Hi. Looks long, but I promise a easy, captivating read you'll want to pass on,
appropriately. Do check out tonight's Beautiful Struggle and take up
Kimberly's
request for feedback. She means it. And read Bob Scheer in today's LA Times
on Terry Schiavo. When will it ever end? Not until they are thoroughly
defeated.
Ed
Hello Friends:
I am a member of a community radio collective that is producing a new program
on KPFK - 90.7 FM. The show, Beautiful Struggle, premieres this Tues., 3/22,
from 7-8 PM and will be broadcast weekly on 90.7FM (also online at
www.kpfk.org). It is produced by the Beautiful Struggle Collective and will be
hosted by Dr. Kelly Madison and Mr. Michael Datcher. Please tune in and tell
your friends! Let us know what you think also
Program Synopsis:
Beautiful Struggle will be an open conversation focused on African American
social and political issues, thought, history, inspiration, resistance, and
social change. The program aims to educate and motivate the audience to work
for social justice and social change. It will consist of illuminating
interviews with scholars, activists, youth, artists, and numerous other
community voices. We will bring you people not likely to be seen or heard in
corporate media, views and analyses not typically allowed or explored.
Interviews will be followed by 15-20 minutes of dialogue with the listener
audience. Acknowledging the role of music and art in the beautiful struggle,
each show will close with a live hip-hop, spoken word, or other performance
from conscious underground performers. Beautiful struggle will be of interest
to progressives of all backgrounds interested in African Americans' Beautiful
Struggle for equality and Social Justice in the United States.
Peace!
Kimberly King
Subject to Debate: Invisible Women
By Katha Pollitt
The Nation
Wednesday 16 March 2005
Women don't shout. Women don't like politics. Women shrink from
intellectual debate. Women don't try. It's time for another round of "What's
Wrong with Women?" Last month's category was science. This month it's punditry,
sparked by a testy (well, nasty) letter from syndicated columnist and FOX-TV
commentator Susan Estrich to Michael Kinsley, the courtly editorial and opinion
editor of the Los Angeles Times, pointing out the lack of female talent on his
op-ed pages: In nine weeks, only 20 percent of pieces were written by women.
Now everybody's jumping in: "Feminists Get Hysterical" (Heather MacDonald in
City Journal) is a typical sentiment.
"There ought to be more women on op-ed pages in general. Over time, I
intend to make that happen," said Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of the
Washington Post, which counts one woman, Anne Applebaum, among its nineteen
pundits; in the first two months of 2005 one in ten op-ed pieces were by women.
Take your time, Mr. Hiatt! As Applebaum warns, you don't want to hire
untalented women who'll just write about "women's issues." Her friends got
their bylines by "having clear views, knowing their subjects, writing well and
learning to ignore the ad hominem attacks that go with the job." And you know
how few women meet those lofty criteria! "The pool of available people doing
opinion writing is still tilted toward men," said New York Times editorial page
editor Gail Collins. "There are probably fewer women, in the great cosmic
scheme of things, who feel comfortable writing very straight opinion stuff, and
they're less comfortable hearing something on the news and batting something
out." Come April, the Times will have seven male op-ed columnists, plus Maureen
Dowd. Not to worry though, Dowd writes, there are "plenty of brilliant
women.... We just need to find and nurture them."
