Well, it has been about a month since the March on Washington; and what better time, I ask you, than a month after the March, to post some photos? It’s also been about a month since I promised I would return to the topic of abortion, democracy, and the courts. And what better time to respond to an argument than a month after you have said you would?

Thus, I intend to do both. Let’s begin.

About a month ago, about 1.15 million of us marched to defend a woman’s right to abortion. Specifically, we marched–at least most of us did–to support the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade and to oppose the Bush administration’s on-going war to undermine, and perhaps eventually reverse, that landmark achievement in the government’s recognition of women’s rights.

One of the more weaselly rhetorical maneuvers that some anti-abortionists make is to complain about the centrality of Roe to our political demands. By relying on the Court’s nullification of nearly all state abortion laws in Roe, and by working to defend the decision from being overturned, we are–the argument goes–guilty of sanctioning and escalating something called judicial activism (or, more extravagantly, judicial tyranny). The pro-choice movement, it is claimed, is playing dirty pool by bypassing the democratic process in order to force our favored policy on abortion from the federal bench–rather than working through democratic procedures on a state-by-state basis. And that is, we are told, a dangerous compromise of both federalism and the separation of powers between the legislature and the judiciary.

Now, I say the argument is weaselly because it’s almost never put forward out of any principled concern for the separation of powers or political decentralization–as is well-demonstrated by the fact that the very same people who advance the argument rarely have any qualms about standing behind federal bans on specific abortion procedures, a Human Life Amendment to the federal Constitution that would impose an abortion ban on all 50 states, or judicial activism that happens to suit their policy prescriptions on abortion. It’s an argument almost always advanced out of sheer opportunism; anti-choicers want the abortion debate to devolve to the States only because, and to the degree that, devolving it ensures that they’ll pick up a few along the way (ie, most of the Deep South and the inland West, and probably Michigan and much of the Midwest, too). That said, being weaselly is not the same as being unsound; it’s a property of the arguer, not the argument. And so even a weaselly argument might be a good argument–although it cannot be a good argument for a weasel who advances it even though s/he is unwilling to own up consistently to its premises. So, in the spirit of interpretive charity, let’s look at the charge and what we ought to say about it now that we have sat down from the march and have some time to talk.

What’s the charge of judicial activism supposed to mean? Well, the argument, apparently, is that abortion is a matter properly dealt with as it was before Roe–that is, to be regulated or left unregulated by the state legislatures–and that the justice’s decision to nullify state abortion laws in Roe exceeded any possible authority that they might have. The complaint, then, is that the pro-choice movement’s support for Roe means bypassing (1) the proper separation of powers between the judiciary and the legislature, and (2) putting important policy decisions in the hands of appointed judges rather than in the hands of the democratically-accountable legislature. (I think that’s a fairly romanticized view of how the legislature actually relates to the electorate over a given single issue in a liberal republic. But let’s move on.)

The critical claim here is a claim about who has the authority to make law. If the argument succeeds, it has the attractive feature (for the anti-abortionists) of short-circuiting the political argument over abortion in favor of convicting pro-choice activism on a purely procedural point. The problem, however, is that the argument only can succeed by either (a) begging the question on the political debate over abortion, or (b) endorsing a totalitarian theory about the authority of elected legislatures. And doing (a) makes the argument premature until we have already come to an agreement on the debate over abortion on independent grounds, whereas (b) requires a premise so repugnant that no non-question-begging reasons can be given for it Why? Because given what pro-choicers believe about abortion, asking them to leave it up to the state legislatures is like demanding that slavery be put up for a vote state-by-state; it’s making the recognition of women’s fundamental rights to their own bodies contingent on the outcome of innumerable local legislative processes.

Another way of getting to this point is by considering the short argument in defense of Roe-style court rulings that I offered in the comments on Alas. Thus:

1. No government body has the legitimate authority to legalize slavery. (premise)
2. A legislature can only successfully make a law if they have the legitimate authority to enact that law. (premise)
3. Courts can only enforce such laws as have successfully been made by the legislature. (premise)
4. Forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term against her will is a form of slavery. (premise)
5. Courts can only enforce bills that the legislature has the legitimate authority to enact (from 2, 3)
6. Courts cannot enforce bills that purport to legalize slavery (from 1, 5)
7. Courts cannot enforce bills that purport to legalize forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term against her will. (from 4, 6)

Therefore, no court can rightly uphold, or make a ruling based on, a law that purports to criminalize abortion. Q.E.D.

