(thanks to feministe: The Gazillion Things Crowding Up My Desktop for the link)

The Nation is a well-written, insightful magazine that’s well worth reading. Eric Alterman is one of the best popular media critics today. These are people well worth supporting with your time, money, and attention. Nevertheless, I can’t find an ounce of sympathy for them in my heart–or an ounce of pique at Aaron McGruder–on reading The New Yorker‘s profile of McGruder and its account of a shouting match between McGruder and white liberals at a recent $500-a-plate dinner for The Nation:

On the day of Saddam Hussein’s capture, last December, the left-leaning political weekly The Nation celebrated its hundred-and-thirty-eighth birthday. It was a Sunday night, and the weather was dreadful–forbiddingly cold and wet, heavy snow giving way to sleet–but three hundred people could not be deterred from dropping five hundred dollars a plate for roast chicken amid the marble-and-velvet splendor of the Metropolitan Club, on Fifth Avenue.

. . .

Toward the dessert (chocolate torte) portion of the evening, Uma Thurman rose to introduce a special guest: Aaron McGruder, the creator of the popular and subversive comic strip The Boondocks, who, as it happens, had travelled farther than anyone else to be there, all the way from Los Angeles. McGruder, one of only a few prominent African-American cartoonists, had been making waves in all the right ways, poking conspicuous fun at Trent Lott, the N.R.A., the war effort. … It seemed to be, as a Nation contributor said later, his coronation as our kind of guy.

But what McGruder saw when he looked around at his approving audience was this: a lot of old, white faces. What followed was not quite a coronation. McGruder, who rarely prepares notes or speeches for events like this, began by thanking Thurman, the most ass-kicking woman in America. Then he lowered the boom. He was a twenty-nine-year-old black man, he said, who got invited to such functions all the time, so you could imagine how bored he was. He proceeded to ramble, at considerable length, and in a tone, as one listener put it, of militant cynicism, with a recurring theme: that the folks in the room (courageous? Please) were a sorry lot.

He told the guests that he’d called Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser, a mass murderer to her face; what had they ever done? (The Rice exchange occurred in 2002, at the N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards, where McGruder was given the Chairman’s Award; Rice requested that he write her into his strip.) He recounted a lunch meeting with Fidel Castro. (He had been invited to Cuba by the California congresswoman Barbara Lee, who is one of the few politicians McGruder has praised in The Boondocks.) He said that noble failure was not acceptable. But the last straw came when he dropped the N-word, as one amused observer recalled. He said–bragged, even–that he’d voted for Nader in 2000. At that point, according to Hamilton Fish, the host of the party, it got interactive.

Eric Alterman, a columnist for The Nation, was sitting in the back of the room, next to Joe Wilson, the Ambassador. He shouted out, Thanks for Bush! Exactly what happened next is unclear. Alterman recalls that McGruder responded by grabbing his crotch and saying, Try these nuts. Jack Newfield, the longtime Village Voice writer, says that McGruder simply dared Alterman to remove him from the podium. When asked about this incident later, McGruder said, I ain’t no punk. I ain’t gonna let someone shout and not go back at him.

Alterman walked out. I turned to Joe and said, I can’t listen to this crap anymore, he remembers. I went out into the Metropolitan Club lobby–it’s a nice lobby–and I worked on my manuscript.

Newfield joined in the heckling, as did Stephen Cohen, a historian and the husband of Katrina vanden Heuvel. It was like watching LeRoi Jones try to Mau-Mau a guilty white liberal in the sixties, Newfield says. It was out of a time warp. Who is he to insult people who have been putting their careers and lives on the line for equal rights since before he was born?

Can you see his face as he says this? The teeth gritted, the lip curled up, the words Ungrateful negro– just barely stifled between his tongue and his teeth.

