Current Affairs

North Korea, and Reason 8,624 that the War on Iraq was a Bad Idea

Greta Christina13 Comments

Kimjongil_1
I’m not a 100% hardcore pacifist. I’m pretty close to it, but I’m not one. I do think there are times — not bloody many, but some — when military action is a necessary evil.

And I think that now, or soon, might just possibly be one of those times. A mentally ill, megalomaniacal dictator has been firing nuclear missiles into the Sea of Japan, with the likely intent of testing whether they can hit California. I think military action should, at the very least, be an option. It should be something we can consider. It should be a card on the table.

But it’s not.

Burningflag
Thanks to the war on Iraq — which we had no good reason for getting into and which has no end in sight — we have (a) no military resources, and (b) no international credibility. Our military is stretched so thin it’s accepting white supremacists to fill out its ranks. And in the field of international diplomacy and conflict, we have all the credibility and moral high ground of Tony Soprano. If a situation arises in which we do, God forbid, need the army — we are hosed. We are fucked with a chainsaw.

Wiggum
I’m not saying the U.S. should unilaterally attack or invade North Korea. The U.S. should not be the world’s policeman. This was always one of my main arguments against the war on Iraq in the first place. The U.S. should not be the world’s policeman — for the simple reason that we suck at it. As the world’s policeman, we are both corrupt and staggeringly incompetent. Our record as the world’s policeman is comparable to that of Chief Wiggum.

But if there’s an international consensus that military action is necessary — in North Korea or anywhere else on this increasingly volatile planet — we should be able to participate.

And we can’t. We expended our resources — and our respectability — to unseat a dictator who had weapons of mass destruction a decade ago, and now we have nothing left to unseat a dictator who not only has nukes, but is actually threatening to use them.

And North Korea knows it. Every megalomaniacal nutcase dictator on the planet knows it.

So this is why you don’t start pointless, unnecessary wars. It’s not just for all the obvious reasons, the misery and suffering and death and evil and children with their limbs blown off. It’s because you then don’t have the option of waging war when it isn’t pointless, when it might just possibly be necessary.

Oh, but I forgot. The war on Iraq isn’t pointless.

Oil_well
Iraq has oil. And North Korea doesn’t.

Lucky for North Korea.

North Korea, and Reason 8,624 that the War on Iraq was a Bad Idea
{advertisement}

How Fred Flintstone Got Home, Got Wild, and Got a Stone Age Life — what does it mean?

Greta Christina22 Comments

Fredflintstone
So if you read the New Yorker, you probably read the Opal Whatsername parody in Shouts and Murmurs, How Fred Flintstone Got Home, Got Wild, and Got a Stone Age Life. I spent much of Mother’s day with Ingrid, her mom, and her mom’s partner trying to figure out all the literary references… but although I usually think of myself as somewhat well-read — and think of Ingrid and Judy and Lori in that category as well — we could only come up with maybe a third of the them.

I Googled the title, assuming someone somewhere would have out an answer key online… but I couldn’t find one.

So do you know any of the literary references in this parody? If you do, please post them here.

The ones we got:

“Afoot and lighthearted, he took to the open road…” Ingrid thinks this is On the Road, but none of us are sure.

“Stonecutter for the world, toolmaker, stacker of meat…” Chicago by Carl Sandburg.

“It was the best of times, it was the first of times…” Tale of Two Cities, Dickens.

“Keep on truckin’” – Robert Crumb.

“See Dino run. Run, Dino, run.” -Whatever the title of that stupid Dick and Jane book is.

“Let us go then, Hominidae…” Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot. (I almost wrote “Love Scone.” Oops.)

“What makes Fred run?” I assume this is What Makes Sammy Run, but haven’t read it so am not positive.

“Wilma, light of his life, fire of his loincloth…” Lolita, Nabakov.

“Once again at midnight nearly, while Fred pondered weak and weary…” The Raven, Poe. (I can never hear this without thinking about the Simpsons…)

“And so he beat on, fists against the granite, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” -The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald.

So what are the rest of the references? Help, please!