Oh, nurture my eye. It may be true that more men than women like to
bloviate and "bat things out"--socialization does count for something. So do
social rewards: I have seen men advance professionally on levels of aggression,
self-promotion and hostility that would have a woman carted off to a loony
bin--unless, of course, she happens to be Ann Coulter. But feminine psychology
doesn't explain why all five of USA Today's political columnists are male, or
why Time's eleven columnists are male--down to the four in Arts and
Entertainment--or why at Newsweek it's one out of six in print and two out of
thirteen on the Web. According to Editor and Publisher, the proportion of
female syndicated columnists (one in four) hasn't budged since 1999. The tiny
universe of political-opinion writers includes plenty of women who hold their
own with men, who do not wilt at the prospect of an angry e-mail, who have
written cover stories and bestsellers and won prizes--and whose phone numbers
are likely already in the Rolodexes of the editors who wonder where the women
are. How hard could it be to "find" Barbara Ehrenreich, who filled in for
Thomas Friedman for one month last summer and wrote nine of the best columns
the Times has seen in a decade? Or Dahlia Lithwick, legal correspondent for
Slate, another Friedman fill-in, who actually possesses a deep grasp of the
field she covers--which cannot always be said for John Tierney, who begins his
Times column in April? What about Susan Faludi? The Village Voice's Sharon
Lerner? Debra Dickerson? Wendy Kaminer? The Progressive's Ruth Conniff? Laura
Flanders? Debbie Nathan? Ruth Rosen, veteran of the LA Times and the San
Francisco Chronicle? Our own Patricia Williams and Naomi Klein? Natalie Angier,
bestselling author and top New York Times science writer, would be a fabulous
op-ed columnist. And, not to be one of those shrinking violets everyone's
suddenly so down on, What about me? Am I a potted plant?
You'll note I've mostly named liberals and feminists--I'm sure there are
good women writers on the right out there, too, and their job prospects are
probably a lot rosier. A conservative woman who endlessly attacks feminists,
like The New Yorker's Caitlin Flanagan or the Los Angeles Times's departed
Norah Vincent or the Boston Globe's Cathy Young--what could be hotter than
that?
Besides being false and insulting, all this fuss about women not having the
cojones for no-holds-barred debate overlooks the fact that, as Deborah Tannen
pointed out in the LA Times, there are many ways to write political commentary.
Not every male columnist is a fire-breather, an instant expert, a tub-thumper,
an obnox. Think of the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne Jr. or USA Today's Walter
Shapiro, both mannerly and sweet-natured to a fault. Some columnists use their
perch to do crusading reporting--Bob Herbert's great strength--to tell stories,
to analyze ideas and policies, to ask questions, to skewer received opinion
with wit and humor. And then there are the ones who just drone boringly on.
Surely there are women capable of that!
That opinion writing is a kind of testosterone-powered food fight is a
popular idea in the blogosphere. Male bloggers are always wondering where the
women are and why women can't/don't/won't throw bananas. After all, anyone can
have a blog, right? In the wake of the Estrich-Kinsley contretemps, the
Washington Monthly blogger Kevin Drum mused upon the absence of women bloggers
and got a major earful from women bloggers, who are understandably sick of
hearing that they don't exist. "I'm staring you right in the face, Kevin,"
wrote Avedon Carol (sideshow.me.uk), "and even though you've said you read me
every day you don't have me on your blogroll. It's things like this that make
me tear out my hair when people wonder why women are underrepresented...."
There are actually lots of women political bloggers out there--spend half an
hour reading them and you will never again say women aren't as argumentative as
men! But what makes a blog visible is links, and male bloggers tend not to link
to women (to his credit, Kevin Drum has added nineteen to his blogroll).
Perhaps they sense it might interfere with the circle jerk in cyberspace--the
endless mutual self-infatuation that is one of the less attractive aspects of
the blogging phenom.
Or maybe, like so many op-ed editors, they just don't see women, even when
the women are right in front of them.
***
Chatting with Jesus
Minister: Jesus, what do you think of the recent presidential election?
Jesus: In the United States?
Minister: Yes.
Jesus: I don't do politics.
Minister: But the President is a Christian. He has dedicated his life
to serving you.
Jesus: He has dedicated his life to serving himself. That is the
opposite of what I teach.
Minister: But he's a Christian.
Jesus: He is an Old Testament Christian. The ancient Hebrew scriptures
say that God is an angry God, a vengeful God, a jealous God. But he is
not. Nor is he petty, nor vindictive, nor narrow minded, nor self-righteous.
God was not made in our image. He is not insecure or emotionally immature.
God is not like us, but in our better moments we can be like him.
God wants his children to be full of love, not full of hate.
He wants his children to be compassionate, not vindictive.
He wants his children to be open-minded, not narrow-minded.
He wants his children to be accepting not intolerant.
He wants his children to be righteous, not self-righteous.
This is the message that God sent me to share with the world two
thousand years ago. This is the message for which I was crucified. And just as
those who put me to death then ignored god's message, so your president
ignores God's message today.
