, Arthur Koestler vividly shows how tyranny was maintained in Stalinist Russia, and by extension, in all countries in which dictatorships prevail. People in Koestler’s world must be on guard against making even the most casual remarks in private that might be construed as critical of the current regime. Close friends and even family members can’t be trusted not to report them for such dissidence in order to gain credit with the powers that be for bringing noncompliance to light. After a transgression is revealed, the offending party is brought before a tribunal, is made to confess and to abjectly apologize for betraying the principles of the regime. After a sufficient public show has been made of the offending individual’s immiseration, that individual is brought into a back room and shot.

Such tactics prevailed in Russia even after Stalin’s era. They were also Mao’s way, Hitler’s way, and the way of almost all corrupt dictatorships around the world. Even those who haven’t read books such as Darkness at Noon are surely aware of these methods that dictators use to maintain power. Is that really the way advocates of political correctness would have America go? Do they really want us to make a common practice of encouraging the outing of people for the stupid remarks they make in private – then forcing these people to publicly wring their hands in apology and deposing them from whatever career success they might be having?

I don’t think that’s the American way. In order to maintain ourselves as “the land of the free,” people must be allowed to say anything they want to say, anywhere they want to say it, including the most stupid, insensitive things - as long as they don’t go beyond the very specific boundaries that the Supreme Court has established. Those boundaries include the famous injunction against yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater (when there is no fire). The Court also restricts what is regarded as “fighting words” That is speech addressed directly to an individual or to a group that a reasonable person can predict would incite an immediate, violent physical response from that individual or group. This clearly would not include a whispered request not to bring any “blacks” to a game, any more than it would include a whispered, personal request not to bring any “fat chicks,” any “Lithuanians,” or any “short people.” A bent toward such exclusions is indeed most often the sign of a limited, boring person, someone from whom intelligent individuals might want to dissociate themselves. But it cannot be the basis for any officially punitive action.

Furthermore, contrary to popular opinion, the U.S. has no laws against “hate speech.” As a recoil from horrific historic developments, some countries such as Germany now do have strict laws against publicly uttering defamatory remarks. It can even be punishable for a German citizen to anywhere call members of certain groups “freeloaders.” But there are no such restrictions in the U.S. Americans are free in theory, and should be free in practice, from official repercussions - no matter how mean and defamatory their remarks.

But there are more things wrong with demoting, firing, or demanding apologies from individuals who have vented their prejudices, besides the fact that it sets us on the slippery slope to tyranny. Another problem with such enforcements is that they don’t accomplish what they claim to want to accomplish. Making people apologize for racially insensitive words and deeds, or in fact for outright racism - never reforms these people. It doesn’t awaken them to the error of their ways. Forced apologies merely make hypocrites of them.

Beyond that, there’s a problem with these apologies in that they are being extracted in a lopsided way. There’s an inherent inequality in the way in which the PC society is trying to enforce equality. While white people are severely taken to task for any hint of insensitivity or offense to blacks, the reverse is not true. There is not the same level of criticism directed at anyone who makes defamatory remarks aimed at white people as white people – or indeed, until recently, remarks demeaning women. Quite the contrary. Hip-hop artists and rappers such as Snoop Dogg have become the darlings of the intellectual set, despite, or perhaps because of, their misogyny and racism. Snoop Dogg was invited to the White House as a result of President and Mrs. Obama’s enthusiasm for him. Martha Stewart appeared in a friendly roast of him where she was challenged to prove she could get as down and dirty as Snoop himself. (Stewart was generally approved as rising to the occasion.)

Essayist Theodore Dalrymple has observed how people used to try to imitate their betters, and often appeared ludicrous in the attempt. Now, the “betters” strain to imitate the worst, the most violent and vulgar elements of society. These wannabes appear equally as ludicrous in the attempt. While Don Sterling is stripped of his team ownership for his sotto voce request not to bring any blacks to the game – white fans of gangsta rap are bouncing in presumed energetic enjoyment of lyrics such as those by Dead Prez -

We gonna order take out and when we see the driver
We gonna stick the 25 up in his face......
White boy in the wrong place at the right time
Soon as the car door open up he mine
We roll up quick and put the pistol to his nose
By the look on his face he probably shitted in his clothes

The fashion for excusing, justifying, and hopping on the bandwagon of the rap culture goes beyond mere imitation and feigned, fawning enjoyment though. The internet is filled with professorial individuals interpreting the lyrics of Chance the Rapper and Snoop Dogg. These translations of rap lyrics by both black and white writers often include the imputation of profundity and actual genius to the songs under consideration. For example, there’s Chance the Rapper’s “Same Drugs” -

We don't do the same drugs no more
We don't do the, we don't do the same drugs, do the same drugs no more
Cause she don't do the same drugs no more
We don't do the, we don't do the same drugs, do the same drugs no more

When did you change?
Wendy you've aged
I thought you'd never grow up
I thought you'd never
Window closed, Wendy got old
I was too late, I was too late
A shadow of what I once was

Critics agree with Chance that the song isn’t about drugs. According to them, it’s a perceptive take on how Chance and his girlfriend aren’t on the same page anymore. What’s more, they hear the lyrics echoing the plaintive regrets of a Peter Pan-like reluctance to ever grow up. They find touching metaphor and literary synecdoche in the song.

Critics similarly praise the “literary legerdemain, the puns, the playfulness, and the sheer genius” of Snoop Dogg’s lyrics, such as those of his biggest hit, “Gin and Juice” –

Later on that day, my homey
Dr. Dre came through with a gang of Tanqueray
And a fat ass J of some bubonic chronic
That made me choke, shit, this ain't no joke

I had to back up off of it and sit my cup down
Tanqueray and chronic, yeah, I'm fucked up now
But it ain't no stoppin', I'm still poppin'
Dre got some bitches from the city of Compton

To serve me, not with a cherry on top
'Cause when I bust my nut, I'm raisin' up off the cot
Don't get upset girl, that's just how it goes
I don't love you ho's, I'm out the do' and I'll be

Rollin' down the street, smokin' endo
Sippin' on gin and juice, laid back
With my mind on my money

And money on my mind…

One critic again found telling metaphor here, metonymy and a loose-limbed, compelling chronicle of someone rolling breezily through life.

My goodness. Metonymy, synecdoche, playfulness, ingenious punning. It all puts the likes of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin to shame. Apparently, such dead white songwriters can’t hold a candle to these modern hip-hop artists. Except, I say – “The Emperor has no clothes! The Emperor has no clothes! The Emperor has no clothes!”

This straining to impute brilliance to so many rappers who are just peeling off random fragments of these-mean-streets vernacular is a shameful display of PC. That’s all the more so because such praise is not equally applied to both white and black performers coming from their respective colloquial cultures. While ghetto performers are praised in intellectual circles, the predominantly white country music performers are seldom seen as displaying any literary genius, playfulness, or astute use of metaphor. Lyrics such as “I’ve got friends in low places,” and “My baby is American-made, born and bred in the U.S.A.” are looked upon with sneering condescension or else ignored altogether by the politically correct.      

