Wednesday, February 04, 2009 - Posts
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I was amused by this AP photo of Obama, haloed by the gold presidential seal, looking for all the world like a medieval saint—maybe St. Augustine. Augustine was a North African who wrote at a time when Christianity was just shifting from a scattered, messianic utopian community—dedicated to personal purity and a willingness to risk martyrdom—into a state religion. Among other things, Augustine wrote City of God, which clarified how a Christian ruler could govern in an impure world.
I love that this picture portrays Obama as our sainted and purifying ruler coming in to force the medieval oligarchs—er, the Wall Street CEOs—to reduce their take to a morally respectable size.
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When I was a child, I was a huge fan of a series of books that featured small, soft, furry white creatures known as Moomins. Of course, not everything in Moominvalley was as nice as the Moomins. There was another character who came along every once in a while, the Groke. Wherever she went, she left behind a trail of frozen ground that killed all living things. Dick Cheney has always remind me of the Groke.
In a new interview with Politico, Cheney pronounces the United States should expect a catastrophic nuclear or biological terrorist attack in the near future—and the Obama administration increases the likelihood it will happen. Cheney's penchant for practices like water-boarding, he claims, kept more 9/11-style attacks at bay during the Bush administration.
[Cheney] asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans—and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team—understand ...
He expressed confidence that files will someday be publicly accessible offering specific evidence that waterboarding and other policies he promoted—over sharp internal dissent from colleagues and harsh public criticism—were directly responsible for averting new Sept. 11-style attacks. ...
“If it hadn’t been for what we did—with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth—then we would have been attacked again," he said.
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Willa, to quote Cher from Clueless (which I seem to be referencing daily now)—trying to find responsible messages about eating in The City is like looking for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie. Which is to say, ultimately fruitless. But the flippant handling of anorexia in The City is definitely worth mentioning because it seems that in the three decades that the disease has been in the zeitgeist (basically since the 1978 publication of Hilde Bruch's seminal anorexia text, The Golden Cage) the media has still portrayed it in a completely unproductive way.
Women's magazines are particularly ham-handed in the way they deal with eating disorders, and I was reminded of this when perusing the February issue of Elle earlier this week. They have a personal essay by recovered anorexic Abby Sher, which reads like a pro-ana handbook:
I had new rules: No eating before the show. No eating in public. No less than an hour and a half at the gym every day. I started drinking diuretic teas and devouring magazine articles about how to feel full from your daily intake of water. ... I’d have high-fiber cereal covered with chicken broth and melted fat-free cheddar cheese on top, sometimes hummus and carrots, washed down with watery cocoa. Whenever I didn’t think I could make it another mile on the stationary bike or felt light-headed on the treadmill, I imagined this banquet awaiting me and tried to pedal faster, harder, stronger.
For those without eating disorders, Sher's chronicle of her not-eating is terminally boring. It is exactly like every other personal account of anorexia that's been in every women's magazine since the days of Karen Carpenter. For those with eating disorders, or perhaps those perilously on the brink, this sort of story is a blueprint, a possible enticement. There seems to be very little literature and media devoted to addressing the causes of anorexia, only these train-wreckish essays for others to gawk at.
So, Willa, I agree—MTV should treat discussions of potential anorexia with more gravity than they treat a shoe purchase, but that would require them to cast a critical eye on the extreme thinness that's the current beauty ideal. I'd bet you some hummus and carrots that they're never going to be willing to do that.
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In other news of the peculiar and amazing, via the Drudge Report: NBC just posted a story about a woman who went to Brazil to get a breast enlargement. Not just any breast enlargement: She wanted to set a world record for breast implants. (This was her ninth surgery, they say.) Interestingly, it turns out Texas, where she had traveled for surgery, has a law limiting the size of breast implants. Libertarians among us: Care to get outraged? I tend to be all for women's right to do whatever we want. But I confess (guiltily) that I found it hard to respond with equanimity to the photograph of Sheyla Hershey. What I couldn't answer: whether that lack of equanimity was the same as what I'd feel in response to any other extreme elective surgery, such as people who amputate their limbs. Because this surgery seems to me to have more in common with the extremity of fetishism than with the desire for sexual allure.
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I don't know if it's been parsed here yet, but this story out of Yemen, ladies, is just remarkable:
[Nujood Ali's] ordeal began last February, when the family gathered to
celebrate her wedding to a motorcycle deliveryman in his 30s. She first
set eyes on the groom when she took her marriage vows. After spending
her wedding night with her parents and 15 brothers and sisters, Nujood
was taken by her new husband to his family village,
where, she says, he beat and raped her every night. ...