So is there something wrong with this argument? If so, what? If not, then what’s the problem with overturning abortion laws in the courts?

(One interesting feature of the argument to note: it takes the separation of powers complaint and turns it on the anti-abortionist who advanced it. If the argument here is sound, then upholding any abortion law would be a brute act of judicial activism; it would be a ruling without basis in any law that the legislature had actually passed. Contrary to an all-too-common lament, it’s far from impossible to find common ground from which to argue abortion politics.)

The argument from premises (1), (2), (3), and (4) to (7) is, as far as I can tell, valid; so the only way to avoid the conclusion is to deny at least one of the premises. Now, of course, any anti-abortionist in his right mind is going to object to premise (4); the point of introducing this argument is not primarily to convince you that it is sound (although, in fact, it is). The main point here is to show why the charge of judicial activism is premature. Why? Because (1), (2), and (3) are completely reasonable premises on which both pro-choicers and anti-abortionists should agree. To deny (3) is to deny that you have any objection to judges making up law–which is just to give up on the original complaint of judicial activism against Roe. To deny either (1) or (2), on the other hand, is to endorse totalitarian powers for the representative legislatures–i.e., to claim that the worst crimes are legally O.K. as long as they are approved by an elective assembly. The only point at which the opponent of Roe can object to the argument is at step (4)–to deny that outlawing abortion is in fact a form of slavery.

But that is just to admit that any charge of judicial activism hinges on whether or not outlawing abortion means denying women the fundamental right to control over their own body–which in turn is to admit that it hinges on finding some independent resolution to the controversy between the pro-choice position and the anti-abortion position. Trying to weasel out of the abortion debate by accusing pro-choicers of supporting judicial activism just is to bypass the real debate and beg the question against the pro-choice position.

So what about (4)? Is forcing a woman to carry her pregnancy to term against her will a form of slavery? Well, here is how Pangloss, my (apparently anti-abortion) interlocutor on Alas, objected to it:

(4) False. You trivialize the historical institution and current practice of slavery. BTW, who’s doing the forcing in your hypo?

Well, let’s start with the latter first: if you’re puzzled about where the forcing comes in in an anti-choice regime, then try get an abortion under one and see what happens to you. A very wise man, who probably did not realize the applicability of his thesis for radical feminism, once put it this way:

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. . . . Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, ch. XXVII, p. 719

This doesn’t mean, of course, that nothing a government does can be worthwhile. More compulsion and less freedom is exactly what we want when it comes to the freedom to murder, torture, or pillage. But what it does mean is that you’d better be awfully sure that whatever you’re getting the government to do is worth forcing other people to do. Government decrees are not magical incantations; they are provisions for the use of violent force. And if you’re not willing to own up to using violent force against people trying to get an abortion, then you oughtn’t be asking the legislature to outlaw it.

So why categorize the forced completion of a pregnancy as slavery? Well, according to one common theory, what slavery means is a condition of involuntary servitude: to be enslaved is to be forced to give up the use of your body to another person, for a sustained period of time, whether you like it or not. And how else would you describe forcing a woman to turn her uterine lining over to the use of a fetus (or, rather, a bunch of grown men purporting to act on the fetus’s behalf)? The only thing that could make the use of force here legitimate would be for the fetus, or someone else other than the woman, to own the woman’s reproductive organs. And for anyone to claim that just is to claim ownership over the woman’s body–which is another quick elucidation of what it means to claim that someone is your slave.

Of course, an anti-abortionist will object that she doesn’t have the right to control her own internal organs when someone else’s life depends on it. Now, it’s tendentious enough to claim that a fetus is a political agent that could have a right to anything. But set that aside for the moment. The fact is that this is not a principle that nearly anyone would ever endorse if we weren’t talking about women and their wombs–it’s only because people have thought of women’s reproductive organs as the property of men for so long that the idea even gets a hearing. Don’t believe me? Try another hypothetical: Susan needs a kidney or she will die. John has two good kidneys; and it turns out that he’s the best match in town. One problem: John likes his kidneys and won’t undergo surgery. Now, some people might think that John’s action is cruel and selfish. Maybe so; but vanishingly few people would be inclined to suggest that Susan has the right to have John tied down and to cut out one of his kidneys against his will. That’s because John owns his own body, not Susan. Slavery is still slavery, even if the slaver can’t survive without it. When it comes to other people’s rights to control their own bodies, a need is not a claim.

