Alas, a Blog | Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

On Apple's Decision to Refuse the "Manhattan Declaration" App

Posted on December 20, 2010 by Ampersand

[Crossposted at Family Scholars, Alas, and TADA.]

After receiving thousands of complaints, Apple has quietly axed an iPhone app that linked to a conservative Christian manifesto called the Manhattan Declaration, issued a year ago and signed by nearly a half-million people.

Apple approved the app in October, rating it a 4+ – free from objectionable material. But this week, Apple changed its iTune. The app “violates our developer guidelines by being offensive to large groups of people,” Natalie Kerris told CNN.

The anti-app campaign, led by Change.org, mustered 7,700 petitions to Apple founder Steve Jobs. Supporters criticized the app as promoting hate and homophobia.

(Full Disclosure: The Manhattan Declaration was co-written by Robert George, who is on the board of directors of the Institute for American Values, which of course owns Family Scholars Blog, where I’m currently a guest blogger.)

NOM has released a video calling this “censorship,” and saying that “Steve Jobs… has become Big Brother.” At the Manhattan Declaration’s official blog, Billy Atwell writes:

NOM’s video makes a good point. Big Brother is traditionally seen as the government. But when corporations are able to grow to such an extent that they control the means of communication, can they be just as destructive and limiting for the American people? I think the situation with Apple removing the Manhattan Declaration’s app is an example of non-governmental power impacting civil discourse,which keeps us from suffering under tyranny.

This is the same Billy Atwell who only two months ago wrote:

The New Hampshire Union Leader, the state’s largest newspaper, refused the “wedding” announcement of Greg Gould and Aurelio Tine. New Hampshire legalized so-called same-sex marriage under state law in January 2010. […]

If Gould truly respected individual thinking he would respect the Union Leader’s decision not to print an announcement regarding his “wedding.” Gould obviously would feel frustration or even resentment over the decision, but his incessant criticism leaves me wondering if he truly values individual thinking and independence.

So apparently corporate “censorship” (as NOM calls it) encourages tyranny if it’s repressing speech Atwell agrees with, but an example of “individual thinking and independence” when repressing speech Atwell disagrees with.

Atwell’s hypocrisy aside, he has a point about how large corporations impede civil discourse. Most Americans get their news and opinions not directly, but through corporate intermediaries. When CBS accepted a pro-life Super Bowl ad (but refused an ad for a gay dating site), they provided a irreplaceable forum for right-wing advocacy that left-wing advocates did not have access to.

In the last decade, the best defense against corporate dominance of public discourse has been the internet, where anyone (well, anyone able to write well, with internet access) can pull up a soap box and have some hope of finding readers. But as major corporations prepare to do away with “net neutrality,” and as devices like the iphone and the ipad increasingly privatize access to their users, I’m not sure we can depend on that continuing.

For the moment, I’m not really crying for any side. With outlets like talk radio, Fox News, and a zillion conservative newspapers and websites, anti-SSM folks are in no actual danger of not having access to the public square. Similarly, pro-equality folks have access to a lot of major media. No side can legitimately claim that their views have been effectively censored.

But a healthy public debate is a matter of degree. We don’t live in a totalitarian society, but our discourse isn’t as free and open as it should be. Obviously, it’s not possible for every viewpoint in the world to get “equal time” in finite media, so gatekeeping is sometimes necessary. I wouldn’t object to a major newspaper deciding not to give space to the flat earth society, for example, since that debate is largely settled and the flat-earthers have no significant constituency among the American public. But for corporations to decide to allow only one side of a major current controversy access to major media is a frightening imposition on public discourse.

So I agree with The Manhattan Declaration folks about one thing — Apple should allow their app, just as CBS should allow pro-lgbt ads in the Superbowl, and the biggest newspaper in a state should accept same-sex marriage announcements. Unfortunately, if their blog is anything to judge by, the folks behind The Manhattan Declaration don’t genuinely object to corporate gatekeepers of speech — they just object to corporate gatekeepers of their speech.

Posted in crossposted on TADA, Free speech, censorship, copyright law, etc., In the news, Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans and Queer issues | 15 Comments

I Will be Out of Commission for A While

Posted on December 20, 2010 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

So I have been diagnosed with what is probably carpal tunnel syndrome, which means I will be needing not to type anything of any significant length for what I hope will be no longer than a couple of weeks. There are some posts scheduled to go up over the next two weeks, but I most likely won’t be posting anything new until my symptoms go away.

