The Death of Imagination

Here's the Trib on voter disenfranchisement, Chicago-style. I saw this happen at my own polling place, which I showed up at fifteen minutes before closing. There were three people in line in front of me (all minority women, as it turned out), none of whom was registered in my same precinct. The two Latinas were more fortunate; their polling place was two (long) blocks due south, and one of the judges was confident they could make it there before 7 p.m. But no one had a clue where the young black woman needed to go. They told her the number to call, but she replied "There's no point, is there? I couldn't make it there before they close." And she was right.

Yes, I know, the Board of Elections sent everyone letters two months ago with the changes, but it's easy for notifications like that to get lost among the junk mail. Moreover, it's the kind of thing you wouldn't know to look out for if you didn't know to look out for it. What I mean is, some voters' polling stations had been the same for twenty years or more. Why should they expect that they'd change overnight? And I do mean "overnight"--one of my coworkers found that her actual polling place was not the same one she'd been told it would be the night before.

A lot of people I know were down on the election judges, but what do you honestly expect from amateurs paid barely $5 more than minimum wage?

Has anyone else been following the circumcision controversy in Germany? My immediate reaction was shock that a European court would make such a ruling. But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered what was actually wrong with it.

What actually caused me to reevaluate my thinking was the headline Circumcision Ruling Called Threat to Religion. To which my reaction was "Good!" I'm much more comfortable with threats to religion than I was even a few years ago. I used to be more live-and-let-live. After all, what do I care what someone else believes? But I'm really fed up with the amount of harm I see being done out of ostensibly religious motives. Sure, secularists do plenty of harm as well. Penn State didn't need any religious justification to ignore the abuse of adolescents. But look at how it is now being held to account and think how differently things would look today if the Catholic Church were forced to undergo the same.

Of course, that headline is only shorthand--what they were actually reporting is that religious authorities were calling the ruling a threat to freedom of religion--and freedom of expression is something I take very seriously. But how well does this charge actually hold up? Contrary to the hysteria, it's not a "ban" on circumcision; it's a circumscription of the practice of circumcision by the right to consent. (Or, if you will, a ban on circumcision of minors.) A person's right to undergo unnecessary surgery for religious reasons is not being infringed; rather, their right to force that upon someone else is.

So far, the counterarguments I've seen to this have been (1) "It's tradition" and (2) "It's anti-Semitism". As you can imagine, I'm particularly annoyed by the later (and its insulting implication that Germany should forever be held to a higher standard in this respect than any other society in the world because Holocaust), not least of all because the case revolved around a Muslim family. But the first argument is pretty damn weak as well. What great vice in our history hasn't been defended with "We've always done it?" We've always owned slaves. We've always executed sodomites. We've always silenced women. (See, it says so right here in this ancient book we carry around!)

I understand that the consensus is still incomplete on the harm done by circumcision, but that does seem to be the direction we're moving. I'm not fond of comparisons between male circumcision and female genital mutilation, since I think they tend to trivialise the truly horrific nature of the latter, but it does seem rather apt when we're talking about specifically religious justifications for surgical modifications. If any rabbis have been willing to stand up and defend the right of pious Muslims to have their daughter's clitores cut out, I must've missed it. So what is so different in this case?

The BBC article I link to above closes with an argument that Christian baptism also "pre-construct[s] the religious position of little children". But who in the anti-circumcision camp is arguing that that is the primary harm being done here? Not to say there isn't a case to be made for that, but the concern of most people--the concern of the court, in this ruling--is with the physical harm being done to a non-consenting and defenceless human being. I'm finding it hard to understand why someone else's right to free expression should trump that.

Am I the only one who finds the whole Cynthia Nixon brouhaha absolutely depressing? Even her defenders strike me as being essentially reactive and confused in their thinking. A typical example:

As a member of the gay community, I knew what she meant all along. I was never angry at her. What I was angry at was this was an opportunity, as always, for anti-gays to take ONE example and apply it to the ENTIRE group. It's a frustration with THEIR bigotry, not her.