Most professorial people, when discussing music, are quick to spurn country music. If they don’t always go quite so far as to instead claim deep enjoyment of Snoop Dogg, they certainly impress upon listeners their appreciation of jazz, the kind of jazz that comes from the soul of the black experience. Forget about the soul of the Appalachian auto mechanic. Such a person ostensibly has no soul.

Despite Ken Burns’ efforts to confer a certain respectability on country folk music by tracing its historical context in his recent PBS series, it’s unlikely that any of the intellectual elite will be moved to embrace it. Political correctness will continue to demand that they dismiss its corn pone whiteness in favor of Snoop Dogg’s presumed gritty, anarchic cogency.

The trouble is, this kind of PC pressure leads people to abandon all standards, all striving towards goodness in art and in personal conduct. They excuse and even affirm any violent, misogynistic, racist attitude when voiced by blacks. They continue to see profundity where there is only mediocrity. They betray what likely would be their true feelings and their essential humanity in favor of their forced affirmation of sentiments such as:

“Kill the white people; we gonna make them hurt; kill the white people; but buy my record first; ha, ha, ha.” (Apache, Time Warner) – or

“It’s time to rob and mob and break the white man off something lovely.” (Dr Dre, Time Warner)

Any white performer singing such lyrics with the word “black” replacing “white” would not be praised; he would be condemned.

But the final problem with PC is that it constrains all normal, friendly human relations. It puts everyone on a hair trigger, cocked to take offense or to accuse the other of some PC infraction. Slamming people out of a social circle because of a narrow expression deemed to be non-PC hardly helps to create a less prejudiced, more welcoming atmosphere. You can’t fight for inclusion by excluding people at the drop of a hat.

I have personally been both the recipient and the perpetrator of such PC flash-over. Quite a few years ago (the reign of PC has been going on for some time), I invited a woman from the Libertarian Party over for lunch. During the brief contact I’d had with her at Libertarian meetings, she’d voiced an interesting, informed mix of conservative/liberal ideas that were the best of what I thought Libertarian philosophy should be. I felt the woman might be good friendship material, someone to cultivate. Unfortunately, our lunch went cold very soon.

We happened to get on the subject of the Chicago public school system and the woman mentioned the fact that well over a third of elementary school students in the City were black. I registered surprise at this. Indeed, I was amazed. The woman angrily asked me why that should matter so much to me. I could see she had interpreted my astonishment as dismay – a skinhead’s revulsion at the thought of being surrounded by black faces, a fear of being outnumbered by “the enemy.”

Actually, my surprise over the statistic had an altogether different cause. I’d recently been at a meeting of a local teachers’ association and I recalled that almost all the teachers there had been white. So I wondered - if so many students in the system were black, why weren’t there more black teachers?

But the bad impression I’d left was irrevocable. It would have been useless for me to explain. Anything I said would have come off as backpedaling justification. We finished our lunch in stony politeness. The only other time I ever heard from the woman was when I received a form notice inviting me to a gathering at her house to stuff envelopes for the coming campaign.

But there were times when I was the rush-to-judgement accuser. I remember the last time I so heartily indulged in that form of haughty appraisal. I don’t exactly remember what had provoked my censure, but I was walking down the street telling my companion how stupid someone I’d met had obviously been because that person had uttered a slur against some other race or ethnic group. To my tirade I added the cliché observation that “People always seem to need to feel superior to some other group. They sense their own inherent inferiority, so they have to fish around for some way to feel superior. They really are inferior though,” I pronounced.

My companion, older and wiser than I was – winked at me and said, “It’s enough to make you feel superior, isn’t it.”

“Epiphany” is a much over-used word, but I had an epiphany at that moment. Yes! What I had really been doing with my little speech was feeling superior to all those benighted others who were prone to making prejudiced, non-PC remarks. Of course there are standards that should be maintained. I’m not someone who believes all opinions are equally valid or that all actions should be allowed. Certainly, anyone poised to make some violent attack against the target of his or her prejudices should be stopped. But indignant rants such as the one I made that day against people who have simply voiced stereotyping remarks - is not the way to change things for the better. My criticism, even if I’d made it directly to the offending parties, would certainly not have turned anyone into a more loving human being. I knew that. So I’d indulged in that criticism merely for the purpose of getting a charge. I was energizing myself with a sense of my own superiority and I was intent on demonstrating that superiority to others.

I realized then that that’s what most PC is about. It’s self-serving. Its only purpose and its only result is to make a display of how much better the accuser is than all those left-in-the-dirt others. The critic gets to feel oh-so-superior to those who feel superior to black people, or Lithuanians, or short people, etc., etc.

If anyone truly wants to bring about a more welcoming, inclusive society, declaring others to be stupid, prejudiced Neanderthals is not the way to do it. Countering other people’s name-calling with name-calling of one’s own won’t accomplish anything. If will only tend to entrench those other people in their prejudices. So how could you go about changing others’ opinions? How would it be possible to deflate others’ prejudices?

Someone posed just that question in the Quora forum recently and Michael McFadden gave an interesting, reasoned answer. He suggested that you give people a chance to simply listen to a different idea. Give them a chance to listen - quietly, alone, unsurrounded by challenge. Any personal confrontation will put others on the defensive, forcing them to defend, justify, retort, and up the ante of hatred. But just give them a chance to sit silently exposed to a better way.

For example, if someone has notoriously been spouting some negative stereotypes about Jewish people, you might give her a ticket to a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank. That shouldn’t be done as obvious rebuttal to her floating anti-Semitism. Just present the theater ticket as a gift to a popular production that has been legitimately praised by critics. Similarly give someone who has expressed a fear of black people moving into his neighborhood a ticket to a production of A Raisin in the Sun, the acclaimed Lorraine Hansberry play about a black family moving into a white neighborhood. On the other side of the coin, if a black person seems locked into characterizing “poor white trash” as his enemy, you might give him a DVD of the documentary Harlan County USA. That documentary shows the struggles of Kentucky coal miners to wring some safety measures and a living wage out of the mine owners. In the same vein, literally, the John Sayles’ documentary Matewan shows West Virginia coal miners initially clashing with the black men brought in as “scabs” to break their efforts to unionize. But ultimately the blacks and whites join forces to make the mines less deadly places. Moving along to another kind of non-PC attitude, you might give the man who is ever-ready with a sexist joke a DVD set of the TV miniseries Human Trafficking. This dramatization graphically shows how a young Czech mother thinks she has finally found love only to be brutally initiated into the sex slave trade.

While using these kinds of gifts, the non-PC individuals can sit alone in the dark, watching, listening, without any pressure to feel or to react a certain way. Their mental pores can open and in this unthreatening atmosphere they can perhaps relax into learning something new, into feeling a different way. Their presumed nemeses can be humanized. Perhaps the recipients of such gifts can be moved off their set point of prejudice to see that we all have a common struggle to make this a better, kinder world.