Minister: But President Bush believes in the Ten Commandments.
Jesus: If he does, then why does he ignore them? One says that "Thou
shalt not kill." Yet he sends an army to invade a foreign land and kill
tens of thousands of men, women, and children. Another commandment
says "Thou shalt not bear false witness." In modern language, this means
that you shouldn't tell a lie. Is there anything your president has said
that isn't a lie?
Think of the Ten Commandments as one, single commandment that
encompasses all the others: Love your fellow human beings as you love
yourself. If you obey this one commandment then all the other
commandments will take care of themselves.
This single commandment is the foundation of god's laws, the one on
which all of the others are based. If you treat this as the foundation
of your laws, and of your life, then you will be doing god's work. If you
honor this single commandment with all your heart, and with all your soul,
and with all your mind, then you honor god. There is no greater form of worship.
There is no other form of worship that even matters. A thousand years in
church are not worth a single act of compassion toward another human
being, or to any of god's creatures.
Minister: But Bush has been born again. He accepts you as his Lord and
Savior.
Jesus: I was sent to teach people to turn the other cheek. He starts a
war in the Middle East.
I was sent to teach people to feed the poor. He steals from the poor
and gives to the rich.
I was sent to teach people to heal the sick. He ignores the tens of
millions people in his own country who have no way to pay for health care.
And he cares even less about those outside his country who need help.
I was sent to teach people to love all their fellow human beings as they
love themselves. He orders American soldiers to slaughter the citizens of
a foreign land. He brags about the death penalty. He ignores the millions
of starving and sick human beings around the world who will die without
food and medical supplies, things that his rich nation could provide for
half the cost of his war in the Middle East.
It doesn't matter who you claim as your Lord and Savior when your hands
are drenched in blood.
Minister: Are you saying that President Bush will go to Hell?
Jesus: I'm saying that he has brought hell to us.
Minister: But he says he is a Christian. People believe him. I
believe him.
Jesus: Then watch what he does instead of what he says. He is a man
full of hate, and anger, and violence. He is an anti-Christian. Verily, I say
unto you that if he had he been alive two thousand years ago, his voice
would have been the loudest among those who clamored to have me
crucified. To him I would have been a terrorist.
The Bible speaks of the Antichrist. But there isn't just one, there are
many.
Everyone who washes his hands in blood and then claims to do so in my
name is an Antichrist. These hypocrites say one thing and then do the
opposite. They say they love god but then they brutalize god's children.
They say they are compassionate, but instead of comforting those in need
they increase the suffering of their fellow human beings. The Antichristians
are those who spew hatred, intolerance, and violence in the name of Jesus
Christ. For now, for this generation, your president is their leader.
Minister: Then you don't agree with his policies?
Jesus: I don't agree with his morals. He talks about moral values but his
actions are immoral. In a world full of poverty and want, his life's work is
to make the rich still richer. In a world from which god's creatures are
disappearing in huge numbers, where the air in many places is unfit to
breathe and the water unfit to drink, where the future of life on the planet is
in jeopardy, the crowning glory of his presidency is to make matters worse.
He is a liar and a hypocrite. Worst of all, he is a mass murderer.
These are the things I condemn.
Minister: Do you condemn him for using politics to pursue his religious
agenda?
Jesus: I condemn him for using religion to pursue his political agenda.
He uses religion to manipulate people. He uses religion to spread
intolerance and commit violence. And he does it all in my name.
He claims to follow my teachings, but I teach love, not hate.
I teach compassion, not "compassionate conservatism."
I teach acceptance, not intolerance.
I teach forgiveness, not revenge.
I teach that "Thou shalt not kill" means just what it says. There is no
exception for capital punishment. There is no exception for war.
Your president lives a life that violates everything that God asks of
us.
Minister: But he's such a devout man.
Jesus: If you believe that a liar, and a hypocrite, and a mass murderer
can be devout, then you do not know the meaning of the word. Reading
the Bible doesn't make the world a better place. Going to church doesn't
save lives or feed the hungry. God doesn't care about our devotion to
scripture, he cares about our devotion to each other.
That's why he sent me here.
Not to save man from sin, but to save man from himself. That is the
meaning of salvation.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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