Posted in Whatever | 9 Comments

We Wouldn't

Posted on December 17, 2010 by David Schraub

In late 2007, I declared that the upcoming presidential election “is about torture”. I was wrong. It wasn’t. Despite my assertion that torture should stay in the public eye until we come to terms with it and, ultimately, eradicate it, our preference towards inertia won out: We, as a people, desperately want to ignore this issue. We want to pretend it doesn’t happen. And unless there is a constant media blitz forcing Americans to come to terms with our torture policy, we’ll continue to ignore it.

The soldier accused of leaking material to WikiLeaks is currently being held in solitary. He hasn’t been convicted of anything, and he wasn’t on suicide watch (though now apparently we have to pump him full of anti-depressants to keep his brain intact). There is a solid case to be made, one this made in chilling detail in The New Yorker, that long-term solitary confinement rises to the level of torture.

But, as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, the New Yorker’s question — is solitary confinement torture? — is no longer the most salient one. Years after Abu Gharib and waterboarding, years after a Bush administration that explicitly sanctioned torture and years into an Obama administration that has done its utmost to insure there is never any accountability for it, a more harrowing question emerges: Even if it is torture, would we even care?

I think the answer is clear. No. We would not. Much as we have with prison rape, we, as a society, have come to terms with permitting torture of those we detain — convicts, military detainees, even the accused. It is now part of who we are as a nation. And it will take a great, soul-wrenching shift to turn us away from it.

Posted in crossposted on TADA, In the news, Prisons and Justice and Police | 10 Comments

The Phoenix Reading Series – December 19, 2010

Posted on December 16, 2010 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

This coming Sunday, I will be reading in The Phoenix Reading Series at Bengal Curry in New York City. The event starts at 5:30, and there will be an open mic, but you need to go down to the restaurant on Saturday in order to sign up. For event details, please click here. , and I hope you will come down to hear not just me, but also the two wonderful poets with whom I will be reading, Yuyutsu Sharma and Shannon Kline. Mike Graves is the series host.

Bengal Curry – 5:30-7:30
65 West Broadway
New York, NY 10007 – 2292
212.571.1122
Between Murray and Warren.
1 1/2 blocks below Chambers St
Take the 1, 2, 3, A, C or E trains to Chambers Street

The bios of all involved speak for themselves. (You can read about me here.)

Yuyutsu Sharma

Recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature, Yuyutsu RD Sharma is a distinguished poet and translator. He has published eight poetry collections including, Space Cake, Amsterdam, & Other Poems from Europe and America, (Howling Dog Press, Colorado, 2009), Annapurna Poems, (Nirala, New Delhi 2008), Everest Failures (White Lotus Book Shop, Kathmandu, 2008) www.AroundAnnapurna.de – Eine photographic-poetische Reise um die Annapurnas, Nepal, www.WayToEverest.de: A photographic and Poetic Journey to the Foot of Everest, (Epsilonmedia, Germany, 2006) with German photographer Andreas Stimm and recently a translation of Hebrew poet Ronny Someck’s poetry in Nepali in a bilingual collection, Baghdad, February 1991 & Other Poems. He has translated and edited several anthologies of contemporary Nepali poetry in English and launched a literary movement, Kathya Kayakalpa (Content Metamorphosis) in Nepali poetry. Two books of his poetry, Poemes de l’ Himalayas (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Poemas de Los Himalayas (Cosmopoeticia, Cordoba, Spain) just appeared in French and Spanish respectively. University of California, Davis, and Sacramento State University, California. His works have appeared in Poetry Review, Chanrdrabhaga, Sodobnost, Amsterdam Weekly, Indian Literature, Irish Pages, Delo, Omega, Howling Dog Press, Exiled Ink, Iton77, Little Magazine, The Telegraph, Indian Express and Asiaweek. Currently, he edits Pratik, A Magazine of Contemporary Writing and contributes literary columns to Nepal’s leading daily, The Himalayan Times.

Shannon Kline

Arkansas native, Shannon Kline, is a playwright, poet and performer who has worked in many aspects of the entertainment industry. She is a proud member of both Actors’ Equity Association and The Dramatist Guild. Shannon’s first play, REUNION, a full length drama in the Southern Gothic Style about an adopted woman who searches for her identity, was recently presented at the National Conference on Adoption in Manhattan, and subsequently at The Drilling Company Theater, where it garnered praise and support for a commercial production in 2012. Shannon is also co-Author of Presto-Change-O!, a musical that premiered at Amas Musical Theater in Manhattan. Other theatrical writing credits include PILLARS, at the Minetta Lane Theater, directed by Terrence Mann and revue shows for Gulf Coast Casinos. As a poet, Shannon had the good fortune to study by invitation with renowned poet and translator, Marie Ponsot, winner of the Nat’l Book Critics Circle Award. Shannon’s poetry premiered as part of a political ballet she was commissioned to write for a dance company in residence at the prestigious Jacob’s Pillow in 2009, for Tony nominated choreographer, Dan Siretta. Her first collection of poetry, Lemon Ice- Box Pie is to be published in 2011.