Self-important denunciations of those deemed to have broken PC rules won’t do anything to accomplish such a goal. Political correctness becomes like a barbed wire fence between people. Until or unless people prove themselves to be imminently dangerous or riddled with truly homicidal anger, we should approach them with understanding – and perhaps more. Perhaps we should even go so far as to follow Goethe’s advice when he wrote that the only opinion worth voicing about the choices of others is one that springs from “a certain… enthusiasm, or from a loving interest in the person… All else is vanity.”

Taking a Dim View - Part II

In Part I of this series, I mentioned how I make a point of watching The View as often as possible. The women are well-informed about many facets of the political/social scene that I don’t follow on my own. However, the women consistently demonstrate blind spots in their discussions. In the previous essay, I focused on how many lapses occurred in the panel members’ thinking around the issue of abortion. Here I discuss how panel members fail to see the inconsistencies in their attitude toward celebrating different gender, ethnic, and social identities.

The women of The View are especially eager to demonstrate how they are in full support of the “coming out” of all those with non-conforming sexual orientations. But their philosophy of acceptance is expansive. They also assert their belief that we should all be able to demonstrate and celebrate our true selves (assuming our true selves don’t involve doing harm to others). The days of having to dissemble are over, no matter what our problems or propensities.

The View panel members give a warm welcome to individuals such as RuPaul, the flamboyant gender non-specific celebrity. They laughingly suggest that Chance the Rapper run for President, so cogent did they find his narrative songs about life in “the hood.” They have praised authors and celebrities for making public the details of their struggles with conditions such as alcoholism, addiction, cancer, HIV, and mental illness. Discussion of all these problems used to be taboo. People coping with them had to scuttle veiled through the twilight. They had to live as pariahs. But now they can come forward into the full light of day and talk openly about these aspects of their lives. They are freed to congratulate themselves on letting it all hang out without any need to gloss over any of the gritty reality of their lives. Acceptance and, above all, self-acceptance, is the order of the day.

People who have the kind of difference that might have evoked schoolyard bullying or that might once have gotten them hidden away in attics - can now come forth and parade in all their glory. This is a good thing - although I sometimes wish that people who never got addicted in the first place might be applauded as heartily as those who beat their addictions. Still, I’m glad to join in, to get in the spirit of appreciating the world in all its diversity. We should all be unabashed, able to celebrate the way we’ve come, the different paths we’ve taken in life (again assuming we’re not committed to trampling over others in the process). The women of The View are right to be waving from the floats of these new festivals of self-regard.

Except, except - a glaring hypocrisy rears its head at the end of many of their shows. At least once a week, The View concludes with a “View Your Deal” segment featuring sales on all sorts of accessories such as cosmetics. As the designated panel member enthuses over the lipstick, the mascara, and the wrinkle-erase products in the latter category, it seems to me she betrays all the principles she might have been espousing just moments before. “Oh, that’s what I need!” she’ll purr over some touch-up product that claims to hide your gray hairs, or temporarily suppress those bags under your eyes, or add the kind of glow to your cheeks that your body no longer naturally produces.

Other shows are also notable for contradicting in the second half of their programs all the reassurances they had issued in the first half. Dr. Phil might finish counseling a woman who had feelings of worthlessness instilled in her by constantly belittling parents. Dr. Phil will again stump for the philosophy that we should all reach a point where we let the negative opinions of others roll off our backs. We should instead recognize what makes us of unique value in the world and we should make our lives about contributing those unique gifts. We shouldn’t waste time remaking ourselves in attempts to satisfy other people’s half-baked judgments.

After this ringing encouragement to be true to ourselves - segue to Robin McGraw and a tray full of her new line of Revelation cosmetics wheeled onstage. Dr. Phil’s wife comes out aggressively promoting these products, perhaps even using the woman from the first part of the show to illustrate the transformations that the Revelation skin care brand can create. Robin will daub foundation, skin toner, and a variety of other camouflaging substances on the woman’s face, telling her how much younger and more refreshed she’ll look with the use of these products. “And we all feel so much more confident when we are looking our best,” Robin will soft pedal her hard sell. (By “best,” Robin of course means “different.”)

Sometimes the contradiction gets even more startling. I’m struck by the many about-faces that have occurred on Oprah’s shows. Oprah might spend the first part of a program talking with an anorexic girl and a counselor. They will agree that part of the cause of this kind of body dysmorphic disorder is often that the sufferer has been raised with an emphasis on perfection. The girl learns to push herself to achieve at levels that can’t be sustained. When she fails, she compensates by losing weight, something that she can continue to control. While one can’t always come in first at a track meet, one can always lose another half-pound by starving oneself or by throwing up.

Then Oprah will also cite how out society’s obsession with being slim contributes to the anorexia epidemic. Women especially have a lot of pressure put on them to have the bodies of slim, athletic teenagers throughout their lives. Fat girls are “dogs” who don’t get dates. Fat women are overlooked altogether. Thinness is sexually fetishized in this society. Oprah always chimes in her disapproval of this attitude. She leads audiences to believe that she might champion a fight against this kind of attitude that puts such emphasis on being girlishly skinny.

Yet throughout her career, Oprah has been preoccupied with dieting! She has come out with diet foods, diet regimens – diet, diet, diet. Then when diets don’t work, Oprah goes to extreme lengths to make herself look artificially thinner. The pictures of her that appear on the cover of each month of her O Magazine are usually heavily photoshopped or airbrushed. In addition, Oprah is girdled to the hilt, giving evidence of routinely going through an even more painful process than Scarlett O’Hara did as her maid cinched her corset in an attempt to achieve the 18-inch waist she had before giving birth. Where not even airbrushing or girdling can do the trick, headline blurbs are judiciously placed to hide any remaining bulges on Oprah’s picture. Every cover of O Magazine, every one of Oprah’s important public appearances, is a masterpiece of topiary art with Oprah being pruned, staked, and contorted into an artificial shape.

But her shows often have contained a further betrayal of her philosophy of “Eat, Pray, Love” – of “Celebrate the Real You.” After the segment on anorexia is wrapped up, Oprah sometimes will parade the results of the makeovers to which she treated some members of her audience. Formerly distinctive-looking, workaday women (usually women) will be brought out, now all dolled up into fashion uniformity, now sometimes teetering a bit in high heels.

Incidentally, Oprah herself once inadvertently acknowledged how anti-feminist and handicapping such heels can be. When one of her celebrity guests admitted that she couldn’t walk from the wings to the stage in such heels and only put them on once she was seated on stage and the camera was ready to roll - Oprah exulted that she could do better. With jolly triumph, Oprah said, “I can walk on stage. I wasn’t always sure I could do it, but I make it!” It’s hard to see how women are being liberated when they regard it as a supreme achievement to be able to walk a few yards in the requisite stiletto heels. Meanwhile, we wonder at and deplore how the Chinese upper class used to bind women’s feet in order to keep them to sexually appealing baby-steps.

At any rate, Oprah’s made-over audience members now stand on stage posing in their new get-ups. The audience members gasp in approval. Everyone applauds. The women no longer look their age, their weight, or their experience. All those distinguishing features have been concealed. The women have been cinched, pinched, and painted. They’ve been re-branded, re-fashioned into new identities.

