Das Gläserngürteltier

They've built a spectacular new Hauptbahnhof in Berlin. As a non-local, I'm not required to care if the cost and inconvenience of construction approached Big Dig proportions, or if Berliners think of its architecture the way Seattleites think of our EMP*+. I just love it.

But, I realized, I'm extremely lucky to have experienced both Berlin Zoo and Ostbahnhof stations when they were still in use. Starting this week, visitors to Berlin won't have any idea what those vestiges of West and East were like.

It was quite amazing that even in 2005, Deutsche Bahn schedules showed our train from Hamburg arriving at Berlin Zoo and our train to Prague departing from the Ostbahnhof. Even though they're only a few stations apart on the same tracks, we weren't totally confident that the train to or from one station would stop at the other one, and even if it did, the schedules were loath to tell us at what time such an event might occur. (I was travelling with a West German, though not a Berliner, and it wasn't clear to her, either.) Since we weren't making that connection on the same day, we never did find out whether a single transfer could have been done at one station or the other. We just got on and off at the DB-prescribed stations.

Definitely not an Iron Curtain, but you do get a feeling of separation from it. Kind of an Iron Sheer. Now replaced by glass. It's a great moment, really.

* I don't know whether Berliners actually feel this way, I'm just saying I don't have to care if they do.
+ I actually like Seattle's EMP.

Edit: Ostbahnhof != Alexanderplatz.

Glad I'm not a thoroughbred

Horses cannot convalesce; their internal organs shut down if they're kept off their feet for any significant length of time. Veterinary surgical techniques may produce state-of-the-art repairs, but the horse is so unlikely to survive the non-weight-bearing period of recovery that euthanasia is still the most humane option.

I, on the other hand, hit golf balls and bowled this weekend on my bionic knee. Life is good.

Accomplishment

I'm now the only person I know to have gotten through all of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

Actually, I'm the only person I know to have gotten past the first 100 pages of Quicksilver.

It was worth it.

There are two ways to keep politics and religion out of Lodge

One is to insist that every Brother completely neutralize himself and erase all hints as to his personal beliefs, lest the rest of us learn what those beliefs are and think less of him for having them. Along the lines of, I don't want to know what church you attend or who you voted for, and I'm not convinced it's appropriate for you to park your car outside the Temple with those bumper stickers on it.

Another would be for a Brother's beliefs and opinions to be held discreetly, but acknowledged when appropriate, and for the rest of us to challenge ourselves to extend Brotherly Love and even respect to him whether we agree with him or not.

One of those approaches would seem to be more in line with the character-building goals of Freemasonry than the other....

Where it's at

Huffington Post: Jane Smiley: Notes for Converts

A quibble: "Anti-Bush from Day 1" very most certainly is not the day after the 2000 election. Let's talk about sometime in 1993, when W. announced his candidacy for Governor of Texas and it was painfully obvious to everyone, including his supporters, that the mansion in Austin held no appeal other than as a stair-step to the one in Washington. There are probably people smarter than me for whom Day 1 was even earlier than that.

Thanks to a smart guy for the pointer. He thinks point #6 is worth special notice, but I favor point #4.

The greatest thing about democracy is that the people always get exactly the government they deserve. Unfortunately, he and I also get exactly the government they deserve.

This is a conservative?!

Quote from CNN, 'Let the prisoners pick the fruits':

King analyzed the issue in class terms.

"The elite class in America is becoming a ruling class and they've made enough money by hiring cheap illegal labor that they think they also have some kind of a right to cheap servants to manicure their nails and their lawn, for example.

"So this ruling class, this new ruling class of America, is expanding a servant class in America at the expense of the middle class of America, the blue collar of America that used to be able to punch a time clock, buy a modest house and raise their families.... Those young people are cut out of this process."

Had not really thought of this particular issue in those particular terms. This is a conservative?!

So the question is, when we say "these are jobs native-born Americans won't do", do we mean at all or just for pissant wages?

If the latter, then is the problem who's willing to do the work for peanuts or is the problem that we refuse to pay more than peanuts? Like, why shouldn't a manicure or a housecleaning or restaurant service be worth 4-5 times the wage they are now, and why shouldn't we wealthiest people on earth pay luxury prices for luxury services?