And, so what? Haters gonna hate. Anti-gay bigots will always be scouring the totality of the queer experience for that handful of instances which confirm their established prejudices and then trumpeting those to anyone who'll listen. But why do we care so much now that fewer and fewer people are listening? Why are we more worried about the message remarks like Nixon's are sending to our "enemies" than the message our reaction to them is sending to our allies?

What is that message? From my point of view, intolerance and insecurity. Nixon made it explicit that she was talking solely about her own personal experience and yet she's being everywhere taken to task for being "unclear" and "irresponsible". This sends the message that people shouldn't be allowed to talk about their experiences if they don't fit the dominant narrative. And all the very public hand-wringing about how these comments will be "used against us" makes it look like we haven't escaped the ghetto mentality of a generation ago. Today it's not the queers and their allies who are in the minority any more, it's the homophobes.

"It's not a choice" is not the sole or even chief basis for demanding equal rights in this country. After all, religious minorities are a protected class before the law and if being a Christian isn't a choice, then why are so many people trying to get me to "choose Jesus"? Sexual minorities should be treated as equal before the law because there's no compelling argument for them not to be, just some claptrap about "traditional values" cobbled together from squeamishness and bits of scripture. Cynthia Nixon's remarks don't weaken the position of gay rights advocates in anyone's eyes but their own--a perceived threat that risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When I first heard of "mandatory voting", I thought it was a bad idea. Liberal Australians informing me how popular such measures were couldn't convince me otherwise. Being a snotty elitist, I think we already have too many numbskulls voting. If you can't be arsed to even make it to the polls, it's a fair bet we're all better off without you skewing the results by voting a straight-party ticket or picking the candidate with the most Irish-sounding name or whatever. However, all the recent shenanigans aimed at disinfranchising voters (primarily schemes requiring photo IDs in order to establish eligibility) have forced me to ponder whether mandatory voting may actually be the best way to do an end run around them. Or course, we could simply end up with the worst of both worlds: Citizens not just prevented from voting but forced to pay a fine to boot.

When the shit started to hit the fan in Bahrain, my buddy Blondie texted me to request that I write my Congresscritters asking them why our government hadn't publicly condemned the Al Khalifa regime for firing on unarmed citizens. Given the urgency of the matter, I didn't trust to the post but contacted them through the forms on their homepages. Naturally, I didn't get any response beyond a simple acknowledgment that my message had been received from the two who wrested an e-mail address from me.

Today I got a poll from our Republican senator, Mark Kirk, offering four options of a response to the situation in Libya:

1. Impose sanctions.
2. Enforce a no-fly zone.
3. Do both.
4. Wait for UN approval before doing anything.

Since "bomb the fucker" was not an option, I chose (3), despite the fact that it seems Kirk has already committed himself to (1). Interesting to see how he frames the argument for this. In his press release, he first mentions the innocent civilians and then gives a list of major terrorist actions traced back to the Gaddafi regime. But in the link from the e-mail, he prominently mentions the role of the crisis in driving up gas prices and, thus, hurting our economic recovery.

It would be petty to cavil about this. Whatever it takes to get Americans to support the overthrow of a nasty demicidal dictator, I guess.

The second night on my own turned out more interesting than the first. Once I figured out that the young cub I ran into last weekend was "giving me the basket" (wie man auf deutsch zu sagen pflegt), I tried to set something up with cuore_felice34, who similarly flaked. Only after I decided, fuck 'em all, I was taking myself out to Massouleh with The Economist as my dining partner did I think to call the every dependable welcomerain. She lives just around the corner for there, so I thought I might drop in for a chat; she had plans but offered her husband, and he responded to my suggestion with, "Where are you going for dinner? Give me half an hour and I'll meet you there." It was a lovely meal, a sincerely why-do-we-do-this-more-often experience, but not a long one, so when I got home I thought I've got just enough time to watch the new NetFlik and do some tidying up before monshu gets home. And I would've, too, if I hadn't broken at the 1:45 mark for a little tea and gossip.