So, what are we to conclude from all this? We conclude that it’s good to celebrate yourself if you’re gay, ghetto, struggling with mental illness, addiction, or myriads of other problems. In all such cases, you are invited to come out and shout.

BUT – if you are not what’s considered attractive (especially if you’re a woman), or if you are over 30 (especially if you’re a woman) – then it’s not okay to celebrate yourself as you are. Rather, in those cases, its incumbent upon you to spend your days glossing it over, hiding it, disguising it, lying about it, denying it. You must make yourself up and make yourself over. And if you don’t - you should be ashamed of yourself!

Taking a Dim View - How the Women of The View Get It Wrong - Part I

I make a point of watching The View as often as possible. The women are well-informed about Who’s Who in Washington. They follow the devious paths of Washington officials in a way that I’d never have been able to track myself. The women also dish on aspects of popular culture and celebrity scandal that likely touch on personal issues affecting many viewers.

However, the women consistently demonstrate blind spots in their discussions. Often, these blind spots are the result of their unquestioning acceptance of prevailing political philosophy, or of their partially unconscious acceptance of the current dictates of political correctness. These lapses in the women’s conversation often leave me with a trailing sadness. There’s so much more that could be said, that should be said – but that now gets smothered in the fog of political cliché.

The women of The View aren’t the only ones who suffer from tunnel vision. Oprah and her guests, and in fact the casts of most talk shows are almost all similarly limited. But The View provides the handiest current example of shallow political platitude.

In the following essay I point out one of the issues that leave the women blank on a number of points. That’s the issue of abortion. I’ll follow with a couple of other essays dealing with other issues where I feel something significant gets left out of their considerations. In all these instances, I wish the women of The View had taken a larger view.

In discussing abortion rights, a majority of the panel felt that women owned their bodies and should therefore have complete say over what to do with those bodies. These panel members believed that laws restricting women’s right to have abortions were patent sexism, the kind of gender bias that gets directed solely against women. One member of the panel posed the question, “Can you think of any instance in U.S. history in which legislation was passed dictating what MEN should do with their bodies?” The women looked at each other, for once silenced and stumped in unison. No one could think of any legislation that had ever affected men’s rights over their bodies, especially over their reproductive rights.

Well, one could get technical and say that almost all laws dictate what men and women can do with their bodies. For example, the most basic laws against committing murder dictate that you cannot hold a loaded gun in your hand, extend your arm, point the gun at some unsuspecting person’s back, and intentionally flex your fingers in such a way that you pull the trigger of the gun. But I know that’s not what the women meant.

However, even when one sticks to the spirit of the question the women were asking, their inability to come up with a single example of men being told what to do with their bodies shows some real lacunae in their knowledge and thinking.

There have been very specific laws passed that included men in their specifications regarding reproductive rights. The notorious sterilization laws that many States enacted in the early part of the 1900’s, and that were sometimes enforced through the 1970’s and 1980’s, certainly represent an interference with both men’s and women’s control over their own bodies.

These laws were enacted as the result of a nation-wide (and indeed world-wide) enthusiasm for the principles of eugenics. Following in the wake of the “survival of the fittest” interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, many eugenics societies formed to advocate compulsory sterilization of the feeble-minded, the criminally inclined, the chronically ill, the chronically shiftless and unemployed, and also of unwanted immigrants as well as of unwanted aboriginals. Wikipedia presents a good summary of the history of “Eugenics in the United States.” There it tells how:

“In 1907, Indiana passed the first eugenics-based compulsory sterilization law in the world. Thirty U.S. states would soon follow their lead… The U.S. Supreme Court, in Buck v Bell, upheld the constitutionality of the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924, allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.”

Even so generally humanist a jurist as Oliver Wendell Holmes supported the Virginia sterilization law, famously asserting “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” And so Carrie Buck was sterilized.

One can see the irony of these shifting attitudes towards abortion. The eugenics laws were aimed at preventing births (through enforced sterilizations and abortions), while modern laws are tending to require all pregnant women to give birth. Autre temps, autre moeurs.

Enthusiasm for the eugenics laws waned somewhat in the U.S. in the 1940s when people became aware that the principles behind eugenics had been central to Nazi philosophy and lay at the base of the extermination of six million people. However, Buck v Bell has never been overturned, and instances of enforced sterilizations continued until quite recently.

It’s true that many more women than men were sterilized under these laws. Some of this was due to raw sexism. It stemmed from a Jack the Ripper-style abhorrence of “promiscuous women” and a barely concealed intent to punish them. But also, the fact that more women were sterilized than men often had to do with simple calculations of population control. It’s women’s fertility that is the determining factor in how many babies will be born.

Nevertheless, of the 64,000+ individuals forced to be sterilized or sterilized without sufficiently informed consent - at least several thousand were men. And in theory, the laws were generally written to apply to men and women equally. This is a significant chapter in American history that the women of The View seemed strangely ignorant of when they couldn’t think of a single instance when laws were enacted impinging on men’s control over their bodies and their ability to procreate.

There was a still larger blind spot in the women’s overview of American history though. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, the question on every young man’s mind was whether or not his “number would be called.” Almost every young man was on tenterhooks. Would he be drafted to go to Viet Nam? Would he be required to expose himself to being maimed or killed in a foreign jungle? I would call any draft a very definite legislative impingement on men’s ability to do what they wanted with their bodies. How could The View women forget about that?

Getting back to the question of how strict anti-abortion laws unequally oppress women though – The View panel consistently fails to consider the obverse of that point. In virtually all countries that have more liberal abortion laws, that is, in countries that allow abortions under a wide range of circumstances – the fetuses that get disproportionately aborted are female fetuses. There is still a virtually universal preference for male babies. The result of the “one couple, one baby” policy that prevailed in China has been widely publicized. When a woman gave birth to a female child, that child was often put up for adoption, or, more brutally, was left to die by the roadside or was covertly killed outright at the moment she appeared. Ahem, another still birth, miscarriage, etc. These erasures allowed couples to try again and hope for the better luck of a male child the next time.

As it became possible to more readily determine the sex of a baby in utero, it was overwhelmingly females who were aborted. But that is true even in Western countries that are considered to be past such obvious sexism. Doctors in Britain report that when, after an ultra-sound, a woman requests an abortion – it is more often than not a female who gets aborted.

So in a way that the women of The View don’t probe deeply enough to consider – it’s a no-win situation for women. If most abortions are outlawed, women are forced to have children they neither want nor can afford. But if abortions are readily available, it’s disproportionately females who are denied life.

There are still a few other crucial points that are rarely taken into account as talk show panel members ping-pong the same old clichés about abortion – women’s rights; the right to life; women’s rights; the right to life…. I discussed one of these other ignored aspects of the debate in my previous Blog post entitled “The False Premise of the Abortion Debate.” The point of that essay was that while many are insisting on women’s right to have abortions, they neglect to consider ways in which women might be given the precedent right not to have sex. In that previous Blog, I maintained that most women usually don’t feel such a compelling urge to have sex, that they must have it NOW, no matter what the consequences.