Michael Graves

Michael Graves is the author of a full-length collection of poems, Adam and Cain (Black Buzzard, 2006) and two chapbooks, Illegal Border Crosser (Cervana Barva, 2008) and Outside St. Jude’s (R. E. M. Press, 1990). In two thousand four (2004), he was the recipient of a grant of four thousand five hundred dollars ($4,500.00) from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. He is the publisher of the small magazine PHOENIX. Many years ago, he was a student of James Wright and organized a conference on James Wright at Poets House in 2004. And he became a member of P. E. N. a couple of years ago. In addition to leading a James Joyce Ulysses’ Reading Group, he has published thirteen (13) poems in the James Joyce Quarterly and read from them and others of his poems influenced by Joyce to a gathering of the Joyce Society at the Gotham Book Mart.

Posted in Whatever | Comments Off

In Defense of Stephanie Coontz

Posted on December 15, 2010 by Ampersand

[Crossposted from Family Scholars Blog.]

In an earlier post on Family Scholars, David Lapp accuses Stephanie Coontz of determinism in this radio interview. David writes:

Coontz treats it as an incontrovertible reality that high numbers of young women will continue to have lots of sex outside of marriage, bear children outside of marriage, and that couples will choose to cohabit instead of marriage–to hear her talk, you’d think it was a law of human nature that came into effect sometime after 1960. As she said multiple times “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

Our question for Coontz is this: would you say it’s an incontrovertible reality that income inequality will only increase, that the poor will only get poorer and the rich get richer? That poverty will only increase? That unemployment will only continue to rise at alarming rates?

David’s analogy badly misrepresents Coontz’s actual views. Coontz doesn’t argue that divorce will only increase, for example, or that marriage rates can only go down. A more accurate analogy would be that Coontz is like an economist saying that although we can reduce poverty and unemployment, there will always be some poor people and some unemployed people.

According to what Coontz says in the interview, she does think more people could be in healthy, lasting marriages, and she favors policies to bring about that change. But she also thinks there will always be some people who aren’t married — people who are cohabitating, single parents, etc.. — and she favors policies to help those people have better lives, too.

At the conclusion of the radio show, Coontz sums up her views (emphasis added by me):

I don’t think [marriage will ever be something only a minority of Americans do], but I do think that it’s impossible to go back to a situation that we had in the 1950s and 1960s (and that was in fact actually a historical aberration), where 95% of the population was married. I think we can improve people’s changes at entering and staying in good marriages. But I think that unwed couples are going to continue to cohabit, that some people will have kids out of marriage, and that divorce will continue to occur. […]

I’m just in favor of a kind of holistic program that emphasizes commitments and relationships. Marriage is an important part of that program but cannot be the only part of it.

David’s post obscures how much common ground actually exists. Coontz and Wilcox (and those who share their respective views) are not implacable enemies; on the contrary, the two academics spent much of their “debate” agreeing with each other. I suspect that David, if he listened more carefully to what Coontz said, might find that he too agrees with her some of the time.

Posted in crossposted on TADA, Families structures, divorce, etc | 2 Comments

This Week’s Cartoon: “Mr. and Mrs. Perkins Go Gift Shopping 2010″

Posted on December 14, 2010 by Jen Sorensen

A holiday tradition continues, as we peek in on the Perkinses once again while they shop for Auntie Perkins and themselves. This year they are shopping online, and having some difficulty in an age when so many things have become “free” — not to mention existing only on an ethereal plane. Fortunately, they haven’t digitized underwear. Yet.

Previous strips in the series are here.

Posted in Syndicated feeds | 2 Comments

Persian Poetry Tuesday: Partow Nuriala's "I Am Human"

Posted on December 14, 2010 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Shortly after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Partow Nuriala was forced by the government to stop teaching philosophy at Tehran University, where she also worked as a social worker. She subsequently founded Damavand Publications, one of the first independent woman-run presses in Iran. Three years later, the government shut the press down, an ironic development since it was during the revolution in Iran that the ban on her first book of poetry, A Share of the Years, which had been imposed by the Pahlavi regime in 1972 was lifted. In 1986, Partow came to the United States with her two young children. Since 1988, she has worked in the Los Angeles County Superior Court as a deputy jury commissioner, though she still has an active literary career. Her publications include four books of poems, literary and movie reviews, a collection of short stories and a play. “I Am Human” was published in the anthology Strange Times, My Dear and was translated by Zara Hushmand. ((Apologies to the poet and the translator for the inaccurate line breaks. I don’t know how to make WordPress show them as they are supposed to appear.))