The movie was Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex, a film about the early days of a notorious German left-wing terror group, the Rote Armee Fraktion. I don't remember hearing about them before my arrival in Germany in 1990. They were still very active then, having assassinated the chairman of Deutsche Bank the previous year, and before I returned to the States they shot to death the head of the Treuhandanstalt (a government agency responsible for privatising the assets of the GDR). Nevertheless, I recall a curious sense of culture shock upon first seeing a wanted poster listing known members. After all, I came from country where organised political terror of this sort had been dead for a decade already. Bombings and shootings were the work of crazed loners, not armed revolutionary groups.

So I had a great deal to learn about the group and the history of the radical left in Germany in general. At the time, I was more interested in current events than recent history (after all, my country had just initiated a war in a Middle Eastern country) and didn't pursue this, so the movie was an excellent primer on an important period of German history. I had never even encountered the term "Deutscher Herbst" ("German Autumn") until reading the Wikipedia article just now. I certainly didn't know that the tiny band of leftists kidnapping bankers had once convinced the PFLP to hijack a plane for them.

It can be tough in films like these to strike the right balance of sympathy with the protagonists. Too little and you're left with a bunch of psychopaths offing people for no reason; too much and you're glorifying cold-blooded murder. I think Eichinger handles this well, making it clear how they caught the imagination of a generation (one of the characters quotes an Allensbach poll that showed one in four Germans under 40 expressing sympathy for the group and one in ten willing to shelter a member) while at the same time presenting the cynicalness of their manipulation of public opinion. The only time he seems to err too far on the side of the terrorists is in the elegiac final sequence.

Baader in particular comes off here as far more thoughtful and mature than he has throughout the film (where he is depicted as the "charismatic, spoiled psychopath" described in the source text). But at least the deaths are shown as unambiguously self-inflicted, two-and-a-half decades of lefty conspiracy theory to the contrary. Overall, Lola rennt's Bleibtreu does a particularly fine job of illustrating how a violent misogynist could attract so many women to the cause. (The gender parity among first-generation members of the organisation was striking to me, and in particular how many women are shown planning and leading attacks.) And learning that Ulrike Meinhof was a popular journalist who had appeared on television before going underground really clarifies for me the popular appeal of the group at the time.

This also makes her a handy identification figure early in the film. It was instructive watching Baader and his partner Ensslin bully her into laying down the pen for the sword, but what I missed was insight into how the two of them arrived at their extreme views. Later, focus shifts to the farsighted director of the Bundeskriminalamt, who apparently completely reformed the German police force making it a model for other states to follow. (It took me more than half the film to be sure that he was played by one of my favourite German actors, Bruno Ganz, and then only because his accent and delivery resembled that which he employed as Hitler in Untergang; I'm not sure whether to credit a fantastic makeup job or the sad fact that advanced age has taken more of a toll on his features than I suspected.)

It's also inevitable that a film this ambitious would leave loose ends. In particular, I was confused by the fate of Meinhof's twin daughters, who were hidden in Sicily when the founding members of the RAF fled to a PFLP training camp in Jordan. Peter Homann is shown leaving the camp to save them, but it's not him who arrives in Italy to take them back to Germany. (In fact, the character on screen must be Stefan Aust, a colleague of Meinhof's and author of the book upon which the movie is based, who cooperated with Homann to return the children to their father, a colleague of both Meinhof and Aust.) Another armed revolutionary group, the Tupamaros, are referenced but their relationship to the RAF is never made clear. (Come to think of it, it's not even clear whether the group in question is the one based in Berlin, notorious for an attempted bombing of the Jewish Community Centre there [on Kristallnacht, no less!] or another of the same name in Munich, to which key second-generation RAF leader Brigitte Mohnhaupt belonged.)