I've previously criticized Americans' fanatical desire for Wal-Mart prices on everything and how that strengthens the whole downward spiral: wage depression, outsourcing and offshoring, etc. Bottom line, we can either demand the lower prices or we can demonize the illegals (and offshorers) who make those prices possible but not both?

I've heard it said that any job is intrinsically "worth" whatever people are willing to accept for doing it. But that only works if the entire globe is a level playing field and wage workers have real choices. It isn't, and they don't. So wages are already unnatural, and the richest corporate executives stockpile the benefits of that. I wonder why we wouldn't want a democratic government to set unnatural wages to benefit the rest of us, instead. Seems to me that's the only way it'd make any sense to crack down on illegal immigration.

New linguistic peeve

The use of "so" to end a sentence, as if it were punctuation.

Another reason to give women's colleges a look?

NYT: To All the Girls I've Rejected

(Women find higher hurdles at college is identical; NYT doesn't always expire their op-eds, but just in case.)

To sum up: at many competitive co-ed colleges, female applicants outnumber male ones, but the colleges want to maintain gender parity in the classes they admit. The result is pretty simple math: well-qualified girls will be rejected to make room for less-qualified boys.

This is a challenge. I'm an alumna of a women's college and I have been working to encourage high school students in my area to consider not only my alma mater, but highly competitive colleges in general and women's colleges in particular. On the one hand, if female applicants are at a demographic disadvantage at co-ed colleges, that's a rock-solid argument for them to look at women's colleges instead. On the other hand, it's hard to brag about a college being easier to get into, at least among the caliber of students I'm trying to attract.

"Be surrounded by all the girls who were almost good enough to get into Kenyon"?

But, wait. That's only half the story. What about going to Kenyon and being surrounded by all those even less qualified boys?

Now which campus is looking more competitive?

It's interesting, because Smith takes a big hit in the U.S. News rankings for having too high an acceptance rate. (I don't think that's the only reason Smith has been slipping for the last many years, but that's the most glaring difference between itself and its peers.) Smith loses that one on two fronts, because its applicant pool is half the size of its co-ed counterparts', but its incoming class is twice the size of its single-sex competitors! I'd love to see us back in the top five again, but I think I'd rather brag about the wealth of opportunities we offer to a truly diverse pool of amazingly talented women and girls.

In any case, I shall be curious to see what effect the demographic shift has on Smith and women's and co-ed colleges alike, in the coming years. Maybe female-dominated campuses will be the wave of the future for all of us. ;)

Again, not sure what went wrong with whom.

Yes, it's alarming to find myself agreeing with Charles Krauthammer.

Gemini vs. Taurus

Like I was saying about what one can and can't count on.

On January 23, before dawn, I was crossing at a reasonably well-lit intersection, in the crosswalk, with the signal, when a royal blue Ford Taurus turning left failed to stop and hit me. The bumper struck my left knee and I rolled up onto the hood before rolling off onto the pavement. Screaming my fool head off the entire way.

If we accept the basic premise of being hit by a car, then after that I'm about as lucky as it gets. As soon as I landed I realized [1] not dead, which is good, and [2] pain in the left leg but nothing else. Everything was basically functioning, even the injured leg, and nothing else hurt. I was conscious for the entire ride and remembered every excruciating detail.

It seemed like a big crowd gathered around pretty quickly, perhaps attributable to my singer's lungs. Folks helped me get comfortable, directed traffic around me, called 911, and talked amongst themselves about the license number of the car because, indeed, the miscreant drove off.

Seattle police, fire and paramedics are really second to none in the quality of their response. I got treated to a ride, with lights and siren, to the Level 1 trauma center at Harborview Medical Center, where I also can't say enough good things about the entire staff of the ER, radiology, CT, and whatever other departments I passed through. Especially the one with the morphine.