I Am Human

Bow your form
in sight of the earth.
Hide your face
from the light
of the sun and moon,
for you are a woman.

Bury your body’s blossoming
in the pit of time.
Consign the renegade strands of your hair
to the ashes in the wood stove,
and the fiery power of your hands
to scrubbing and sweeping the home
for you are a woman.

Kill your word’s wit:
ruin it
with silence.
Feel shame for your desires
and grant your enchanted soul
to the patience of the wind
for you are a woman.

Deny yourself,
that your lord
may ride in you
at his pleasure,
for you are a woman.

I cry
I cry
in a land where ignorant kindness
cuts deeper
than the cruelty of knowledge.
I weep for my birth
as a woman.

I fight
I fight
in a land where
the zeal of manliness
bellows in the field
between home and grave.
I fight my birth
as a woman.

I keep my eyes wide open
so as not to sink
under the weight
of this dream that others
have dreamed for me,
and I rip apart
this shirt of fear
they have sewn to cover
my naked thought,
for I am a woman.

I make love to the god of war
to bury
the ancient sword of his anger.
I make war on the dark god
that the light of my name
may shine,
for I am a woman.

With love in one hand,
labor in the other,
I fashion the world
on the ground of my glorious brilliance,
and into a bed
of clouds I tuck
the scent of my smile,
that the sweet smelling rain
may bring to blossom
all the loves of the world,
for I am a woman.

My children I bring
to the feast of light,
my men
to the feast of awareness,
for I am a woman.

I am the earth’s steady purity,
the enduring glory of time,
for I am human.

Cross posted on The Poetry in the Politics and The Politics in The Poetry

Posted in Iran, literature | Tagged partow nuriala | 2 Comments

Eating Lunch While I Wait for Students and Think about Writing and Character

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

So it’s a turkey and Muenster cheese sandwich, a half pound of tomato-feta-and-cucumber salad, a brownie for dessert and pecking away a few sentences at a time here while I wait for students from my freshman composition class to come for documented essay consultations. I set this time aside to go over a draft with them in as much detail as I have time for and that their drafts deserve because they will not have the time to rewrite the essay after I have given it a grade. (My policy is that students can rewrite almost anything for a better grade as long as they hand it in to me according to the timeline defined in my syllabus; there’s just not time for that this close to the end of the semester.)

I had conferences scheduled on Wednesday and Thursday of last week too–today is Monday, and it’s about 1 PM where I am–and out of three freshman comp classes, of about 20 students each, exactly 6 showed up. I could, I realize, require students to sign up for these conferences, but at this point in the semester, frankly, I am tired and I don’t have that much energy to invest in trying to get people who don’t care enough to come on their own to care about the paper they are trying to write. (I realize this is a little unfair; that there may be people who care but are sincerely busy enough that they won’t schedule the time unless they have an appointment, but those are not the majority of my students.) In fact, here is a student come to talk to me right now. Back in a minute.

///

I’m back, and it makes me happy to be able to say that the student who left my office is a real success story this semester. She is not likely to get better than a C+, but considering that she started out failing almost every assignment I gave, that she was convinced she just did not have it in her to write a competent essay, that C+ will represent more learning than most students accomplish. If I could give her a grade based purely on the amount of progress she has made and the effort she has clearly put into the draft we just reviewed, I would give her an A, or at least a B+.

Ironically, though, this student’s success illustrates very nicely what I wanted to write about when I started this post, except that when I started I wanted to use the students who haven’t been showing up as my starting point.

When I applied for promotion to full professor last year, one of the things I had to do was write a brief statement of my teaching philosophy. This was my favorite part of putting my promotion proposal together because, while I have been teaching for nearly 25 years and of course have had a philosophy (or philosophies) during all that time, this was the first time I’d ever had to articulate what matters most to me about the teaching of writing, understood both as the process and the product of what I do in the classroom. This, in part, is what I wrote:

To learn to write well is to pursue a connection between your facility with language and the content, intellectual and otherwise, of your character. I do not mean by this that people who cannot write well have no character or that writing is the only way in which people can show their character. I mean, simply, that you cannot write well if you do not make this connection, because not to make it is to fail, as a writer, in holding yourself accountable for the quality of your own thinking. Or, to put it another way, it is to fail to take your own intellect seriously. As a teacher, primarily of writing but also of literature, I measure my success not in how many A’s or B’s I give out—since grades reflect the surface of learning, not necessarily its quality—but in whether my students have begun to take on the responsibility not simply of having ideas, but of having the audacity, because we lie to our students if we do not acknowledge that it takes courage, to attempt to communicate those ideas in words compelling enough to command a reader’s attention above and beyond the fact that they were written in response to a classroom assignment…. As writers, we exercise this responsibility—we hold ourselves accountable—most obviously through the process of revision. In order for revision to be meaningful, however, in order for revision even to be possible, a writer must have a sufficient stake in what she or he is attempting to revise that the work of seeing it anew feels both worthwhile and necessary.

