I am not now, nor have I ever been, a whore

Almost lost in the reaction to Rush Limbaugh's recent diatribe against Sandra Fluke is the utterly stupid nature of his attack: Limbaugh simply doesn't know how birth control works. At least not the pills (unless he thinks that, like Foster Freeze's aspirins, they're used between the knees). Hormonal birth control is, as anybody with a modicum of biological knowledge understands, an ongoing process. It's actually the processual aspect of The Pill and its more modern cousins that makes it a valuable tool in women's health care. Regulating hormones through pill-use can ameliorate all manner of ills perpetrated on the female body by Mother Nature.

Now, as my little cadre of readers probably already know, I'm not generally in favor of messing with Mom. In my utopia, people manage fertility through body-knowledge and restraint. But I happily rode the wave of hormonal and barrier birth-control throughout my reproductive life, which ended abruptly at age 40 with a tubal ligation. And not once during all that time was I paid to have sex.

Instead, I paid for my participation in cutting-edge science when my first pregnancy occurred in spite of, and then was ended by, a little device called the "Dalkon Shield." I had switched to an IUD after a student walked into my office one day and asked, "How long have you been on birth control pills?" Impertinent as the question was, it alerted me to the fact that I bore a "mask of pregnancy"--a characteristic gathering of freckles under my eyes and across my nose caused by the hormones I was taking daily, and had been since 1968, when I married for the first time. So, on the advice of my top-of-the-line doctors at Penn, I switched to a nifty little fish-shaped device that was all the rage, at least until it caused millions of women to suffer the kind of bodily indignity I had: a late miscarriage which had probably not ever even been viable because I had conceived while it was still in place, and then had to have it removed. (I did not join in the suit against the manufacturer.) Fortunately for me (unlike many others whose fertility was compromised), my subsequent pregnancies progressed uneventfully and produced my now thirty-five year-old son and thirty-three year-0ld daughter.

On the surface, if you read some of the coverage concerning Limbaugh's tirade (like this article in Forbes), the argument seems to center on whether or not these guys should have to pay for contraception as a part of health care contributions (hence the "paying for sex" connection, however spurious). The ostensible reason for the initial congressional testimony had to do with the freedom of religious institutions to abstain from contraceptive coverage for reasons of conscience and/or belief. The financial aspect of this whole controversy is what I find most peculiar, because it assumes that none of us should pay with our hard-earned money for anything we don't believe in. So, if I don't believe in augmenting male sexual potency I shouldn't have to pay for Viagra if it's included in my company's health plan? Or, if I don't believe in capital punishment, I shouldn't have to pay for it with my hard-earned tax dollars?

But what if paying for contraception actually saves us all money? Family planning is one of those bugaboos of life that used to be something of a joke. For a long time it was downright illegal, and then it was chancy. Women had three choices: abstinence, diaphragms, and condoms. What the advent of birth control pills really initiated was a greater ability for a wife to reliably negotiate her fertility instead of relying on her husband's understanding and restraint (or the mainstay of the '50s, a set of twin beds); it most certainly didn't turn women into prostitutes--although it undoubtedly helped many prostitutes keep from becoming mothers.

Ever since men discovered that they had something to do with making babies (see my rant on this here), they've increasingly tried to 1) take credit for it all (by "planting a seed" in the womb) or 2) control reproduction by deciding when a woman would have sex, whether or not she wanted it. The only way women could reliably stay childless was to become a cloistered nun (and that probably wasn't a sure bet, either). Modern means of birth control ended all that, we thought, for once and for all. But in large part, men still control the pill-box by means of purse-strings, as we have seen in the last several weeks. And nothing makes that clearer than the photograph that opens this post (religious leaders being sworn in to testify in the Issa Committee hearings--all of them male).

The Republican presidential candidates all seem to have decided that men (religious men) really do need to be deciding for all women when they will have kids and how many. And their supporters are now willing to decide for all of us, regardless of how we understand the questions of "personhood" or the roll sex plays in human experience. I'm not sure I've ever seen such a display of religious and political bigotry as has shown up in campaign discourse these last few weeks.