Contrary to the way in which women are portrayed in the movies, most often women are not so urgently desirous that they have to rip off their partner’s clothes as soon as they get in the door. This is a far bigger misrepresentation of women’s true feelings than the often-cited Victorian assumption that women were naturally reticent. The truth is that women most often have sex only in order to accommodate men’s urgency. A woman has sex in hopes of “keeping” her man, of bonding him to her so that deeper feelings might have time to flourish. If women had their way, if they had just their own wishes to consider - they would tend to have sex only if and when they were ready to accept that a child might be the result. However, as a practical matter, women aren’t given that right to say “NO” to sex, and few people are currently working to give them, not so much that right, but that ability, in the course of ordinary romantic relationships.

Then there is still another aspect of the abortion debate that the women of The View fail to consider. Most “Right to Choose” advocates talk about how women should be allowed to “own their bodies.” But this idea of ownership is disturbing. In most modern liberal contexts, ownership has come to have some negative connotations. It’s usually supposed that one can only rightly own a thing, not a person. What made slavery especially abhorrent was that it necessarily made things out of the actual human beings who were being bought, sold, and owned. It reduced human beings to mere items of inventory.

If one considers that ownership can only be exercised on a “thing,” it doesn’t matter whether you are talking about owning other people – or yourself. Both should be seen as equally repugnant.

Many individuals are now calling for reconsidering that usage even as it applies to animals, plants, and all the earth’s resources. The rise of factory farming makes it especially apparent how depreciating the concept of ownership can be. Creatures who should rightfully be treated with respect, with an awareness of and a sense of awe at the singular, miraculous life force that fills them – are instead brutalized and considered only as commodities under the farm’s regime of ownership.

Those who are fighting for reform of the factory farm system often point to the traditional Native American philosophy as an example of how life and all of earth’s resources should be regarded. Native Americans did not strictly apply the concept of ownership to the animals they hunted for food, or to the land’s bounty in general. White people’s attempts to enforce the concept of private ownership on them were perhaps responsible, more than any other depredations, for disorienting and dispiriting the Native American population. The modern idea that each individual should own himself or herself would have been even more profoundly alienating to Native Americans.

But aside from this broadly problematic application of the term “ownership,” it should also be remembered that ownership doesn’t mean one can do exactly as one wishes with one’s property. The “Right to Choose” faction of the abortion debate seems to imply that by granting women the right to claim ownership over their own bodies, the women can be granted total freedom to do whatever they want with their bodies. But ownership almost never grants any such carte blanche. Indeed, ownership of something usually carries with it a heavy burden of responsibility, restriction, and broad conservatorship. The owner of an apartment building can’t deny African Americans the right to rent there based on their race; the owner of a chemical factory can’t dump toxic waste, even on company property. Just because you own something doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with it – and that includes your own body.

There’s one further aspect of the idea that each of us owns our bodies that actually flies against enlightened philosophy. Such a concept of ownership evokes the old Cartesian dualism that modern science has larger discredited. By saying “I own my body,” you imply that there are two separate entities involved in your personhood. There is an immaterial mind controlling a material corpus. There is the owner and the owned inhabiting you. Who is this owner, the one who assumes such haughty proprietorial rights?

Contrary to the idea that there is such a schism constituting each of us, now most science falls on the side of there being only one unified entity comprising each of us, and that entity is an interactive physical network. The processes that give rise to all thoughts, including thoughts each person has about his or her own identity - are chemical, electrical processes at work in a real, material substrate. The person and the thought are one. We are all both indivisibly the singer and the song.

It’s true that these metaphysical considerations might seem to be a bit rarified for daytime TV. Talk shows are meant to be entertaining as well as informative. But the women of The View do audiences a disservice by ignoring these aspects of the abortion debate altogether. The truth is – men have been legally denied control over reproductive capacity and over their lives as a whole. Ready access to abortions can work against the interests of females. Pregnancies are more the result of men’s urgency than of women’s real desires, with the latter being subordinated once again. By trapping women into adopting the idea of a robber baron’s right of ownership - they are being trapped into a limiting falsehood.

This is just one of the issues on which talk shows fall short of taking a larger view. In a couple of follow-up essays, I’ll cite other ways in which I wish talk shows would step outside the box of the usual political cliché and open the discussion to wider, wilder fields of thought.

Going in Blackface/Going in Drag

Having dressed up in blackface should be the basis for less criticism than it is currently receiving, and, at the same time, it should be the basis for a broader criticism.

The issue of white people appearing in blackface has become current as the old schoolbooks of various celebrities and political figures become easily available to view and to examine for reprehensible leanings the individuals might have manifested as young people. I do believe that going to a frat party dressed in a caricature of “blackness” reflected a certain coarseness and thoughtlessness at the time. I don’t however think that people who did that should be demoted from their present jobs or even that that they should be made to abjectly apologize. There are likely so many other more simpleton vulgarities and more actual cruelties that they (and that we all) have perpetrated along the way. There were worse things done that people should apologize for and that should be taken into account when evaluating anyone’s current claim to status and respect.

However, it is sometimes hard not to suspect that a person who would do such a thing is fundamentally flawed – in these cases, fundamentally racist. I remember being shocked years ago when Candice Bergen appeared on David Letterman’s show, obliviously explaining how she enjoyed dressing up her dogs. She congratulated herself on one costume she thought she’d been particularly ingenious about contriving. She’d dressed her dog as “a Jew,” complete with cute “little yarmulke and everything.”

In general, Candice Bergen has solid credentials as a liberal, a champion of all good causes aimed at advancing equality for minority groups. That particular foray into doggie dress-up seems to have just represented a blind spot, or as people say now, an instance of being “tone deaf.” So it likely was with many people who went to bygone costume parties in blackface or who played into similar racial/ethnic stereotypes with their costumes. While some might have been boors and/or racists, many more were probably just suffering from some youthful lapse of sensitivity.

But this current focus on who might have come to a high school party in blackface has spread into a more generic criticism of a large part of American musical tradition, namely the tradition of the minstrel show. For the purposes of these shows, white performers corked up and appeared singing in blackface. Some commentators have cast back and seen in these shows the ultimate racist offense to black people.

Well, not so fast. It’s true that many old-time entertainments featured mocking caricatures of African Americans. There was the shuffling, the ogle-eyed stupefaction, and the slurping consumption of watermelon slices. But more often, minstrel shows didn’t fall back on such demeaning stereotypes. The performers more often simply appeared in blackface, singing songs that featured the themes and rhythms of black Southern music. Much of the intent of these performances was not cruel caricature, but just the opposite. However much many whites discriminated against blacks – black people were acknowledged as being supreme when it came to making music. The whites wanted to ride on the coattails of this strain of creativity. So they imitated blacks to the extent of appearing in blackface and singing songs that cast back to a sentimentally re-imagined plantation life, or to rural and urban birth-of-the-blues settings.