I originally wanted to write about how frustrating and debilitating it is to have so many students who, no matter how hard I try to craft their assignments so that they can pick topics in which they have a stake, apparently do not take this responsibility at all seriously; it is a pleasure to have written instead about one who clearly does.

Cross posted on The Politics in the Poetry, The Poetry in the Politics.

Posted in Education | 1 Comment

Why Barack Won't Get Angry

Posted on December 12, 2010 by Jeff Fecke

One of the truly annoying memes among my fellow lefties has been the recurring demand that Barack Obama get angry.

“Why won’t he fight the right?” goes the mantra, as if Obama pushing through a health care plan and massive, successful stimulus in the face of absolute and complete Republican opposition does not equal fighting. “When will Barack get angry, and start demanding that the GOP capitulate to our demand for an end to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the passage of the DREAM act, an unlimited extension of unemployment benefits, tax increases on the rich, single-payer health care, net neutrality, a pony in every pot, and the freeing of Mumia?”

If Obama will just “get angry,” the narrative goes, all that Republican obstinateness will fall away like the roof of the Metrodome. And Democrats will get everything we’ve ever wanted, immediately, the end.

There are two things badly wrong with this narrative. The first is that Barack’s anger and will are all that’s needed to shake loose a Republican blockade on political action that will only intensify now that it’s been ratified by a majority of Americans. Barack yelling at Susan Collins won’t make her vote for DADT repeal. Indeed, the only thing that appears to have her close to voting for DADT is the potential passage of the tax deal that is the biggest sell-out in the history of history; if DADT does get repealed, it will be only because Obama dared to compromise.

But the second major reason that Obama won’t get angry is that he can’t.

I’m not saying that Barack Obama is Spock; clearly, the man is capable of anger just like he’s capable of any other emotion. But he can’t show that anger.

In the New York Times, Ishmael Reed lays out exactly why:

Progressives have been urging the president to “man up” in the face of the Republicans. Some want him to be like John Wayne. On horseback. Slapping people left and right.

One progressive commentator played an excerpt from a Harry Truman speech during which Truman screamed about the Republican Party to great applause. He recommended this style to Mr. Obama. If President Obama behaved that way, he’d be dismissed as an angry black militant with a deep hatred of white people. His grade would go from a B- to a D.

What the progressives forget is that black intellectuals have been called “paranoid,” “bitter,” “rowdy,” “angry,” “bullies,” and accused of tirades and diatribes for more than 100 years. Very few of them would have been given a grade above D from most of my teachers.

Barack Obama is black. And while the right wing tried to claim his election ushered in a post-racial America, anyone with a passing familiarity with this country knew better. America is much less racist than it was in 1950, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a racist nation. And one of the great racist tropes is that of the Angry Black Man.

Barack Obama was able to win in 2008 in no small part because he has learned how not to fall into the trap of appearing too threatening. The level of racism aimed at Obama has been shocking to anyone paying attention; how much worse would it be had Obama given in to the temptation to yell at his opponents? You think the right enjoyed picking out the worst of Jeremiah Wright? Just imagine if Obama had hollered, as John Boehner did on the floor of the House, “Hell no”?

Obama has to keep his cool. Even when angry and frustrated, he speaks calmly and rationally. He doesn’t have a choice — if he steps over the line, he’ll be destroyed.

That doesn’t mean Obama shouldn’t “fight” — he has to stand up to the GOP from time to time. And yes, I think we can all point out times when Obama has made poor opening gambits, or chosen to emphasize something that shouldn’t have been. And we can discuss that strategy rationally, discuss how Obama can really go after the right — and how we can help him.

But we can’t demand that the strategy be self-destructive. Barack Obama isn’t going to get angry, because the result of that is a cure worse than the disease. You and I, however, are free to get as angry as we want. And maybe, rather than demand Barack start yelling, we should start yelling instead.

Posted in Elections and politics, Race, racism and related issues | 52 Comments