The thoroughness of a Level 1 trauma center is also impressive. They weren't going to take my word for any of my injuries, so I had at least 100 radiographs taken of my entire spine, both legs, and my left wrist, as well as multiple CT scans of my abdomen (including one with the funky dye in the IV that makes your blood vessels glow on the scan) and also CTs of my injured leg to get a closer look at what turned out to be a grade V tibial plateau fracture. Funny how things hurt more when you know they're broken than they did when you were thinking soft-tissue injury....

I had surgery the next day to repair the fracture with a whole mess of titanium plates and screws and composite bone graft material and whatever it is they fix a torn meniscus with. Fortunately, because I have plenty of "tissue" (read: fat) around my knees, they were able to take care of everything with a single immediate surgery, rather than the medieval external fixator which involves rods and screws through the skin and into the bone while waiting for the swelling to diminish.

I spent the next two days relaxing in the orthopedic trauma ward while decidedly foul dark goopy stuff drained out of a tube inserted into my knee. Apparently it's better to have the goop sucked out than to leave it where it is. Once the drain came out (imagine a 6-inch tube being pulled out of your insides, eeew), the atmosphere changed from spa-like and heavily medicated to plenty more work, and physical therapy began. I slacked at first, but it's amazing how the threat of a roommate (public hospital, you know) can motivate one to haul oneself to a real bathroom with a door that closes.

Now I'm home, and the parts of the house that I can get to look like a medical supply store. I've got a continuous passive motion (CPM) machine on the sofa, which I can lie in all day having my knee bent and stretched for me (strangely, this is not torture at all and is in fact quite comfy). I've got a thigh-to-ankle brace that I wear most of the time, except in the CPM. I've got a walker, crutches, a shower chair, and of course an orthopedic potty seat. Mom picked up barstools for the kitchen and the bathroom, which make it possible for me to brush my teeth at the sink instead of into a bowl in bed.

One regains one's dignity slowly, one hygienic function at a time.

There's a diminishing but stubborn list of things I can't do for myself at home, which so far has meant babysitters every day, evening, and overnight. It kinda comes down to not being able to carry anything while walking with crutches or a walker: cooking, feeding the cat, and general fetching just don't work. We think with some advance planning I'll be able to manage this well enough to fly solo during the day starting next week.

Work has been great and accommodating so far.

The cops located the miscreant registered owner of the Taurus, but he denies being the driver. It's pretty obvious he's lying and has enlisted some friends to lie for him, but without a solid witness placing him behind the wheel, there won't be enough proof to prosecute. Liability? Uninsured, of course. Lawsuit? Sufficiently lower standard of proof, but probably more expensive to pursue than any award I'd ever hope to see. Looks like there will be co-pays and deductibles in my future, but still investigating options there.

I think my at-home PT exercises are going well, and I like my range of motion already, but I suspect there'll be a rude awakening when I start the formal PT sessions next week.

Three weeks down, nine to go until I'm weight-bearing and stick-shift-driving again.

If there was something else I was planning on doing in late winter and early spring 2006, I sure can't remember now what it was.

Diet revolution, part IV

Amber Waves, June 2005: Obesity Policy and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Amber Waves is a publication of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, whose job is not to look out for your health. The USDA supports agriculture; they're dedicated to making sure that US food producers can sell things.

And thus, I'm not sure whether this journal article is just an appalling piece of agricorporate propaganda*†‡, or an accurate reflection of the futility of trying to change gluttonous habits, or both.

Either way, it's some serious obfuscation of the role aggressive marketing plays in the fattening of America.

---

* Suspicious:

Numerous studies, though ongoing, largely conclude that aggregate cigarette advertising has a small or negligible impact on overall cigarette smoking.

† Highly suspect:

The American Dietetic Association says that each additional 3,500 calories a person consumes results in an additional pound of body weight. That implies that a person who gave up 100 calories (equivalent to a piece of toast) each day for a year would end up approximately 10 pounds lighter at year's end.

‡ Coincidence? The biggest processed food companies are owned by tobacco companies....

Diet revolution, part III

It's a simple plan. It, like anything else in life, is not guaranteed. Here it is anyway.

• Count calories.

This is unglamorous, but it's physics. Fewer calories in and more calories out is all there is. Gather data, determine basic calorie needs to maintain current weight, then set a reasonable daily caloric target to achieve a reasonable pace of weight loss.