Ken Burns emphasized these less reprehensible roots of minstrel shows in his recent “Country Music” history series. He pointed out how white musicians from Appalachia and from other rural backgrounds staged minstrel shows as a way of merging their music-making into the older, more earthy musical laments and revels coming out of the African American experience. The white country folk added their twang to the music, but their performances were clearly meant to tap into the roots of African American styles.

This impulse on the part of whites to participate in the creative success of black musicians was carried a step further by the predominantly Jewish entertainers who came to this country from Eastern Europe. There was very little impulse to take pride in one’s European ancestry then. Immigrants were often more interested in denying their heritage than in searching for it. The goal of most recent immigrants, and especially of their children, was to become AMERICAN. They aspired above all else to shed any remaining traces of the shtetls their parents came from and to thoroughly assimilate into the American way of life.

They wanted not only to assimilate, but to simulate all aspects of what they perceived as being typically American. When they went out onto the wider stage of American life as musical performers, the Jewish entertainers in particular wanted to adopt what they regarded as the most authentic, the most quintessentially American styles. To many of them, that automatically meant assuming black rhythms, black appearances. So they performed in minstrel shows and solo in blackface. It was a way of making their music evoke what was considered to be America’s most distinctive contribution to music. It was a way, not of mocking blacks, but of identifying with them. Yes, sometimes the subtext of minstrel shows was to present black people to white audiences as harmless, happy naïfs. But in a larger sense, many of the minstrel shows could actually be seen as tribute performances.

Many of the Jewish performers who are remembered today did turns in blackface. There was George Jessel, Eddie Cantor, and above all - there was Al Jolson. Under the YouTube pictures available of his performances in blackface, most of the comments are favorable, recalling Jolson as the “World’s Greatest Entertainer.” However, a minority of comments condemn such performances as utter racism. But these critics are getting it wrong. That’s especially true when those submitting comments assume Jolson himself must have been an unconscionable racist, akin to the White Supremacists of today, using his act as a way of showing contempt for black people. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth.

Al Jolson had many character flaws, as documented by his biographers. His enormous ego caused him to predictably upstage other performers and to undermine rivals in every way possible. He was also a philanderer and a neglectful husband. However, the one area in which he was sterling, outside of his performing talent – was in the area of race relations. It’s acknowledged that he did more than perhaps any other performer of his era to promote black entertainers. He breezed into hotels and venues with the irresistible assumption that all black members of his troupe would get equal accommodations and treatment. The energy of his assumptions helped black performers in his orbit be appreciated on an equal footing with whites.

This can most notably be seen in the movie that he largely produced and directed, Hallelujah, I’m a Bum. He chose Edgar Connor, a relatively little-known black actor, as his co-star in the movie. The two of them sing their way through the vicissitudes they face, as pals. What’s most interesting about this partnering is how unself-conscious it is. There’s no sense in which it looks as if Jolson is being paternalistic in advancing Connor, as if he is inwardly congratulating himself on his liberal beneficence in promoting Connor’s career. There’s just an implicit equality and comradeship between the two of them on screen, something that the viewer can feel reflected Jolson’s attitudes off-screen as well. Those who cite Tony Curtis’ and Sidney Poitier’s partnering in The Defiant Ones as a trailblazing depiction of ultimate friendship between a black man and a white man on screen, forget that that trail had already been blazed by Jolson and Connor.

So there was nothing invariably racist about performers appearing in blackface in the latter part of the 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th century. Commentators who today would automatically condemn those who performed in minstrel shows or anywhere in blackface are missing a few pages of meanings in American history.

However, at the beginning of this essay, I said that while those who have appeared in blackface don’t always deserve to be criticized as utter racists, I also said that there’s a sense in which appearing in blackface should be criticized in a wider context.

Growing up, I did tend to at least temporarily think less of any classmate or acquaintance who came to a costume party in blackface. But I was equally put-off by those men who chose to dress-up as women for these occasions. That’s because almost invariably, these revelers’ appearances were cruel, mocking caricatures of womanhood. The costume representing femininity almost always consisted of four elements: a big-hair blonde wig, inch-long dark eyelashes, stiletto heels, and, above all else, HUGE false bosoms. The party-goer would sashay into the room bouncing these bosoms to the accompaniment of some course mammary humor, and then would spend the evening acting like a flirtatious, ditzy embodiment of a blonde joke. That’s what being a woman obviously reduced to in the eyes of these people.

As a woman, I was offended by this cheap, contemptuous representation of womanhood – for the same reason that Native Americans are offended by people who rain-dance into parties with a feather and a war whoop – for the same reason that Jews are offended by either humans (or dogs) dressed up in payot (sidelocks) and yarmulke – for the same reason that black people are offended by those who shuffle and jive into frat parties and Halloween parties dressed in blackface. The effect of such costumes is not to identify with the kind of person being portrayed. It’s not to become like that person in the way a girl might feel she’s becoming a princess or a ballet dancer when she dresses in flowing gown or tutu. Instead, the effect of many of the people who arrive at costume parties in these types of blackface, war-paint, be-bosomed outfits is indeed sometimes to distance themselves from such “other” lesser beings. It’s to reduce and demean those others into stereotypes, to make them the butt of a big, broad joke.

So while I don’t think people who have dressed up in these caricatures should have forced apologies wrung out of them, I do wish liberal critics of this behavior would be more inclusive, more consistent in their reproach. If they criticize those puerile party-goers who dressed in blackface in the past – why don’t they as roundly criticize those who continue even into the present day to dress-up as grotesquely reductive caricatures of women?

In some ways, the frat party/Halloween party drag queens pose more of an insult to womankind than those shuffling blackface revelers posed to African Americans in the past. At least those who came in blackface still represented characters who could function in the real world. By contrast, those who come in the kind of demeaning drag I’ve described, reduce women to almost complete incapacity. No women who actually had foot-long breast implants, streaming mascara and inch-long false eyelashes, a cocooning blonde wig, and stiletto heels, could function in the real world. Such an outfitted individual couldn’t perform the job of either police officer or military office. She couldn’t even reliably get to work as a secretary, a stockbroker, a chef, or an electrician. She certainly couldn’t make her way into the Oval Office. She could neither pursue a villain nor run away from danger. She’d be trapped in situ, a rag doll propped upright in gruesome rictus.

So why don’t those who appear in such pointless party drag rouse the same kind of criticism today as those who came in blackface yesterday? It seems that despite all the sensitivities of the MeToo movement, few people are sensitive to the implicit degradation of women that is manifest in Halloween drag. Women are still not granted the respect that other “minorities” have now been granted, at least in principle.