This is the message these guys are sending to women: it doesn't matter how smart you are, how well you understand science, or what your religious beliefs are. If you don't follow our line of "reasoning," and if you don't buy into our particular religious doctrine, you're not only wrong, you're a wanton slut for wanting to have sex without getting pregnant.

You'd think these guys would be only too happy to let Lefties and Progressives have all the birth control they want, because in the end there would be far fewer opponents to reactionary platforms; they might have one or two--or no--kids, while Tea Partiers and more holy folk have seven.

I'm reminded of the old joke that made the rounds during some of the Roe v. Wade battles: If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

The attitudes we're seeing during this campaign are eerily (and frighteningly) reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's 1985 dystopian reading of the future in The Handmaids Tale. At the moment, it's still just a thought experiment about what could happen if a particular group of men (and their complicit wives) manage to gain further control of women's bodies. What should be a question of women's health has turned into a proto-manifesto of some men's desire to decide what's best for us. Let's just hope that the more sensible and enlightened members of their gender can join with women to forge a better alternative.

Looking Backward(ly)

One, almost palpable, aspect of growing older is the increasing amount of nostalgia that permeates one's view of the world at large.

As we grow older, and as change becomes a significant feature of the presentness of the world we inhabit, we begin to remember the past almost as a physical space: houses, landscapes, objects, people. Historians and archaeologists probably suffer more than most, because we "remember" not only our own pasts, but those of others. Whether or not we bathe our visions in some kind of gauzy, golden light, masking difficulties, injustices, or even horrors, we nevertheless tend to paint our ideas of the future with the palette of the past.

Several recent events and observations have brought all of this to mind, the most recent of which is the Academy Awards ceremony (with its focus on early cinema), coupled with Pat Buchanan's departure from MSNBC.

Mind you, I've never thought much of Buchanan's picture of the world which, as Brian Stelter mentions in today's New York Times, is firmly rooted in the idyllic Ozzie and Harriet past that coincides with my own childhood in the fifties. But while my childhood was populated by multi-racial people and multi-cultural life, Buchanan's was white, straight, Catholic, and (in his mind, at least) hewed to those fine Republican values inherited from our Founding Fathers. In my case, although both of my Grandmothers had been born in Canada, immigration wasn't really part of our background; both my father's and mother's families had been in North America since the Revolutionary War. I'm not sure how long Buchanan's people had been in this country, but like many of his fellow (Tea Party) Americans, he seems to think that early immigrations from Europe were somehow different from those occurring now.

Buchanan's beliefs and politics were informed by Catholicism as practiced in America the Beautiful, while mine were informed by Catholicism practiced in Japan and Taiwan, preached by priests from Italy and China, and severely tested by Vatican II. By 1963 I had left the Church, primarily because it had rejected many of the traditions it had accrued through time (Latin masses, smells and bells) and that had kept me "faithful" for as long as I was. Having not grown up in suburban America, however, I never did form an attachment to its mythical elements. Not being exposed much to television probably helped.

I try to be a realist, and to ground my hopes for the future in a clear sense of what has actually happened rather than some imaginary Golden Age. In doing so, I am constantly reminded of the criticism directed at William Morris's Medievalist socialism. Whenever I mention his work (at least when the immediate response isn't "Oh, yeah, the wallpaper guy"), the comments that follow usually point out that the Middle Ages he so admired had been radically depopulated by plague, and, besides, who would want to live that way, anyway? And post-apocalyptic films and fiction play on the notion that "Medieval" equals "Stone Age." Get rid of what we have now, the novels all suggest, and we'll be wandering down interminable roads, eating one another, living in squalor, and/or we'll become victims of one or another rampantly repressive ideology.