Never, ever, ever substitute marketing claims ("low fat!" "low carb!" "healthy whole grains!" "wholesome!" "vitamin-enriched!") for calorie count.

• Measure.

We got into this mess in part because our idea of portion sizes is so far out of line. We need to take our brains back from the restaurants and marketers and learn how to perceive the food correctly.

• Trust the math.

Realize, accept, and make peace with mathematically-determined portion sizes. That is the amount of food we need, even if our bad habits tell us otherwise.

Rely on the numbers and use them to learn new and better habits.

• Make conscious choices.

There are no "forbidden foods", only trade-offs we make to achieve our daily caloric target. Instead of feeling deprived and resentful, we are empowered to make these choices. We need to pay attention to the real consequences of each choice, and be aware of which decisions support our weight-loss goals and which ones sabotage us.

• Question "convenience".

Things marketed to us as convenience often aren't. The time it takes to stop at a restaurant or a drive-thru or to assemble a processed food from a kit often are not meaningful savings over the time it would take to put together our own real food at home.

• Be wary of processed and restaurant foods, even in small doses.

Make sure that the additives and artificial flavors aren't stimulating cravings or reinforcing bad habits.

• Learn to love whole, natural foods.

One of the scariest things about artificial marketed foods is that they teach us the wrong things about what food is "supposed" to taste like. We then reject reality because it doesn't taste fake enough.

Reclaim the flavors of grape, orange, cherry, cheese and meat! Say no to the Kool-Aid- and Cheeto-ization of our everyday diet!

• Learn, get angry, stay angry.

Practically everything about the American diet has been engineered by corporations. The urge to eat harmful foods, the gimmicky diets that don't work (and the deliberate undermining of confidence in simple calorie-counting), the reluctance to exercise, the frantic drive toward elusive convenience, the fallback onto artificial supplements for ourselves and our children, and much, much, much more, are all dreamed up in marketing departments and inflicted on us for nothing more, nothing less than profit... with our enthusiastic participation. Recognize it and reject it.

ICU psychosis 101

ICU psychosis is a disorder in which patients in an intensive care unit (ICU) or a similar setting experience anxiety, hear voices, see things that are not there, and become paranoid, severely disoriented in time and place, very agitated, or even violent, etc. In short, patients become temporarily psychotic. — Medicinenet.com et al.

Causes of ICU psychosis (partial list):

• Sleep deprivation, exhaustion
  
• Disruption of day/night schedule
• Constant interruptions
  
• Unfamiliar surroundings
• Disruption of regular routine & activities
  
• Sensory deprivation
• Windowless rooms
• Little human contact
  
• Sensory overload
• Hallway and neighbor noise
• TV
• Flashing monitors
• Beeping alarms
• Loss of control over surroundings
• Lights on/off
• Windows open/closed
• Door open/closed
• Access to food, drink, belongings, lip balm, etc.
  
• Pain
• From medical condition
• Post-surgical
• Needle sticks, injection with stinging medications
  
• Discomfort
• Furniture
• Sleeping positions
• Room temperature
• Tubes & wires
• Hunger, thirst
• Lack of hygiene
• Poor caregiver communication
• Slow response to call button
• Failure to explain procedures
  
• Refusal or inability of caregivers to honor requests
• Nurses' need for doctors' approval, and slow response thereof
  
• Inability to communicate
• Due to medical condition or breathing apparatus
• Due to declining mental state
  
• Medication problems
• Disruption of regular medications
• Especially psych medications
• Reactions and side effects of new medications
• Interactions of old and/or new medications
  
• Powerlessness
• Immobility
• Due to medical condition
• Due to monitors, IVs, other tubes
• Due to fatigue or atrophy
  
• Lack of personal privacy
  
• Indignities
• Exposure
• Detailed monitoring and measuring of bodily functions
• Requiring assistance with bodily functions
• Loss of control of bodily functions
• Catheters, etc.
• Fear, anxiety, depression
  
• About medical condition
• About ongoing or upcoming procedures/treatments
  
• About anything/everything on this list
• Exacerbated by disruption of psych medications
  
• Compounding confusion, agitation
  
• Caregiver frustration
• Self-injury or interference with needed treatments
  
• Possible physical restraints
• Family and friends "siding" with caregivers "against" patient
  

Compound all this by the patient being disabled: say, blind.

