Category: Uncategorized

Story structure and the just-world phenomenon.

I think most of us have, at one time or another, finished a book or left a movie wishing that the story had ended just a little bit sooner. We felt for the characters in the work [from this point on I will be using the word ‘work’ interchangeably for movies, books and plays.] We understood their motivations. We wished for some of them to succeed and for others to fail. We rooted for changes to take place or we cheered those who were fighting to turn back the tides of time.
Then the work ends and we feel cheated, unhappy or let down.
There are many reasons for this feeling of disappointment to occur. The reader [again this is a generic term for readers, listeners and watchers] may have fundamentally misunderstood the work. They may have thought it was a comedy because they were unaware of the cues the author used to signal that it was a tragedy to hir audience. Or the author hirself may have been unaware of the way the audience would interpret the cues given. Misunderstanding of cues occurs, not uncommonly, when an author from outside a particular genre attempts to work within that genre. If the author is not conversant with genre expectations then they may not be aware that choices they have made as to cues or foreshadowing will at best fail and at worst confuse members of the audience.
I think, however, there is a sometimes a quite different reason for the reader’s feeling that there is something wrong with the ending of the work. Everything should have been wrapped up 10 minutes earlier or a there should have been a 10 minute coda. The author should have left off the last chapter or added an additional one. Our last look at that protagonist should have been different.
Before I go on I want to introduce into this discussion of reader dissatisfaction the concept of the just-world phenomenon [sometimes known as the just-world fallacy or the just-world hypothesis.] As Synder and Lopez remind us:
[t]heory and research support the idea that human beings are inclined to feel that suffering and punishment, like joys and rewards, should be deserved. . . .Belief in a just world can be maintained by ‘blaming the victim.’ . . .Because of the need to bring ‘ought’ and ‘reality’ into balance, the poor tend to be blamed for their poverty, and the person who is raped is blamed for the rape.”[1]
Authors are frequently told that there are a limited number of ‘mythic story structures’ and a limited number of character archetypes. The names and the exact number of these vary from one theorist to another ranging over time and space from Aristotle[2] to Tierno.[3] There are a number of things that most of these theorists agreed on. That stories need beginnings, middles and ends; things must change over the course of the story; and that characters, in particular the protagonist, must themselves have arcs.
While one might argue as to how closely modern plays and books cleeve to those ‘rules’ it is difficult to argue that modern movies do not. Even movies that unfold through a series of flashbacks and/or flashforwards still have beginnings and ends. [4]
The reader who as been trained by movies and television to understand a story as having a clear beginning and a clear end and who further is trained to see a hero as someone who makes something happen and who sees the world through the understandings of the just world hypothesis will have extraordinary difficulties with dramas and stories that have what they percieve to be depressing endings. In modern stories heroes win. The empire crumbles. Skynet will not trigger a thermonuclear apocalypse. Oh, the hero hirself may not survive—but their cause will triumph. Yes, the evil may still linger in the dark corners of the universe but just as this incarnation was overthrown so will our descendents be able to crush it again when it attempts to return.
But how do we understand it if the protagonist does not triumph? How do we deal with a story that takes away from the protagonist even hir internal journey? In a just world those who do not triumph cannot have been the just. We feel uncomfortable that the author has made us inhabit the mind, not of the hero, but of the unworthy victim.
Looking back more than half a century after 1984 was published I realize that one of the most transgressive things that Orwell did was to make the reader who wants to side with the triumphant and feel that their side won realize that they, like Winston, must come to love Big Brother.
[1] Snyder, C. R., & Lopez, S. J. (2009). Oxford handbook of positive psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pg. 79.
[2] Aristotle, . (1998). Aristotle\’s poetics. New York: Hill and Wang.
[3] Tierno, M. (2002). Aristotle\’s poetics for screenwriters: Storytelling secrets from the greatest mind in Western civilization. New York: Hyperion.
[4] Although it is true that in the case of movies such as Momento there can be more than one way to order the scenes and thus what was from one point-of-view  the beginning was, from another, the end.

Book Review: Queen Lucia

Queen Lucia by E. F. Benson. (1920)
While I have read this book at least once a year for the last two decades I never cease to find some new delight in the writing and in the characters around whom this book focuses. Having arrived once again at the last page I could hardly wait to move on to the next book in the Mapp and Lucia Series, Miss Mapp.[1] Several chapters into Miss Mapp I put the book down and started to think about the similarities and differences between these two books. I wondered about both the impact of the 1985 British television series on public perceptions of the series and the way in which the decision made by the Thomas Y. Cromwell Company to deviate from the publication order of the individual books when it published a compendium of all six of the Mapp and Lucia novels under the title Make Way for Lucia altered the new reader\’s perceptions of the overall arc of the series.

It is difficult to know what constitutes “a spoiler” when discussing a book published 90 years ago and adapted into a television series that aired over two decades ago thus I will proceed with caution by beginning with general commentary before moving on to material that might contain spoilers. I will warn the reader when I am moving from the former to the latter.

In Queen Lucia the reading audience is introduced to Emmeline Lucas (the titular Queen) and her circle of friends and acquaintances in the village of Riseholme. Lucia, we learn, was a leading figure in the fairly recent gentrification of Riseholme. Benson does not, of course, use that word to describe the process of wealthy people buying up and refurbishing cottages but his description is quite recognizable. Lucia herself might today be diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  MedicineNet.com lists symptoms of NPD as:  
being self-centered and boastful; constantly seeking attention and admiration; considering oneself better than others; exaggerating ones talents and achievements; believing that one is entitled to special treatment; easily hurt although not always showing it; setting unrealistic goals; and taking advantage of others to achieve ones goals.
Lucia shows all those symptoms and yet, as Benson writes her, we do not hate her. The reader comes to understand her and indeed to feel at least amusement and perhaps even compassion for her in her endless (and futile) need to be the “center of attention” among her social circle in Riseholme.