All of the above will, according to the Buchananesque prognosis, be caused by lowered birthrates among the middle class (due to the use of abortion as birth control), increasing immigration from third-world countries, rising diversity in the armed forces (gays, women, folk of color), godless humanists, and all manner of plagues and diseases brought on by our increasingly wanton ways. Liberals in general, and Barack Obama in particular, are "destroying America," as I've heard over and over again from participants in the Republican caucuses As Seen On TV. What can only follow is the end of Western Civilization, or at least of American Exceptionalism, as we know it.

Of course, I'm not at all convinced that this is a bad thing. A smaller, multi-racial, more culturally diverse populace might well lead to innovative solutions to economic and social problems. If the self-described Conservatives want smaller government, the only way we can accomplish it is to decrease our population. If we want to increase self-reliance, we need to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels, foodstuffs, and technology from foreign sources, and re-learn how to make many of the products we now buy from others, such as textiles.

Pat Buchanan's idyllic mid-century America was only half the size of the current one. Women were only just beginning to acquire the ability to pursue careers other than child-rearing, and Blacks were still being seated at the back of the bus. We were involved in or heading into an interminable series of conflicts (Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, Iraq and Afghanistan), and barely averted World War III more than once in subsequent years. Divorces were rarer (although not in my family), but perhaps only because they were harder to get. Infant mortality has declined significantly since 1950, but minority children die at a much higher rate than whites, and the overall rate in the US is rather embarrassingly higher than for any other developed country. The effects on BabyBoomers' lives may not have been as devastating as the Black Death, but neither are they all that laudable.

If nostalgia is, at best, an ambiguous condition, I'm not sure that future generations will be affected by it much at all. As I struggle to reach new crops of students by instilling an interest in the past and what it can teach us, I find myself swimming in a rip-current of apathy, if not antipathy. Fewer and fewer of my pupils consider the past as particularly valuable; instead, they wonder what it has to do with them, now. "How is this information going to help me in my career?" they ask. The question is genuine rather than churlish. They really do want to know what utility I can offer, but I'm never sure how to answer them. The old saws about how general education will make them better people, or how knowing the past will help them avoid making the same mistakes don't hold much truck with a group hell-bent on fame and fortune in the game or fashion industries. The best I can offer is that the past, especially in the visual arts, represents a gold mine of ideas and images. At least as long as you cite your finds properly.

From an archaeological perspective, the present is the surface, under which lie immeasurable treasures. Education provides only what amounts to a surface collection of odds and ends that indicate what one might find underneath. The more practical contribution schooling makes to our future lives is to provide us--if we're fortunate to have decent teachers--with the tools we need to excavate the past, connect the ideas and objects we locate there with our contemporary needs and desires, and interpret them carefully and fairly. My parents and grandparents told me stories about my ancestors that made me want to know more about "the olden days." But they also insisted on telling me how hard it had been, and ultimately how unfair things were for others who didn't fare as well as we had.

If real knowledge and wisdom don't somehow emerge from the massive piles of information being heaped on this generation, in their future nostalgia might simply become a dismal undertaking, rather than a potentially rewarding exercise in plumbing memory. Rather than longing for imagined, distant glory, we should be showing our kids how to reflect critically on what they remember in order to faithfully craft the stories they tell their own children.

Image credit: In truth, I don't know where I got this; it was just in my archives for use in class. But the image is a bas relief designed by Philip Webb and executed by George Jack on a cottage in Kelmscott, Oxfordshire. I think the relief was commissioned by Jane Morris, in memory of her husband, and certainly captures his pensive demeanor. I have a copy of it at my desk at school.

Fracking the Future

Americans seem to be so deeply mired in oil culture that we're never going to escape.

As I wandered through various websites on my Sunday morning catch-up-with-the-news efforts, several stories caught my attention--from Good, Grist, the Times, and other sites that keep me apprised of the world's goings on (since I can't really rely on the Daily Poop to cover much that doesn't happen locally). I tend to focus on energy issues out of habit, and a number of stories resonated with what I've been noticing about a general reluctance to take alternative energy sources seriously in this country.