Disclaimer: health professionals are generally great and try their best, but most do not have adequate staff time to handle ICU psychosis, nor will they necessarily have an arsenal of valuable techniques for dealing with it.

Paying for college, or more to the point, getting college to pay for you

This weekend I attended a workshop for students and parents, put on by a member of the Federal Way school board, on the subject of small, private, competitive and generous liberal arts colleges.

Most of these institutions are located "back East" and most folks in the Northwest have never heard of them. But they're excellent schools, and they've got lots of money to spend and infinite flexibility in how they will choose to spend it. For a low-income student, this translates into a good chance at a free ride if they work hard in school and know the right places to apply.

Many schools now emphasize need-based financial aid, but one school's idea of "need" can be very different from another's. Public schools are required to adhere to the federal and state definitions of "need", which can be severe ("after your parents take out their third and fourth mortgages, the remainder that you'll 'need' is..."). But private schools can do whatever they want. Some private schools come up with their own extremely generous definitions of "need"; others offer huge merit scholarships to the students who really impress them (see also this article). Some do both.

Parents and students often have no idea, and assume they are stuck with the federal assessment. It pains me how many families don't even try, because they don't know.

The workshop teaches families how to find these colleges, and students how to make themselves into attractive candidates.

The basics:

Get the best possible grades, but more importantly, take the most challenging classes available. All that stuff about being a well-rounded student is only true if you have already demonstrated that you can handle the college's curriculum.

But don't give up if you don't have a 4.0... a B student with a tough high school course load is usually very attractive, and that's where the well-roundedness comes into play as well.

Refer to Barron's Profiles of American Colleges and or Guide to the Most Competitive Colleges, both available on Amazon.

Start with the lists of most competitive and highly competitive colleges, throw out all the public schools (they don't have any money), and build a list of ~20 schools of potential interest (overall, not just financially).

Big, famous schools that everybody has heard of will have huge pools of applicants competing with you for admission and money. Look for lesser-known but highly-rated gems where you'll be a bigger fish.

Look beyond tuition. Barron's has information about endowment, average grant/aid award, and percent of students receiving aid. This can be helpful in figuring out which schools on the list are potential best buys and cash cows.

Finally, open up a correspondence early on with any school you feel passionate about. Ask intelligent questions, and generally make yourself known to admissions officers, alumnae, even faculty. (The workshop leader related the tale of a young woman who started writing to her chosen college and meeting with its alumnae as a 9th grader; by the fall of her sophomore year they accepted her to the class starting 2 years hence... with a full scholarship and without her ever submitting an application!) Passion counts for a lot. Even a need-based program will probably happen to find a few extra dollars for a really compelling candidate.

Most importantly, don't assume you can't, and don't give up!

Diet revolution, part II

It's a little creepy to me how much the media looove gastric bypass surgery.

I got curious; I looked it up. Gastric bypass is normally described as something like "stomach stapling" (which has been around for years), where the stomach's capacity is reduced. I didn't realize that it also includes partial removal or bypass of the intestines, which causes "malabsorption". If the patient overeats beyond the stomach's capacity, the intestines' ability to digest is also reduced and excess food passes undigested. In other words, diarrhea. (I assume this is the "dumping syndrome" that is sometimes cryptically mentioned by the media; they don't describe it or explain its cause.)

What I'm wondering is how this is any different from a bulimic who uses laxatives to purge after a binge.

On the other hand, desperate times call for desperate measures.

I'm thinking there's some math that goes into a weight loss surgery decision. Diet and exercise takes time. If a person has serious weight-related health problems, it's possible that the time it would take to lose the weight the "right" way may be greater than the time they may have. Those people probably need surgery. But even in our obese society, those folks are still outliers.

Nobody targets a major advertising and media blitz at just a few outliers.