Nevertheless, Newfield is right in one respect: the whole fracas reads like a bad flashback from the 1960s. Not, however, for the reasons that Newfield thinks it does: what feels like it came out of a time warp is a bunch of pretentious, comfortable white radicals (oh, I’m sorry, progressives — a terminological shift that looks like a bad flashback from the 1910s) lecturing everyone else on how to do enlightened politics, patting themselves on the back, angrily shouting down speakers they disagree with, and snivelling about anyone who says things that make them feel guilty.

Here, meanwhile, is what McGruder has to say about the whole thing:

At a certain point, I just got the uncomfortable feeling that this was a bunch of people who were feeling a little too good about themselves, McGruder said afterward. These are the big, rich white leftists who are going to carry the fight to George Bush, and the best they can do is blame Nader?

There’s not much to say on the latter point that I haven’t already said elsewhere in considerably more depth; the main thing to stress here is that, while I have quite a few problems with Green Party strategy since the 2000 election, and a lot of problems with Nader’s campaign for 2004, it’s dreadfully foolish for lefty Democrats to waste their time and effort alienating people who are sympathetic to the independent party movement with slash-and-burn Nader-blaming tactics. The target is Bush: energize your base by taking the fight to him and you will win. Demoralize your base with hectoring and finger-pointing and you will lose, and you will deserve to lose.

It’s the former point that I want to dwell on for a moment: the stifling sense of complacency and self-congratulatory politics that we on the Left are all too often prone to. If there is a characteristic vice of the white, male Left, it is pride: specifically, the phony simulacrum of self-worth that comes from indulgence in a certain sort of Pharisaic purity. The basis of our politics, after all, is the repudiation of some of the very roots of the society we live in — the ugly, daily realities of white supremacy, gay-bashing, war, colonialist occupation, men’s rape and battery against women, and so on. The constant temptation is to act as though we’ve somehow managed to extricate ourselves from the sins of the society that surrounds us, and to purify ourselves through our own virtue.

What happens when that self-image is endangered is all too familiar–all too often we answer criticism with a sort self-righteous, defensive backlash. (This is a lesson that we owe especially to the writings by feminists on the male Left; see, for example, Cocktales, anthologized in Dear Sisters; everything I say here about the white Left just as much to the male Left, the straight Left, the collegiate Left, or whatever form of privileged background you care to look at.) And when this happens, the tactics are all too familiar. We change the subject from what we’re doing to how we’re feeling and what we’ve done–changing the subject from institutional structures and the interpersonal character of our acts, to our own personal good intentions. It shifts from being a question of whether or not I’m doing something fucked up (and if so, what I can do to be accountable for that), to being a question of whether I’m one of Us or one of Them (the bigots, the running-dogs, the misogynists, the Bush Administration–everyone that I, the pure one, have defined myself against). From there it’s not far to taking up criticism as a personal attack rather than as a serious critique; and it becomes very easy just to attack back, to scapegoat the critic and–natch–to reiterate all the virtuous things I’ve done for you (or think I’ve done, anyway), that set me apart from the demoniacal Them–and how dare you not realize it, &c.

But if we want to help build an open and just society, some day or another we are going to have to answer for all the big and little ways that we’ve participated in injustice–and the sooner the better for all concerned. Courage, and pride in accomplishments, is a great thing to have — but without humility and accountability there is no real courage or pride; there is only boldness and egotism. Salvation needs works, but it also needs grace; good intentions alone won’t feed a person who’s hungry or stop an assault or defuse a bomb. I, for one, haven’t always made my good intentions do some good for other people more than once; and I know also that I’m not the only one, either. If pompous white radicals progressives won’t cop to that on our own, then we could use a good Mau-Mauing every now and again–hell, anything to get us to sit down and shut up and think about what other people are saying for two seconds. It’s not about guilt, and it’s not about radical chic. It’s about having the guts to acknowledge that you’ve fucked up from time to time (and if the elite Left hasn’t been fucking up pretty frequently for the past two decades, what the hell has it been doing?!) and having the humility to listen to people (even if you disagree with half of what they are saying) when they take you to task on it.