It might also be objected that being forced to carry a pregnancy to term is not slavery because the woman has tacitly forfeited control over her uterus when she consented to have sex. Let’s set aside the fact that the majority of pregnancies resulting from rape end in abortion; at least some anti-choicers are willing to allow for abortion in cases of rape and incest. Still, could a woman forfeit her rights to determine who makes use of her uterine lining by consenting to sex? No, of course not; the idea of tacit consent here is silly to begin with, but more importantly even if there were explicit consent the woman would still have the right to revoke it at any time. She could only fail to have that right if her right to control her own internal organs were alienable. But it’s not; she has (and so do you) the right to withdraw consent, at any time; claiming irrevocable, completely open-ended rights over her internal organs would, again, be claiming that she is your slave just as assuredly as claiming irrevocable, completely open-ended rights over the work of her arms and legs.

(What about the claim that the description of anti-choice politics as slavery trivializes the reality of slavery? That would only be true if saying this is slavery were the same as saying this is just as bad as American race slavery, or whatever other instance of the institution the interlocutor happens to have in mind. But it’s not. Any honest appraisal of historical evidence would show that the position of thralls in medieval Scandinavia was far, far better than that of field slaves in the Caribbean, or the forced laborers in Dachau or the gulag. But that does not mean that we shouldn’t categorize the thralls as slaves. And similarly, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t categorize forced pregnancy as a form of slavery, either.)

Is there some other basis for asserting that the government has a right to force a woman not to terminate a pregnancy? If there is, I’d be glad to hear it. But if there is not, then we are left to conclude that premise (4) is true. And if premise (4) is true, then no government could have the authority to outlaw abortion, and any judge which upheld a bill purporting to outlaw abortion would be engaging in the worst sort of judicial activism. And thus the Court made the right decision in Roe. Those who fight against that decision are fighting for a Court to uphold the government’s right to legalize slavery and enact reproductive tyranny.

That’s why I marched, anyway. What about you?

I’m more than a little worn out from driving, so there won’t be much to say about the March tonight. But I would like to point out that it was incredible, that it was enormous, and that I’m humbled, and delighted, to have been a part of it.

The organizers estimate an astounding 1.15 MILLION PEOPLE attended the March. Volunteers were working on putting together a person-by-person count; I’d be interested to see how close that poll came to the estimated figure. In any case, even the lowball police estimates (according to the Washington Post) put the figure over 750,000-850,000. No matter how you count it this was the largest march on Washington DC in history. The downtown of Washington has something of the air of a stately necropolis; but on Sunday, it was no longer the tomb of American law. It was alive and seething, and we were standing up there to make the law defend a woman’s right to control her own body.

Snide sidebar: Randall Terry gave an interview on the morning news the day of the March, promising an ocean of signs and banners to confront the marchers. It seems that like the Aral Sea, Terry’s ocean had receded quite a bit. There were a few antis strung out in ragged lines across two or three city blocks; Randall Terry positioned himself in front of some fetus signs pasted up on free standing boards. When I saw the interview on the morning news, I went back to the hotel room and made up a sign for blocking the computer-generated fetus graphics that read Randall Terry GO HOME; if I’d known what the anti contingent would be like, I would have made it Is this the best you can do?

I am awestruck and hopeful about what has just happened in the capital. This was incredible. It was historic. I only wish that I could have sat down with the organizers and talked about the mobilization effort that went into it over the past several months; I am sure that there is a fascinating story to tell about the use of the March for Women’s Lives MeetUp and other Internet geegaws for organizing, and the incredible way in which these online tools were transitioned into real offline action.