Pretty recently, I had hopes that weight loss surgery might rescue me from this problem of not having my head in the right place to lose it the right way. Just fix it once and for all. I was annoyed, but also relieved, to learn two things: one, surgery doesn't work unless you also get your head in the right place (hence the 50% failure rate), and two, I don't qualify. Yet.

Diet revolution

I don't think figuring out a proper diet for weight loss is hard. If you expend more calories than you consume, you'll lose weight. A lot of people try to make it seem more complicated than that, but I don't think it is. It's just physics. Newtonian physics, even.

I think the same physics dictates that, for us fat folks, adopting a general-purpose "healthy lifestyle" is necessary but not sufficient to bring us to a healthy weight. A proper healthy caloric intake is, by definition, whatever we need to maintain whatever weight we're at (and not gain more). So if we want to lose rather than maintain, then we need to cut the calories even further until we reach our target. Yes, that means "diet", and yes, that means potentially feeling deprived in the short term.

The more I've thought about it, the more I firmly believe in the physics. If I set a dieting caloric intake at 1,200 calories/day, in terms of weight loss it shouldn't matter whether I consume those calories in leafy green vegetables or potato chips. Calories are calories. (That doesn't mean I wouldn't have lots of other health problems if I chose the chips, but I assert that I'd lose weight.)

So why do we agonize over which diet we should choose for weight loss (Atkins, Zone, South Beach, low-fat, etc., etc.)? I don't think one's choice of diet has any effect on the physics of calories. I think it's about compliance. Barry Sears is somewhat honest about this in his Zone books, and it's the foundation of the low-carb craze, and I think it's legitimate.

Slashing caloric intake is hard when we're accustomed to eating way more than we should. And I tend to believe the key balanced-carb and ultra-low-carb claim: carbs give you a burst of energy and spike your blood sugar, but then they burn off quickly, leaving you feeling down and craving more. Cutting carbs doesn't change your caloric requirements, but may make it easier to stick to those requirements. I also agree with the related claims that proteins and (good) fats are more filling and more satisfying in smaller amounts, and that bulky (good, high-fiber) carbs allow you to eat high-volume but low-calorie, which can also be filling and satisfying. Again, the calories don't change, but how we feel about the calories makes a big difference.

This doesn't address the issues of emotional or stress eating, or sedentary lifestyle, or the natural evolutionary urge we humans and animals all have to acquire the richest possible foods with the least amount of effort and consume them in the largest possible quantities. I don't know how all those skinny people's ancestors' genes survived this long, but now that we're here, the tables have turned and those genes are well-suited to our post-scarcity era. The rest of us have work to do.

At least one of us seems to be broken

Recently I have found myself reading columns by George F. Will and at least broadly agreeing with them.

Does this mean there's something seriously wrong with him or with me?

Miscellany and week in review

I don't care what the media says; "myriad" is not a noun.

So, by now, anybody who's reading will have noted that I'm a bit long-winded and I seem to take just about everything incredibly seriously. That isn't strictly true; I do possess a well-concealed sense of humor IRL. It's just that so far, I haven't felt like there was any point to putting up a blog of (intentionally) stupid stuff.

This is sort of the venue for me to work out the demons of all the theses and dissertations that I never wrote and never will. There are undoubtedly lots of people out there researching and writing about these issues in greater detail and far higher quality. If you find any, feel free to steer them here to educate me, or me there to educate myself.

And if you're not enjoying the blog so far, well, it's unlikely to change much. This is what bsktcase is kind of about.

An exercise in cultural relativism, feminist style

I was a women's studies major at a women's college, so this is by no means news to me. Really. But lately I've been really interested in examining the issue of "women as property" (say, historically, or in cultures where a Western-style "feminist" movement hasn't happened) from sort of a different angle.

In college, it was all about cataloguing the myriad ways in which women were oppressed by being considered property, and about being appropriately outraged thereby. And I'm not backing off from that. When one thinks of a woman as property, one is inherently not recognizing her as an intelligent human being endowed by her Creator with certain rights. Obviously I think women are the latter and thus I have a problem with the former. And this is not news.

What I've been thinking about, and this may or may not make any sense as I try to explain it, is the ways in which women-as-property and women-as-instruments really serve to illuminate certain cultural practices, laws, historical events, or what have you. Instead of getting distracted by being outraged, I'm just thinking about what it means.