Aaron McGruder was right; folks like Eric Alterman and Jack Newfield write some good stuff, but they are feeling way too good about themselves. If McGruder’s shock therapy did not work, then I’m not sure what to suggest, except perhaps a long-term prescrption of Daily Abnegations. Every morning, before they sit down to work, maybe they should repeat to themselves: Black people know more about racism than I do. Women know more about sexism than I do. Poor people know more about poverty than I do. Now let’s work together to do some good by the end of the day.

This may seem like a tall order for someone like Eric Alterman, who describes himself as A contributor to virtually every significant national publication in the US and many in Europe, but surely the most honest and incisive media critic writing today can suck it up and manage it.

Feminism — and I mean radical feminism here, although much of what I’ll mention has been inflicted on socialist and liberal feminists too — is not a matter of little-known historical arcana. It’s a vibrant movement that has had world-shaking consequences within the living memory of most adults. So it’s sad, to say the least, that the history of feminism over the past 35 years has been almost entirely enveloped in a fog of historical amnesia; that the recent history of the movement is simply not discussed in schools or the press, and that legions of blowhard self-proclaimed experts (take Nicholas Kristof — please!) feel free to weigh in periodically on feminist works and feminist organizing without actually bothering to find out what the feminists they are attacking actually said or did.

Now, I don’t care very much about setting straight the Kristofs of the world; but one unfortunate result of the memory-hole treatment of radical feminism is that there are a lot of distorted critiques of particular radical feminists running around, which seep into the writing even of those who want to give fair and sympathetic historical accounts. It’s understandable that this should happen: if you’re trying to give a survey view of feminist history, you couldn’t possibly read every single feminist work that will be touched on; you’re inevitably going to rely on some glosses from other sources, and if those glosses are inaccurate then those inaccuracies will creep into your work without you realizing it. Nevertheless, understandable errors are still errors; and I hope that they can be set straight.

Consider the case of Susan Brownmiller, the New York radical feminist journalist who is best known for her landmark work on rape, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. Her work is remarkable, ground-breaking, vitally important, and also, at times, flawed. There are, to be sure, reasons to disagree with Brownmiller; but this is not one of them:

Of course, there have been a number of feminists who, disturbed by what they saw as an assimilationist tendency in feminism, asserted a more positive notion of femininity that was, at times, undoubtedly essentialist. Susan Brownmiller, in her important book Against Our Wills, suggested that men may be genetically predisposed to rape, a notion that has been echoed by Andrea Dworkin.

— Pendleton Vandiver, Feminism: A Male Anarchist’s Perspective [Infoshop.org]

Or:

Against Our Will was controversial from the moment it was published. In it Brownmiller advances the theory that rape is biologically determined. Because she called attention to anatomy as the basis of rape, she was accused of letting men off the hook, and, more recently, her work has been picked up by conservatives to undermine the antirape movement.

–Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, Second Wave Soundings [The Nation]

But the criticism here is a bit off-base, because, well, Susan Brownmiller never said anything of the sort.

Brownmiller has argued at length against biologistic accounts of rape. She argues against them in Against Our Will; she argued against them again in her smack-down review of Craig Palmer and Randy Thornhill’s A Natural History of Rape.

Where did this misunderstanding of Brownmiller come about? It seems to be based on a brief passage toward the end of the first chapter of Against Our Will, where she says:

Man’s structural capacity to rape and woman’s corresponding structural vulnerability are as basic to the physiology of both our sexes as the primal act of sex itself. Had it not been for this accident of biology, an accomodation requiring the locking together of two separate parts, penis into vagina, there would be neither copulation nor rape as we know it. Anatomically one might want to improve on the design of nature, but such speculation appears to my mind as unrealistic. The human sex act accomplishes its historic purpose of generation of the species and it also affords some intimacy and pleasure. I have no basic quarrel with the procedure. But, nevertheless, we cannot work around the fact that in terms of human anatomy the possibliity of forcible intercourse incontrovertibly exists. This single factor may have been sufficient to have caused the creation of a male ideology of rape. When men discovered they could rape, they proceeded to do it.

–Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will pp. 13–14

But all that Brownmiller is saying here is that it is a fact of physiology that it is anatomically possible for men to rape women; and that is obviously true, since anatomically impossible things don’t usually happen. She goes on to argue throughout Against Our Will that rape is not a biologically foreordained fact; it is a political choice that men use against women because they benefit from the power that it gives them. As she writes just a few paragraphs later:

Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.

–Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will pp. 14–15

That is a straightforwardly materialist theory: rape and the threat of rape are taken to be instruments of power that men choose to use against women because men benefit from it at women’s expense. Whether it is the correct theory or an incorrect theory, it is certainly not a biological determinist theory about rape (much less a specifically genetic theory).

These inaccurate criticisms of Brownmiller aren’t coming from Cathy Young-style charlatans. Vandiver is well-versed in feminist history, and trying to give a sympathetic survey of recent feminist history for anarchists; Baxandall and Gordon are the editors of Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement, an absolutely indispensible compilation of historical material from radical and socialist feminists in the first decade of the Second Wave. Unfortunately the patina of distortions spread over the real history of feminism by uncharitable critics sometimes also trips up those of us who are sympathetic and want to get a clearer understanding of it. Here’s hoping this post has helped us get a step forward towards clarity.

For further reading:

• GT 2004-01-22: Happy Roe v. Wade Day!

Here’s some more good news on the Emergency Contraception front: while the FDA process has advanced to the point where EC will probably be available over-the-counter sometime or another soon, Australia is quickly moving one step ahead of the United States: Emergency Contraception is set to become available over-the-counter in Australia tomorrow, January 1.

This isn’t to say that Australia’s EC situation is advanced over that of the United States in every respect. One major difference is that whereas the medical community in America largely supports the FDA’s move towards OTC availability, the medical community in Australia is at best nervous about the move, and in some cases directly opposed. The main issue for them, though, seems not to be the sort of religious Kulturkampf that flares around the American side of the debate. Rather, Australian doctors just seem to be more accustomed than American doctors to controlling the medical lives of their patients, and more jealous at giving up that power. For example, consider this Foucaultian bit of paternalism:

But Australian Medical Association president Bill Glasson said he was concerned that pharmacists were not legally required to record a woman’s visit.

I think that they really need to rediscuss how it is going to operate in the interest of good medical care, Dr Glasson said.

The pharmaceutical society’s national president, Jay Hooper, said many pharmacists would take it upon themselves to record each time a woman wanted the pill.

Not that American doctors don’t also sometimes engage in this tracking and scummy hectoring. At the Auburn University Student Health Center, for example, you could obtain EC–but they’d note when you got it, throw a bunch of red tape in your way, and if I recall correctly, they’d only let you have it once a semester. (The idea in both cases is for doctors to be able to lecture women that they decide are making unhealthy lifestyle choices. I am all for encouraging women to make healthy lifestyle choices, but I can’t imagine that an emergency situation to prevent a pregnancy is the appropriate time to do it, or that forcing women to listen by restricting access to EC until you’re done lecturing them is the appropriate way to go about it.) But the American medical community does not seem particularly squeamish about giving up that control if it means that women are more able to prevent unwanted pregnancies: the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists both lobbied for, and strongly supported, the FDA advisory panels’ decision. In Australia, however, the Australian Medical Association seems nervous and is ready to develop their own house guidelines to try to minimize the freedom it will offer women.

I don’t think, incidentally, that the attitude is a matter of misogyny, exactly. But it is directly connected to patriarchy–it’s a matter of the authoritarian sense of entitlement that modern doctors have always felt and acted out vis-a-vis their patients. The condition exists in Australia and America both, but with regard to over-the-counter pills the Australian medical community seems to have divorced itself from it less than their American counterparts. Consider: at the same time as EC becomes available over the counter for the first time in Australia, so will ibuprofen. And this has caused no small degree of consternation for the Australian Medical Association:

Also from Thursday stronger pain relief medication will be available in supermarkets, a move that has angered and confused doctors and pharmacists. Dr Glasson said the pain killer ibuprofen, contained in products including Nurofen, should only be sold under the supervision of pharmacists. It’s a dangerous move and it’s a backward step.