Nujood finally found her moment to escape one day, when her
mother gave her a few pennies and sent her out to buy bread. Instead
she took a bus to the center of the capital, Sanaa — a city of 3
million people — where she hailed a taxi and asked to be taken to the
courthouse. She had never been inside a courtroom but had once seen one
on television, she says, and knew it was a place where people went for
help. There she sat silently on a bench, uncertain as to what to do,
while crowds of people scurried past, scarcely glancing at the quiet
child.
She'd come to get a divorce. Though the repercussions for her abusers were minimal, to say the least--thank goodness she knew "where people go for help." In the wake of all our dolly-talk (and note, ahem, the overwhelming fertility of this poor girl's parents), I can't help but notice that Nujood is, of course, the age of Malia Obama. Here's hoping she takes over the world or something.
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I read Susan Sontag's peculiar, amazing journals this weekend. (In the midst of lists of books she needs to read, from Brave New World to Oscar Wilde's De Profundis are resolutions to wash her hair at least "once every ten days.") But one passage from 1962 leapt out at me in connection to the discussion of female desire we had the other week:
Female sexuality: two types, the responder + the initiator. All sex is both active (having the dynamo inside oneself) + passive (surrendering).
Fear of what people will think—not the natural temperament—makes most women dependent on being desired before they can desire.
Sontag—at least in 1962—seems to agree with today's so-called "postfeminist" scientists that being desired is important to female sexuality. But here she believes it has to do with cultural, rather than biological, reasons.
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Anyone catch The City the other night? (Or Newsweek's inspired spoof on it, weekly Web series The District, about Obama's own life-changing move to a new town?) The purtiest reality show in the land took a break from bringing us inane conversations and overdetermined glances about relationships to bring us inane conversations and overdetermined glances about ... anorexia.
A brief recap: While out at a club, ultra-intimidating fashion publicist Kelly Cutrone calls out model Allie for having an eating disorder. Allie storms off and spends the rest of the episode claiming she doesn't have a problem and that if there was something wrong, "my agency would let me know." Oh, and that check? It's in the mail.
Uncomfortably, MTV more or less takes Allie's side: not by providing any hard evidence, but by giving the lion's share of camera time to people backing her up. Various not-so-close girlfriends tell Allie that if she feels "healthy and happy" that's all that matters; her model boyfriend says he works with girls who look like "rails" in comparison to her; we're shown footage of Allie wandering around Dean & Deluca pointing at (though never ingesting) foodstuffs. She likes smoked salmon! No problem here!
With all these folks falling all over themselves to assure Allie they believe her, the episode ends up pushing an extremely bizarre message, something like, "Don't worry about anyone you suspect has an eating disorder, so long as they lamely deny having one. Especially if that person is a model." Hmm. That doesn't sound quite right.
This couldn't have been what MTV intended. But then they should have realized, sure, you can film frivolous chats about boys and not-so frivolous chats about eating disorders with the same camera equipment, but that doesn't mean they warrant the same he-said, she-said (or, in this case, she-said, she-said) treatment in the editing room. If the show's going to take on a serious subject, it has an obligation to treat it thoughtfully—or at least like it's more significant than brunch.
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Does anyone else feel played by Obama telling Anderson Cooper and just about every news outlet that he "screwed up" on the Daschle situation? George Packer and morning news anchors are framing his mea culpa as a stark contrast to Bush's inability in 2004 to come up with any mistakes he'd made since 9/11. Their point: Isn't it so refreshing to finally have a president who can admit when he's done wrong?
Yes, a willingness to own up to mistakes is a great trait. But what exactly is Obama admitting to having done wrong here? He says the vetting process is not to blame. So what, then? Cooper's push for an explanation came up fairly empty handed:
AC: What was your mistake, letting it get this far? You should have pulled it earlier?
BO: I think my mistake is not in selecting Tom originally because I think nobody was better equipped to deal both with the substance and policy of health care—he understands it as well as anybody—but also the politics that's going to be required to actually get it done. But ultimately, I campaigned on changing Washington and bottom-up politics and I don't want to send a message to the American people that there are two sets of standards, one for powerful people and one for ordinary folks who are working every day and paying their taxes.
I can see how Obama could say he inappropriately created a double standard if he had actually appointed Daschle despite the tax scandal, but he didn't have the chance to do that. So if he was right to select Daschle originally, if the vetting process was solid, and if the appointment wasn't actually carried out, then where exactly was the screw up?
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