If a culture considers a woman to be the non-sentient property of her husband, then it makes a certain kind of sense that such a culture would demand virginity (unopened in mint condition, if you will) and/or have no use for widows. It makes perfect sense that such a society might punish a man for his crimes by raping his sister or daughter; it devalues his property and thus is equivalent to assessing a fine. Women who are property would be saleable and barterable and could certainly be seen as consumer goods or appliances. One can imagine how someone in a women-as-property culture would consider [e.g.] electing women to parliament to be as absurd as electing his livestock or his dishwasher.

I'm not saying I agree. I'm recognizing that at a certain level, a culture's position on this matter is likely to be internally consistent. I would hope that by trying to understand the entire system and how its elements fit in, we can identify root causes of injustice instead of flailing around and vilifying the symptoms.

I'm also by no means targeting non-Western cultures. This sort of thing really sheds light on every practice from genital mutilation to pole dancing. In the West, we call it "low self-esteem" but it amounts to the same thing: women who believe, for whatever reason, that rather than actors they are mere instruments to be acted upon by others. I feel like that idea is at the heart of any practice we Western feminists might want to see changed anywhere in the world (including our own backyards), and that by approaching it in such a way, we might make progress with the world instead of stridently (and imperialistically) alienating it.

But it's also just interesting to think about how all these things work together and how bizarre and unsettling that can be.

Addendum, 1/19/2006:

Another point of all this is to consider that women-as-property was the unquestioned norm in virtually all agricultural societies going back 10,000-12,000 years. That's a pretty serious tide to turn, and we haven't been at it very long: women-as-individuals (collectively; tokens don't count) is an idea that has dawned in some modern societies over the last 250 years or so, with meaningful progress only within the last 50.

Just another reason to favor patience and understanding over outrage and colonialism in situations like these, I think.

Once upon a benefit concert

Just last week I read, and was intrigued by, The Rock Star's Burden, an NYT op-ed. (Subject to login and possible future archiving, sorry.)

The gist of it is that the West in general, and rock stars in particular, have got it all wrong where aid to developing nations is concerned. A specific way in which this is proposed to be so is the bottomless pit of corruption in so many of the world's poorest countries. The article raises an excellent question: when we send monetary aid, or promote debt relief, how carefully are we examining where that money will go and how it will be used?

I was a pre-teen Band-Aid/Live Aid junkie. Only after college did I start to learn things: that the Ethiopian famine (like many) was not a natural disaster, as it was presented to us, but largely was inflicted intentionally in the course of a civil war. That donations often don't reach their destinations due to theft, lack of transport vehicles, insecurity of roads, lack of roads. That aid can be seized and used as a tool to manipulate and repress people. That local farms fail when they can't compete with free food aid; that agriculture is abandoned when people have to move to centralized aid distribution camps. The list goes on.

It had not previously occurred to me that foreign aid, administered naïvely, could potentially cause harm.

Are these high-profile projects really about helping the needy, or are they about convincing ourselves that we've Done Something? That we've Done Enough?

Earlier this fall, there were articles reporting that for all the buzz generated by Live 8, not many actual accomplishments have materialized. I don't know for sure whether that's true, or fair.

Live Aid in 1985 asked for donations, which people sent in. I wonder what it means that Live 8 in 2005 focused so much attention on debt forgiveness. We're not even pretending to give of ourselves any more... we exhort somebody else to give and that feels like we've Done Enough?

But the op-ed writer's solutions didn't seem like a big improvement. He criticized Bill and Melinda Gates for proposing to send computers to schools in the developing world that currently don't have paper and pencils, which admittedly does seem at best premature, but he didn't give them any credit for their work on AIDS, malaria, and global health research in general. He talked about the brain-drain of doctors and professionals from their own countries and proposed "Northern Exposure" style educational contracts to keep them working locally for a few years. Do those work? It's easy to poke holes in someone else's work; much harder to come up with poke-resistant alternatives.

With all that fresh on my mind, Bono and the Gateses are Time magazine's Persons of the Year. I'm not sure what to make of that now.