Patients have to look at the medical aspects of these drugs and get good advice that only the friendly pharmacist can give. Paracetamol is much kinder on the stomach.

Ibuprofen, an anti-inflammatory drug, was only available in pharmacies until the Government ratified the new regulations in October.

. . .

Products containing ibuprofen have been available in supermarkets in the US since 1984 and in Britain since 1996.

The teeming masses of Ozzies will now be able to buy Advil without a doctor’s learned advice! O tempora! O mores!

But however the doctors and pharmacists may whine, the women of Australia have every reason to celebrate. A happy New Year’s to the reproductive rights community in Australia — good show!

Poor Lee county is a mixture of a prosperous college town and a run-down old mill town; rural areas facing extreme poverty; and sitting not far north of the Alabama black belt counties. As a result, if you look at the House districting map of Lee county, you’ll see that we’re carved up into six different fiefdoms for the state House of Representatives, you see that we have six different districts of the state House of Representatives, with lines running straight through the middle of towns to carve out safe districts. And Lee isn’t unique: we’re just part of a larger problem (look at the Birmingham district in Jefferson County and the surrounding area). This carved-up districting process establishes fiefdoms for dynastic state legislators; if you get elected enough to be in the legislature at the time of a census, you get to redraw the map for your own re-election. And gee whillikers, the people writing the rule book keep winning from census to census.

In the aptly-named How to Rig an Election, the [Economist][] examines America’s peculiar system of legislative redistricting, in which the lines are drawn and redrawn state-by-state according to partisan power politics. District gerrymandering gives state legislators the tools for egregious incumbent-protection schemes, which decimate the possibility of competitive races and completely invert democratic control of governance. The corrupt gerrymandering of safe districts means that legislators pick their voters, instead of voters picking their legislators.

So how can we fight back and reclaim the power from the careerist political hacks?

The Economist suggests a more European style of redistricting, Putting it into cleaner hands such as bipartisan commissions or neutral civil servants. But this isn’t going to help matters any. The problem is the power that rests in the hands of experts who know how to tweak and twist and manipulate the demographic data to shore up power. Ameliorating the direct interest of personal power by taking it out of the hands of the legislators themselves helps a little, but it doesn’t remove the process from partisan or bureaucratic power politics. Strategic interests don’t disappear when you switch over to an army of bureaucratic civil servant tweakers.

Our reluctance to challenge the arrogance of careerist bureaucratic "experts" has limited our ability to see other answers. But it is precisely expertise that is the problem. This doesn’t mean that the people drawing the lines should be stupid; it means that they shouldn’t be professionals who have invested their efforts in the art of twisting, tweaking, and manipulating districting lines.

So here’s how we reform redistricting

• First, completely overhaul how districting is done in the first place. State legislature districting should only be done within a county: each county gets one state senator, and a number of state representatives proportional to its population. Because they’re elected at the county level, district lines can only be drawn within the county, and you have no more gerrymandering across county lines. Also, since this scheme will generally increase the number of senators and representatives, it will also make legislators more responsive and representative towards individual constituents.

• Set strict guidelines for the shapes of districts which prevent egregious gerrymandering.

• Now ditch the legislators, ditch the bureaucrats. Instead, bring the people into the process. Create a process for selecting committees of randomly-chosen ordinary citizens who will be charged with redrawing the districts in a rational manner. For the state House of Representatives, districting can be done with citizens from the county represented. For the US House of Representatives, districting can be done with a larger committee of citizens cluster-sampled from across the state.

• Make the entire process open to the public, with media coverage and input from citizens not on the committee.

While this will help a great deal, fixing districting is hardly the be-all and end-all of democratic reform. To challenge the dynastic power of entrenched legislators, more will have to be done.