Of course, all those loose ends make for a fascinating game of Wikipedia wandering. It's heartening to discover that one of Meinhof's daughters is a successful journalist (the one, in fact, who broke the notorious file photo of Joschka Fischer beating a cop) and heart-rending to learn that, despite his extraordinary success, Herold is forced to live in a former border patrol base and bear the costs of his own protection against assassination by RAF sympathisers. (He calls himself "the last prisoner of the RAF".)

Through a discussion in a forum I frequent, I was just recently made aware of the opinion piece by German banker Thilo Sarrazin which appeared the 24 Aug issue of Bild magazine. (German original here, English translation here.) Here's the paragraph that pulled me up short:

Diskriminierung scheidet als Grund für diese mangelhaften Erfolge der muslimischen Migranten aus, denn Migrantengruppen aus Fernost oder Indien, die eher noch fremdartiger aussehen als Türken und Araber, schneiden teilweise sogar besser ab als die Deutschen.

("Discrimination as a cause for this lack of success of the Muslim immigrants can be excluded, as groups of migrants from the Far East or India, whose appearance is even more exotic than that of the Turks and Arabs, in some cases even surpass the Germans.")

You may have been saying to yourselves earlier, "Hmm, 'Sarrazin'--that doesn't sound like a very German name." And it isn't, etymologically-speaking. His ancestors were among those Huguenots who were given refuge in Prussia. Yes, you got that: The same man who can't think of any grounds for discrimination besides outward appearance is only a German citizen because his ancestors were discriminated against on the basis of their religion.

He concludes his piece with this crotchety little tirade:

Ich möchte, dass auch meine Urenkel in 100 Jahren noch in Deutschlandleben können, wenn sie dies wollen. Ich möchte nicht, dass das Land meiner Enkel und Urenkel zu großen Teilen muslimisch ist, dass dort über weite Strecken türkisch und arabisch gesprochen wird, die Frauen ein Kopftuch tragen und der Tagesrhythmus vom Ruf der Muezzine bestimmt wird. Wenn ich das erleben will, kann ich eine Urlaubsreise ins Morgenland buchen.

("I would like my great grandchildren 100 years from now still to be able to live in Germany — if they want to. I do not desire that the land of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren be largely Muslim, that Turkish and Arabic be spoken in broad swathes, that women should wear headscarves, and the daily rhythm be determined by the prayer call of the muezzin. If I want to experience that, I can book a vacation to the Orient.")

I'm sure somewhere there's a similar paragraph written by a 17th or 18th-century German intellectual dismayed by the rampant Frenchification of German society at the time, and it's a damn shame I don't have the patience to go searching for it.

So in addition to catching up on LJ entries (FB I had to write off--I can barely be bothered to keep up with it even when I'm not out frolicking every day) and porn installments, I did make an attempt during my lost weekend to resubmerge myself into the stream of current events. We received complimentary USA Today at the resort, so I wasn't totally in the dark about developments, but still I managed to miss out on quite a bit, notably the trashing of Toronto's city centre. Fortunately I had nitouche to direct me to Torontoist's Fourteen Essential Videos.

Pundits were quick to reassure me that, as G20 riots go, this one barely registered: no one killed or even seriously wounded, no real attempt to storm the barricades, etc. Am I the only one surprised to see the bar set so low? I mean, this is Canada, where trust in the police is high, corruption and serious crime are low, and there's no real tradition of violent street protest. Not to idealise our frosty brethren too much, but I can't help feeling that if they can't get the balance right, we don't even have a chance down here.