How Fred Flintstone Got Home, Got Wild, and Got a Stone Age Life — what does it mean?

The South Dakota Thing

Greta Christina6 Comments

I’ve been thinking about this whole terrifying fucked-up South Dakota anti-abortion law, which completely outlaws abortion in the state, without even the usual exceptions for rape or incest. And I’ve been thinking about the pro-choice response to it… much of which has been to focus on the horror of rape, and why rape survivors should be allowed to get abortions.

I may get drummed out of the club for saying this. So I want to say first: I am absolutely 100% pro-choice, and 100% against this God-awful law.

But I’ve always thought that the “rape/incest” exception idea is bullshit. If you believe that a six-week-old embryo is a human being, what possible difference could it make how that human being was conceived? If you’re deciding whether it should be legal to terminate its life, why would that question be relevant? After all, you wouldn’t say it was okay to kill a two-year-old child (or a twenty-year-old adult) because he/she was conceived by rape or incest. If it’s a person, it’s a person.

The “rape/incest” exception that most anti-abortion activists make has always struck me as unimpeachable proof that anti-abortionists are actually not concerned about “life.” They’re concerned about sex. They think women who have sex outside marriage should be “punished” by having to have babies. (What a great life for that baby, huh?) That’s the only reason for a rape/incest exception — that rape/incest survivors didn’t have sex on purpose, and therefore shouldn’t be punished for it. (Other unimpeachable proof of this includes the fact that most anti-abortionists are also against easily accessible birth control and sex education.)

Anyway. My point is this: I actually think that refusing to make an exception for rape/incest is a more morally consistent position on abortion. As enormously as I disagree with it, if people really believe a
fertilized embryo is a human being with full civil rights, there’s no reason they should make a distinction between embryos conceived by women who wanted sex and women who didn’t.

The best and most consistent piece of anti-abortion writing I ever read (not a wide field, to be sure) was from a priest/minister (I forget which), who believed abortion was immoral… but also believed it should be legal. He said that if people wanted to stop abortion, they should be fighting to make birth control cheap and easily accessible to anyone who wanted it, including teenagers; to get good, realistic sex education in the schools; to make day care cheap and widely available; to improve funding for public schools; to make family leave a legal requirement; to make national health care a reality; etc. etc. etc. In other words, his position was that the best way to stop abortion was to make it unnecessary — to make sure that nobody got pregnant who didn’t want to, and to make sure that anybody who wanted a child could have one without it ruining their life.

And I don’t entirely disagree with him. I absolutely don’t agree that abortion is immoral — but I do think it’s usually sad. And I sure agree with his vision for a world in which it didn’t have to happen very often.

I actually feel some understanding for the more thoughtful, rational anti-abortion people (again, not a wide field). I sometimes think the pro-choice movement gives short shrift to the real ethical question at the heart of the abortion debate: namely, at what point does a fertilized embryo become a human being? I don’t actually think that’s an easy question to answer. In fact, the foundation of my pro-choice position is that it’s a damn near impossible question to answer — and that it therefore should be up to each woman to answer it for herself. But if I didn’t believe that — if I believed that an embryo was a human being — I’d be appalled by abortion too, and trying like hell to stop it.

But once again, for all their “baby-killing” rhetoric, I don’t think that’s really the issue for most anti-abortionists. I think the issue is that they hate the idea of women having sex without consequences.

The South Dakota Thing

JT LeRoy and Hoaxes

Greta ChristinaLeave a comment

Actually, I’m not going to talk about the JT LeRoy thing per se (I work for a company that published one of his books, so I don’t think it’d be appropriate). Read the articles in the Times or the Chron if you want the details.

But the JT LeRoy thing is making me think about the whole subject of artistic hoaxes, a subject I find both fascinating and baffling.

There’s something about them that I fundamentally don’t understand: Why would anybody even *want* to pass off their work as someone else’s, or as something other than what it really is? To me, the whole point of artistic endeavor (if I may make a gross oversimplification) is a feeling of connection with the world: a sense that you’ve dredged something out of yourself and put it out in the world, and that other people are taking that something into themselves and letting it have an effect on them. To pass your work off as something it isn’t… it essentially severs that connection, rendering the entire exercise pointless.