I was watching Bill Maher's Friday night show on HBO, Real Time, only because there was absolutely nothing else on, and both the Beloved Spouse and I were too tired to do anything but veg. I find Maher mildly amusing at best, and more often irritating, but his guest was Alexandra Wentworth who is both very funny and married to George Stefanopolis. We stayed with the show until the end, mostly out of inertia. Maher's peanut gallery (consisting of Eliot Spitzer, Erin McPike, and Steve Moore) went on to comment on various news items as Maher brought them up. Moore (a Libertarian, co-author of Return to Posterity), when talking about clean energy (wind and solar) kept insisting that it's "not economical" and we have to keep fracking and pumping in order to fuel (pardon the pun) future economic recovery. But as any good logic teacher knows, simply asserting something over and over again doesn't make it true; and Moore lacked the time to back his assertion up with any evidence.

But this general notion--that the only "economical" solution to our dependence on foreign oil is to pump more of our own, or find a "bridge" (like natural gas) to tide us over--seems to be embedded in the "conservative" world view at the moment (which doesn't seem all that conservative, upon reflection). Pundits and politicians alike consistently dismiss renewable resources as not cost-effective, or uneconomical. Then they bring up Solyndra as a whipping boy: see what happens when you fund this sort of thing?

Well, according to David Roberts's article in Grist from Friday, the whole Solyndra episode seems to amount to nothing more than a bad call on the part of the Obama administration. The year-long investigation into the loan has turned up, in Robert's words, "Bupkis. Nothing." All efforts to locate wrong-doing have produced nothing more than evidence that it was "a decision made based on merits, undone by economic shifts in the international solar market, with embarrassing political optics. There has been no evidence of wrongdoing. There is no 'scandal.'"

Opponents to alternative fuel sources seem to want this to turn out badly for purely political reasons. Prove that the administration proceeded with this deal for corrupt reason, and it'll tar (again, pardon) the whole industry.

Another story that gave me pause (and reminded me that folks are constantly trying to invent alternatives to fossil fuels) came from Good: Fuel Gets Fruity: Converting Produce Scraps into Gas. Biofuel made from readily available materials seems to be popping up all over the place. Someday, perhaps, we'll all have home scrap-digesters instead of LP gas tanks or natural gas lines running into our homes. As much as I like cooking with gas, I'm working on eliminating the need for it, since I really do think we're running out, and it bloody well terrifies me anyway. Recent evidence also points to the possibility that natural gas isn't as clean as we're being told it is, and is thus much less promising as a cleaner "bridge" fuel that can help us wean ourselves from oil and coal.

The recent move to take another, closer look at the Keystone pipeline drew the ire of the right (we need the jobs and the oil, they say, even though most of the jobs would be temporary and the oil itself would be exported). But according to another article in Grist, by Jess Zimmerman, anti-Keystone folks are finding new allies in the Tea Party: those who don't like the fact that if the pipeline builders can't buy your property from you, they'll just take it via eminent domain.

If only people could see that reliance on fossil fuels is every bit as dangerous to our rights as the taking of property against our will. Don't basic rights to clean air and water come under the notion of a right to life and liberty?

Perhaps because there aren't measurable price tags attached to the breathability of air or the drinkability of water, we can't see them in the more concrete sense that we can property values (even though these are tied to issues of clean air and water). And how do we begin to attach economic value to the ability of future generations to grow crops on land radically altered by changing rain patterns and mean temperatures, or to make a living from polluted fisheries?

What if the idea of prosperity had more to do with well-being than with cash? A transformation in the national psyche from a monetary model of the good life to one based on sustainability and long-term viability seems to be in order. But there seem to be only small glimmers of hope that our national preoccupation with the cash value of what we're leaving our kids (rather than the kind of a planet they're going to inherit) is going to change any time soon.

Image credit: The photo is of the Urban Planet building at Shanghai's Expo 2010. According to its designers, "The exhibition was characterized by a dichotomous structure illustrating the two-faced character of the city as both a consumer of environment and as a place for innovation and technology in the service of an ecological renewal for the future." (via Wikipedia)