Women are still portrayed and perceived in stereotypical ways that it would currently be unthinkable to portray minorities When a woman appears on-screen, it’s still a disproportionate number of times as a prostitute, a dominatrix action figures, or in some other form of sexually fetishized role or some role signaling heightened sexual availability. While in some sense, this may represent the reality that many women face, there’s a current prohibition against portraying other minority groups only in such starkly reduced circumstances, even when that might actually be what they are experiencing in certain areas. Any movie that presented black youths only as gang-bangers or middle-aged black women only as servants (except in some specifically historical context) probably would be censured, if it got made at all. However, it’s common to see movies and TV shows in which all the women who come on-screen are there merely to service and excite men sexually. Sit-coms such as Two and a Half Men which featured women only as bimbo ditzes ripe for sexual conquest are still popular and accepted. However, it would have been unthinkable to have the Two and a Half Men Harper brothers’ housekeeper and any other household help that were featured characters to be portrayed as shuffling blacks. As ever, concern for the rights and sensibilities of women has lagged far behind concern for the rights and sensibilities of the various racial and ethnic groups.

Women are always the last to be advanced into any facet of equality. Before the Civil War, there were many ardent abolitionist groups advocating the emancipation and enfranchisement of blacks. Some have argued that there were more such groups in the South than in the North. But wherever these groups worked to advance the freedom of blacks, their membership consisted mostly of women fighting for liberty on all fronts. As the time approached when it seemed blacks would be freed from slavery and black men at least would be granted the right to vote – the abolitionist/suffragette women who’s been the main movers and shakers to bring this about assumed that black men would turn back and give a helping hand to the women who had fought for them. They assumed that black men would in part use their new ability to vote to help gain that right for women too. But it didn’t happen. With few exceptions, the women were left in the dust. They had to fight for themselves for almost another fifty or sixty years before they were granted the right to vote in 1920. There’s no one alive today who technically couldn’t themselves vote or whose parents couldn’t vote because they were black. However, there are many people alive today who legally couldn’t vote themselves, or whose parents couldn’t vote – simply because they were women. Women’s victory is relatively recent.

The long lag time that women suffered is still not recognized by many. I just recently read a noted historian’s celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation and then, finally, passage of the 15^th Amendment prohibiting the federal government and each state from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” This author crowed that “at last, all citizens had the right to vote.” Ahem. Excuse me. There was still the substantial 51+% of U.S. citizens who did NOT have that right. But people forget that, as they forget women in so many ways.

So while the sensibilities of black people and many ethnic minorities are currently being respected in the sphere of political correctness – the sensibilities of women are still disregarded. The Halloween caricature of womanhood as big wig and boobs goes on. Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club lampoons femininity more crudely than ever. When the Club started holding its theatrical performances in the mid-1800’s, no women were students at Harvard, so, as with Shakespearean performances in Shakespeare’s own time, all the women’s parts were perforce played by men. More often then, the men dressed as serious representations of historical women. There was a legitimately sober and recognizable Mary Todd Lincoln and a serious Queen Victoria. However, in recent decades, the Club has drifted into little more than frat house caricature of women. Each year the honored guest artist of the Club is expected to don the stereotypical accouterments of what’s regarded as womanhood – and everyone laughs, makes bawdy jokes, and has a high old time.

Not long ago, YouTube star Shane Dawson went into blackface to do a takeoff on Wendy Williams – and he had to abjectly apologize to the world for his insensitivity and presumed racism. Around the same time, Mel Gibson was the Hasting Pudding Club’s honored guest at their annual bash. He accordingly had to appear in the reductio ad absurdum that people still regard as womanhood. He had to sport an impossible fetching flounce of curls and a Scottish plaid tickle bra. No one thought to find this latter portrayal offensive. The display drew the predictable yuks, approval, and applause. Where is the logic in this? When will women themselves and men see that it’s as offensive for someone to wear goofily stereotyping drag to a Halloween party as it is to come in blackface?

What’s the essential difference between these two pictures….?

The False Premise of the Abortion Debate

There are two vital elements that are missing from the current abortion debate.

The first problem is the lack of any real engagement between the two sides of the issue. The two sides are like train rails, stretching parallel towards infinity, never touching. Those on one side say they are for the sanctity of human life. Those on the other side say they are for a woman’s right to choose. But these two contentions have nothing to do with each other. Neither addresses the other’s point.

It wasn’t always quite like that. Around the time of the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, there would still sometimes be attempts on each side to take the other’s argument into consideration. For example, in response to the “pro-lifers” arguments about the sanctity of human life, the “pro-choicers” would advance the counter-argument that a fetus could not really be counted yet as sentient human life. The Bible, medical texts, and ancient wisdoms were cited for and against this view.

The debate did usually proceed along a predictable trajectory. The “pro-lifers” would contend that if sentience was the criterion, then one would be justified in killing bothersome seniors who were in advanced states of senile dementia. Or we would be justified in killing anyone who was in a vegetative state, terminal or otherwise.

That was a difficult argument to answer, but pro-choicers would sometimes take a stab at it, citing the high rates of spontaneous miscarriages that take place without the prospective mother necessarily feeling that a human life had been lost. In most such instances, the woman probably wouldn’t even have known that she was pregnant. No funeral ceremonies would be held. No one would consider that a human being with a history and an awareness of itself had passed.

Taking the argument in another direction, pro-choicers would often cite pro-lifers’ frequent support of the death penalty. In this case, the pro-lifers would respond by adding an adjective to what had been their abbreviated stand. They would specify that they had meant they were against the taking of innocent life.

And on it would go. There was never any meeting of the minds, never any resolution of the debate. It seemed likely that there could never be any intersection of the two points of view. But at least each side made some attempt to recognize the other’s concerns and to formulate some kind of a response. Ultimately, a concession was made to the pro-life side and a partial, uneasy compromise was reached by specifying that abortions would only be permissible in the first trimester or some other such period of the pregnancy in the bills passed by the various States.

Now, no such recognition of some right on the other side takes place. One side will just flatly state the superiority of valuing all human life – and the other side will just flatly state the need to allow women to have choice. These two sides simply repeat their respective priorities at each other - and never the twain shall meet.

The second problem with the abortion debate lies primarily with the side that emphasizes the right of women to choose. While this side fights for the right of a woman to choose whether or not she will bring a baby to term, it completely ignores the fact that women aren’t being granted an important precedent right of choice. That’s the right to choose whether or not to have intercourse in the first place.

That’s the elephant in the room, the issue that almost everyone in America refuses to even consider. The issue is sometimes raised as it applies to women in developing countries. There it is sometimes openly recognized that women have no choice when it comes to having sex. Many of these cultures virtually dictate that women be married at an early age and that an important part of their role as wife must then be accommodating their husbands’ sexual urges. It’s taken for granted that women must make themselves sexually available to their husbands at all times. In these other cultures, it’s virtually impossible for a woman to deny her husband “his privileges.”

In many cases, it’s also impossible for women to avoid being raped. Wars always have posed a special threat to women as invading groups take the rape of any available women on “the other side” to be their sexual prerogative.

There’s very little that outside agencies can do to liberate women in this regard. The most that United Nations aid groups and the whole gamut of humanitarian aid groups can do when they come into these cultures with the hope of improving the lot of women is to offer means of avoiding pregnancy and disease as the result of having sex. They can’t enable women to choose not to have sex in the first place.  