• Ensure that no candidate ever runs unopposed: give voters the option to vote None of the Above in any given race. If NOTA prevents a candidate from getting a majority of the vote, then the election is scuttled and new candidates run for the position.

• Implement legislative term limits, to break up the power of dynastic candidates. If they can’t stay in office from one redistricting to another, there’s no point in trying to mainpulate it in your favor.

• Obliterate ballot access restrictions which prevent non-Demopublican parties and independent candidates from getting on the ballot. Every citizen needs to feel empowered to run for office and alternative viewpoints need to be included in the discourse: giving an up-down decision on the pre-selected favorite of the Party elite is democracy as it was practiced in the Soviet Union. It’s not a real choice.

• Similarly, institute ballot reforms such as Instant Runoff Voting, which will empower independents and third parties by destroying the wasting your vote and lesser of two evils arguments. IRV allows for preferential voting, where if no-one gets a clear majority of the vote, the second (and if necessary, third, fourth, etc.) choices of the voters still count towards choosing the winner.

• Empower citizens to go over the heads of the state legislature to the people themselves. Institute a voter initiative process so that action doesn’t have to be filtered through the whims of legislative power.

• Empowering citizens also involves the creation of participatory, local spaces for citizen organization and power. This means forming neighborhood assemblies and interest-based caucuses of citizens, which can pass resolutions, organize cooperative mutual aid in the use of money and goods, and open up a space for people to work at running their own lives.

For the past 5 years feminists have been doing most of the work in understanding and combatting the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan is one of the largest and most firmly-established anti-Taliban resistance groups in the world. The Feminist Majority Foundation’s Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan has been the authority in the US on the Taliban regime for nearly five years (Eleanor Smeal has given briefings to Congress on the topic and has testified before a joint hearing of two U.S. Senate Foreign Relations subcommittees). Acclaimed journalist Saira Shah lived undercover as an Afghan woman (with the assistance of RAWA) to make her groundbreaking documentary, Beneath the Veil. Because the first victims of the Taliban were women, women and women’s groups, abroad and also in the U.S., are the most credible authorities on the Taliban regime.

And yet, somehow or another it ended up happening that only 12% of television programs have featured women as experts on the post-September 11 crises [FMF], even after the U.S. alleged the complicity of the Taliban in the attacks. Instead, they are trotting out the predictable crowd of old white male pundits: generals, retired CIA operatives, State Department cronies. In the time since September 11, I have seen networks, without a trace of irony, put Bob McNamara, Henry Kissinger, and Oliver North in front of the camera as experts on what we ought to do about international terrorism. Well, I guess they ought to know–when it comes to terrorism, maybe it takes one to know one!

So, while the media drumbeat for the war continues it’s the same old cock-swinging commandos droning on about Afghanistan. The same CIA and State Department cronies who propped up the Mujahedeen and the Taliban in the first place, who trained Osama bin Laden because they believed that foreign jihadi were more reliable opponents of the pro-Soviet regime than locals. And since women’s voices are being silenced, no-one much seems to be pointing out that Afghan women were the first and most horrifically victimized by the Taliban regime. That Afghan women, who are imprisoned in their homes and banned from driving or travelling without a male relative on pain of death, cannot escape the cluster bombs dropping over their heads. That women continue to be oppressed our equally thuggish allies in the Northern Alliance (who are nothing more than the old Mujahedeen). That women have repeatedly been cut out of the tribal councils on forming a new government, and the U.S. government can’t be bothered to give a damn whether or not equity for women is brought up as an issue in the formation and constitution of a post-Taliban State.

The mealy-mouthed monologue of the corporate/government-colonized newsmedia has been parroting the words of feminists that they ignored for years–deploying a weak brand of pop feminism against the Taliban to keep the war fervor high. And yet, somehow, it seems that the actual women are not being included in the dialogue, and the actual needs facing women in Afghanistan are not being discussed.

What a fucking surprise.