Sure, it’s nice to get fame and admiration. But what’s the point of fame and admiration if the person being admired isn’t really you? Wouldn’t that good glowy feeling you get when your work is recognized just feel like it was missing the mark?

Sure, it’s nice to hobnob with celebrities. I guess. It seems a little weird to me, actually, but then I’ve never hobnobbed, so what do I know. But what’s the point if the person these celebrities are admiring doesn’t even exist? Wouldn’t any sense of coolness you got from hanging out with them feel meaningless, since it wasn’t really you they were hanging out with?

I suppose you could say it’s done for money. And it’s true, money buys the same amount of stuff whether you got it fraudulently or honestly. But… well, there must be easier ways to make money than a literary hoax. There must be easier ways to make money than a literary *anything*.

Now, I’m not talking here about hoaxes for the sake of hoaxing: the ones done for the sheer fun of pulling people’s legs, or to make some point about the laziness and gullibility of the media/academia/the human race/etc. Those, I get. But the kind of hoaxes I’m talking about are different. I’m talking about the kind of artistic hoaxes that are meant to stay hoaxed: the ones that are really meant to deceive, truly and permanently.

It’s not that I don’t understand why people lie to each other and try to fool each other. I get that. People lie to gain advantage, to protect themselves, to make themselves seem more attractive, etc. etc. And there’s obviously a sense of power people get from fooling other people. I get that, too. I get why people bluff in poker games, make stuff up on their resumes, lie to people they’re hitting on in bars, and so on.

But making a lie out of years of creative work — that’s a different animal. If you don’t actually care about the artistic endeavor and are just doing it for fame and money and power … well, that’s an awful lot of trouble to go to, for what seems like not that much payoff in the fame and money and power department. And if you do care about the artistic endeavor, then it seems like an enormous amount of trouble to go to for absolutely no payoff at all.

It reminds me a little of the Bible verse (stay with me here, people): “What will it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?” For a long time I thought that verse was just another bit of generic Biblical soul-spouting. But now I think it’s actually very astute — and not just in a religious sense. I think it means that there’s no point in losing who you are in order to get wealth and power and stuff — because there won’t be anybody there to enjoy it once you get it. If you lose your soul, your self, in order to get stuff, you won’t have any self left to feel good about all the stuff you got.

JT LeRoy and Hoaxes

My Letter to the Editor, or, Another Goddamn Bee in my Bonnet

Greta ChristinaLeave a comment

So demonstrating my mastery of yet another literary form (I already have porn and scathing movie reviews under my belt), I just got a new letter to the editor published in the SF Chronicle. (This makes about four or five total. I don’t remember exactly.)

It’s a response to an Op-Ed piece about universal access to pre-school, which you probably should look at if you want to make sense of my letter (or if you just want to get your dander up). Or you can just appreciate by itself, in all its context-free glory.

My letter reads as follows and begins now:

Editor — I’m very glad that Daffodil Altan had a good life and a good education without preschool (“A time-honored alternative to universal preschool,” Dec. 28). But apparently she failed to learn that a single counter-example doesn’t disprove a statistical trend.

Nobody is claiming that every single disadvantaged kid who doesn’t get preschool will grow up to be a thug. Nobody is arguing that preschool is the sole solution to poverty and crime. And nobody is trying to force preschool on parents who don’t want it. Advocates of universal preschool are simply claiming that preschool, on the whole, gives a better chance at life to large numbers of kids, and that it should be available to parents who want it.

Altan’s early experience at her mother’s knee sounds wonderful and worthwhile — but it is one person’s experience, and as such it makes a terrible argument against a program that could be hugely beneficial to thousands.

GRETA CHRISTINA
San Francisco

Not bad, huh? I do so enjoy the whole “rational yet snippy” tone that letters to the editor seem to call for. Anyway, you can see the letter in the Chron itself if you like. (You have to scroll about halfway down the Letters page.) Yay! I’m a star!

My Letter to the Editor, or, Another Goddamn Bee in my Bonnet