The most radical kind of aid an agency can attempt is to actively prevent the genital mutilation of women, a practice that continues in some cultures as a means of keeping women’s sexual experience the exclusive property of the men to whom they have been consigned. Educating cultures away from this practice is beyond the scope of most humanitarian aid societies. Agencies are generally limited to providing medical aid in connection with what will be the inevitable sexual experiences of most women in the culture. They can try to avert medical problems by offering papilloma vaccines and some techniques for avoiding the HIV virus and other STDs. After the fact, they can provide antibiotics and some palliatives, but often not any absolute cures.

They can also offer women discreet access to contraceptives. But this kind of assistance indeed often has to be very discreet. The men themselves usually can’t be enlisted into “taking precautions.” Many men in these cultures refuse to even consider the use of condoms. Condoms are seen, not only as interfering with their pleasure, but also as interfering with their masculine right to inseminate. Anything that diminishes their fertility is seen as diminishing their manhood.

So men are also often averse to having women avail themselves of contraceptives. If a man’s wife or wives don’t become pregnant, it reflects badly on his masculinity. But also, having children is positively encouraged in many cases. Having many children means having many helping hands and is also a perpetuation of oneself into the future. So if a woman seeks to put her own interests first and to deny the family unit the benefits of having many children, she often has to be secretive about it. Therefore, agencies can provide her with contraceptives only on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” basis. But that’s about as far as they can go.

They can’t give women the freedom to refuse to have sex. The rare instances in which such liberation is attempted is usually not undertaken on the behalf of women. It’s undertaken on behalf of accomplishing some more important project, of achieving some more important goal – such as peace. Women might be organized or might organize themselves to withhold sex until their men stop fighting. But such Lysistrata-like campaigns usually end up being comically impractical and short-lived. So while it might be acknowledged that women in these developing countries often don’t have the basic choice of whether or to have sex – there’s almost nothing that can be done to give them that choice.

In the U.S. and other Western cultures, it’s usually not even acknowledged that women are lacking the right to make this basic choice. Barring obvious instances of rape, it’s now generally assumed that any pregnancy has been the result of both the man’s and the woman’s choice to have sex. In western cultures, it’s now assumed that women ultimately want to have sex as much as men do and that the only elements of choice that need to be given, the only choices that count - are after-the-fact choices. Women can be granted free access to contraceptives (after the obvious choice to have sex has been made). Or they can be granted the right to have abortions (again, very much after the fact). So debate starts from the assumption that both men and women equally opted to have sex and that the only issue that remains is how to deal with resultant pregnancies.

Neither side considers that abortion would rarely even become an issue if women’s true instincts were honored. The fact is that very few women feel such an urge to have sex that they MUST have it even if it might lead to disease, dishonor, or an unwanted pregnancy. Very few women have an urge that screams, “I want it! I must have it!” regardless of the consequences. Only men generally feel that sort of imperative. If left to their own devices, most women would be content to have sex only if and when they were positively ready to accept pregnancy as the result.

A woman’s silent scream is “I want love!” But the only way for her to have any hope of being with a man long enough for that more difficult feeling to grow, is to accede to having sex with him. Yes, in spite of all our self-congratulation about how far we’ve come from the presumed oppressions of Victorian times, the fact is that those times actually defined women’s desires more accurately when it came to sex. It was assumed women weren’t going to be as desirous as men, that it was only her affection for a man that would lead her into any sort of contented accession to his desires. As we look back on that period from our new set of presumptions, we say that Victorian women were forced to fake reluctance. In actuality, it’s modern women who are forced – in this case to fake enthusiasm.

Many current male authors of books about evolution now advance the hypothesis that women really are biologically geared to enjoy sex as much as or even more than men do. Matt Ridley, the author of The Red Queen, cited as proof of this contention the wild shrieks of ecstasy that women emit during intercourse. When I wrote to him, suggesting that women may not be experiencing the level of enjoyment he is attributing to them, he wrote back, with perhaps some excess of typical male presumption, that all the women he’d been with had been notable for their exultant vocalizations in bed.

I could just feel female readers chuckling knowingly at this response. I felt it might be too deflating of me, or more likely, too useless, to try to advance any further contrary views on the point. However, I privately was reminded of the Seinfeld episode in which the extent of women’s deception is revealed to Jerry. As the gang is sitting around in the diner, Jerry expresses shock at hearing that a lot of women fake orgasm in such a way that their partners can't tell. He states that he's sure the women he's been with weren't faking. He's sure he would know. At which point Elaine neatly steps in with a corrective regarding their own time together. She says, “Well, you didn't know.” Aghast in disbelief, Jerry asks, “What about the breathing, the panting, the moaning, the screaming?” To which Elaine triumphantly ticks off “Fake, fake, fake, fake.”

And so modern women are committed to a life of faking it, in bed, and on a deeper level. They have to pretend to the men in their lives, and more devastatingly, even to themselves, that they are desirous of having sex on a regular basis. They can’t even readily admit to themselves that they’d rather eat a chocolate bar, watch TV, or just cuddle. To openly admit that they are generally not enthusiastic about having sex, isn’t a possibility for them. That would be to significantly unravel all the presumed advances that women have won over the last century or so. It would be to deny that they have been significantly liberated. For most women to admit that they don’t really crave sex or even particularly relish it, would be for them to admit that they are acceding to men’s wishes, that they are shaping a large part of their lives around accommodating men’s desires, even to the point of submerging their own longings. That would blatantly cast them back in their old role as the givers, and men as the triumphant takers. That would be once again to admit inequality.

So women have had to convince, not only the men in their lives, but themselves as well, that they eagerly seek, or that they can at least be readily triggered into seeking, sex throughout their lives. If pregnancy is the result of this presumed overriding urge, of this mantle of desire they have felt it necessary to wear – then they enter the arena of debate about how it would be best and most liberating to deal with such consequences.

The point is that, in some sense, women have less reproductive choice now than they ever had. This will be true even if Roe v Wade is allowed to stand, or even if it is extended to make abortions more readily available for longer periods of time and in more cases. As evidence of this, one might cite the myriads of women who are struggling to raise a number of children, on their own, with their transient partners long gone. These women might have had the right to have abortions, if they so chose. But in some essential way, they were denied the precedent choice of whether or not to have sex.

There are classroom seminars held, aimed mostly at girls, telling them how to diplomatically say “No.” But it’s always understood that these taught tactics will at best serve as postponements, never as real allowances for the girls’ longings to be satisfied and assume primacy long-term in their adult lives. In reality, these lessons don’t generally even serve as delaying tactics. When faced with the boy’s urgency in the car after the date, the girl knows she has to say “Yes.” What’s more, she has to evince eagerness as part and parcel of her “Yes.” If she doesn’t, the boy will move on to the next girl, and she’ll be left without any hope at all of growing a “relationship” with him.

So most often now, acting against what she truly desires, the girl will accede and, all education about sex and contraceptives notwithstanding, she will evince that requisite eagerness and spontaneity, and will accept becoming pregnant as a result. Then all that remains to her will be the spare scraps of feminist “choice” - the choice of whether or not to have an abortion. She will have been granted nothing in the way of achieving her first choice, which was to love.