Have you written a letter to the editor of your local newspaper explaining your support for the March (and abortion rights) yet? If not, you should. It’s time to take this piece of history into the future. The political bloviators and spin-meisters need to hear, loud and clear, how 1.15 MILLION PEOPLE just stood up and marched for choice, and how millions more stand behind them. If we raise this issue–if we put women’s rights to their own bodies on the table–if we make George W. Bush talk about it rather than utter mealy-mouthed dodges from one side of his mouth and anti-choice code words from the other–if we make John Kerry talk about it rather than look nervous and start muttering weak euphemisms–then we will win and the antis will lose.

Let’s begin.

(this post is part of the Stand Up For Choice BlogBurst)

Stand up for choice!

Here’s three ways you can support the March for Women’s Lives, even if you can’t be there yourself:

1. Show your support for the March by putting a post like this one on your own website. Be sure to add your own thoughts on why you support the March and a woman’s right to choose!

2. Take those thoughts and turn them into a letter to your representatives in Congress. (Make sure you mention your support for the March, and make sure they know you’ll be voting pro-choice in November.) Then, take that letter and turn it into a letter to the editor of your local newspaper!

3. Make a small contribution to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America: support the effort to protect choice as a right and to make it a reality.

Why?

I stand with the March for Women’s Lives because American women’s right to choose is under threat. Four more years of anti-choice politics will mean an unprecedented opportunity to chip away at the landmark victory of Roe v. Wade–and may even mean the opportunity to overturn it. That cannot stand. Everyone has the right to control their own bodies, and for women that right doesn’t stop at the uterine wall; a government that bans abortion is forcing women to continue pregnancies against their will–and that is nothing less than legalized slavery. While men in government offices play at politics, women will hurt and women will die because men in government uniforms think they have the right to tell them what to do with their own bodies.

A generation ago, women (and the men who stood with them) rose up, organized, and agitated to win the right to choose. This weekend, we will rise up again. Together, we can win again. And we will.

Onward!

We will make ourselves heard. We will support pro-choice work in our communities. Our struggle is here. Our time is now.

P.S.: Don’t forget to spread the word: if you support the March and its goals, rip off this post for your own website. Do it! Now!

Martin Striz (of plausible thoughts fame) asked me an excellent question in an e-mail the other day: are there any emblems or other efforts to show support for the March for Women’s Lives this weekend if you can’t go yourself? (The March websites have some pages on ways to support the March if you can’t make it, but they all focus on things that you could have done a few months ago to help publicize the March.)

Well, it’s late in the game, but we are working on Internet time here, so here’s my idea. (I’m just tossing it out to see if it sticks; feel free to rip it off, alter it, deride it, ignore it, or whatever seems best.)

If you’re not going to the March this weekend–or even if you are–why not show your support by participating in a [BlogBurst][] in support of the March and abortion rights?

We can (1) get out the pro-choice message and bring it front and center in political discussion, (2) raise the visibility of the March even more through Google and political weblogs, and (3) take our support out into the world–and help others do the same–with letters to the editor, letters to our representatives, and contributions to pro-choice organizations. Here’s the format (you can see a SAMPLE POST here):

1. A post to your web page headed up by a link back to this BlogBurst:

   <p><strong>(this post is part of the <a href="http://radgeek.com/gt/2004/04/22/stand_up.html">Stand Up For Choice BlogBurst</a>)</strong></p>

   and either the March emblem:

   

   or this one:

   

2. Link to the March for Women’s Lives website.

3. Offer three ways to support the March for Women’s Lives even if you can’t be there yourself:

   Here’s three ways you can support the March for Women’s Lives, even if you can’t be there yourself:

   1. Show your support for the March by putting a post like this one on your own website. Be sure to add your own thoughts on why you support the March and a woman’s right to choose!

   2. Take those thoughts and turn them into a letter to your representatives in Congress. (Make sure you mention your support for the March, and make sure they know you’ll be voting pro-choice in November.) Then, take that letter and turn it into a letter to the editor of your local newspaper!

   3. Make a small contribution to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America: support the effort to protect choice as a right and to make it a reality.

4. If you’d like to follow any or all of these suggestions yourself, well, hell, it couldn’t hurt, could it?

Sound reasonable? I’ll get the ball rolling with an example post here at the RGPD. Let’s begin!

(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.