And I don't think they did. On the one hand, $1 billion Canadian for security, 15,000 riot control officers on duty, and they couldn't even keep a handful of punks from smashing up Yonge Street and burning several TPS cruisers. On the other, the largest mass arrests in Canadian history, innocent people held without charge in abusive conditions for over 24 hours, and assault of unarmed civilians. (I don't think I'll ever be able to hear "O Canada" again without thinking of that notorious baton rush of peaceable demonstrators.) Sadly, those incidents seem like further confirmation of the truism that when you put on riot gear, everyone begins to look like rioters. On the other hand, the failure to defend even Toronto Police Service property just looks like wanton stupidity. It's so egregious that despite my devotion to Hanlon's razor, I'm agnostic on provocateur explanations rather than dismissing them out of hand. At the very least, it tells me that whatever the $1 billion was spent on, it wasn't intelligence.

The most coherent explanation I've heard for why the Black Bloc were allowed to rampage for over an hour free from police interference is that the RCMP expected the primary assault would be on the Convention Centre and didn't want to lose officer strength snuffing decoy riots. But what most impressed me about raw footage of the rioters is how little effort it would've taken to stop them. There can't be more than a dozen or so actively engaged in destruction and even their efforts are laughable more often than not. An off-duty banker is all it takes to stop their looting and the presence of one or two mooks to keep them from smashing windows. (They don't even have to be security guards; note how the pizza place with two ordinary guys standing behind the door [7:46 on the CTV video] doesn't get touched while the neighbouring Quizno's is trashed.)

What most depressed me about the footage was the behaviour of the bystanders. Every time someone breaks a window, there's a ring of people with cameras recording the incident. When a lone citizen actually does step forward in order to prevent a vandal from smashing in a door, he's quickly mobbed by onlookers demanding he "leave him alone". Yeah, buddy, we came down here to see something. You with your outmoded civic-mindedness, don't interfere with the performance! It's disgusting, because whenever one of the "anarchists" is engaged, they quickly back down. They were cowards and bullies without even the wherewithal to overcome passive resistance. But the mere threat of their appearance justifies an outlandish police presence with sweeping powers, which in turn appears to validate their anti-authoritarianism. And it's the ordinary citizens, who just want to peacefully assert their right to disagree with their government, who get screwed.

No wonder I've been feeling so antisocial this week.

I've been trying to avoid commenting on the most recent flare-up of the immigration debate because if there's anywhere with a worse heat/light ratio in our political discourse, then I really don't want to see it. It's boundlessly depressing to read the Economist's well-reasoned condemnations of the recent legislation in Arizona and see that 90+% of the comments online are from anti-immigrationists. I've been clinging to the hope that this was just the last burst of resistance from a dying generation upset by demographic change, but the latest poll figures belie that.

Still, there's an interesting linguistic angle the whole debate, and it's not what you think. The recurring metaphor in most of these rants is "my country = my home". It goes like this: You wouldn't let someone into your home uninvited, and you certainly wouldn't let them live there without your consent. (Usually framed more belligerently as "How would you like it if...".) Well, the USA is our home, and these people are showing up uninvited. It's a very effective metaphor--simple, easy to grasp, emotionally powerful. (How many terms are more emotionally resonant than "home"? "Mom"...?) That's why I've struggled for weeks now to find a response that shows how essentially wrong-headed it is. I own my home, but I don't own the USA. And it's a good thing, too, at least where these people are concerned, because if I did they wouldn't be here.

See, the essence of the metaphor is that we should be able to exercise control over who we're forced to coexist with. Which is an appealing idea, but just doesn't scale up to size of a city neighbourhood, much less a whole damn country. Aside from which I would take a freshly-arrived undocumented Mexican over an American-born nativist any damn day. Their educational levels tend to be roughly comparable, but the immigrant is likely to be much more optimistic, particularly when it comes to the future of the USA. (Why else would they choose to come here?) And I certainly know who I'd rather have cook for me.

Speaking of cooking, I wouldn't want anyone living in my home who wasn't contributing to its upkeep, would you? Yet 9.5% of the labour force in this country is unemployed. Does that mean I can ask them to leave?