Benson examines with detail and wit the life of the moderately wealthy in England between the wars. No one, or at least no one that really counts, works. Lucia’s husband had amassed “a fortune, comfortable in amount and respectable in origin, at the Bar” after which he put his money into securities and he and wife retired to Riseholme. There they bought a number of cottages and extensively modified them so that they looked impeccably antique from outside while retaining all the pleasures of modernity within. The rest of Lucia\’s social circle live on military pensions and moderate[2] inheritances. They are well off though clearly not, in their own consideration, really wealthy. Mr. Lucas had been a barrister and Colonel Boucher had presumably served in the recent war and the Quantocks’ generosity was dependent, in part, on the soundness of “ Roumanian oils.” Of course the servants worked as did the clerks in the stores and musicians who were hired to play at special events but except for the opera singer who comes to live in the town no one else who “matters” works for a living.

This is not an England that has remained unchanged by the recent Great War. Lucia and her friends all have maids and valets and cooks but these men and women are treated less like indentured servants they would have been a decade previously. Times were changing, albeit slowly, and one can see glimmers of the England-that-will-be peeking out from behind the façade of England as it always-has-been.

Benson manages to show us both the emptiness and the fullness of the lives of his principals. It is their job to socialize. They must go out to dine and give dinners. They must have something interesting to say and therefore must find many a thing to be interesting. Yet at moments one senses that even they have suspicions that their way of life is dying and will not survive many more body blows.

Benson could write convincingly and with inside knowledge about the world of the wealthy and aristocrats but he seems to have taken Jane Austen’s advice to heart in the construction of this book, “Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.” We observe each of the families. We come to know some of the individuals very well as we watch them carry on a way of life that is becoming more and more precarious. The changing nature of the economy, immigration and emigration, more education for the “lower classes” and technological changes are making it more difficult and less acceptable for any but the very wealthy and the very poor to live unproductive lives. Those among the very poor would fill their time in an attempt to acquire the bare necessities of life. Those among the very wealthy could fill their time with entertainment often at great expense and provided by others. Members of Lucia’s class and social circle have the necessities of life but cannot afford the great frivolities that distract those at the upper end of the economic scale. And so they must find a way to fill their days with hobbies and entertainments which they invest with great meaning and worth. And occasionally even they seem aware of the threadbare nature of the supports holding up their world.


[1] In my review of Miss Mapp I will discuss the question as to whether it should be placed as the second or the third book in the Mapp and Lucia series.
[2] Moderate in their terms of course. The amount that any of these characters spend on food alone would have paid for the rent, food, clothing and education of at least one lower middle-class family.


PAST HERE THERE BE SPOILERS

 

How can one best describe ‘what happens’ in Queen Lucia? Two couples become engaged over the course of the book but neither are numbered among the principals of the story. And, although Olga Bracely and Georgie Pillson plot to bring about the marriage of Colonel Boucher and Mrs. Weston to solve the domestic crisis brought about by the impending marriage of his valet to her maid, the engagement is brought about within the course of a few pages and with few problems. The “Guru” first introduced to Riseholme by Daisy Quantock and then commandeered by Lucia turns out to be a curry chef from a London restaurant who, upon realizing that the truth as to his provenance is about to come out, absconds with money and silver pilfered from homes of PIllson, the Lucases and the Quantocks. Yet none of them are willing to report the thefts to the police since they valued the objects he stole far less than the face they would lose if the world came to know that they had “fallen for” the act of an amateur con man. Similarly, the Quantocks after finding out that the “Russian Princess” who conducted séances while staying at their house was  a fraud prefer to burn the evidence rather than have people know that they were taken in.

One can safely say that none of these things is what the book is about.


The book is about Lucia, a woman who misleads herself as much as she misleads the world. As the story opens Lucia is the central and organizing force around whom the society of Riseholme orbits. She is comfortable in power with little concern that anyone among her acquaintances could successfully challenge her. 

The book is also about Georgie who plays with the idea of loving a woman rather than being a courtier but who retreats from that actuality when it crosses his path. As the story opens he is one of the bodies who orbit Lucia. Indeed in some ways he is the most important of her satellites for her husband has little choice in his role and she need not fret that the gravitational influence of a passing star will wrench him from his appointed place in her heavens. Georgie, on the other hand, is not so securely hers. 

The book is also about the ever greater exertions this small group of people find necessary to preserve the stagnation in which they wish to live. They are busy with nothings. They dabble with great energy at things which even they do not value greatly. They do not raise children. They do not tend the sick. They do not write books neither do they actually read books. They play piano and they sing but when a real professional singer [Olga Bracely] comes into their midst the fact that their efforts are all glitter rather than gold becomes obvious. 

The book is also about someone coming to Riseholme from the outside world and, unintentionally stirring up those stagnant waters. Yet even this outsider with the power to break the spell and bring modernity and change to Riseholme chooses to preserve it as it has been for so many years.

So, finally, the book is about a group of people working to hold together a way of life that is doomed to pass.

Reading as a skill vs reading as a form of social positioning

All too often I hear or read people complaining that \”kids today\” don\’t read enough. I admit that I am wont to suspect that these individuals themselves are not great readers. Why? Because they speak of \”reading\” in such a way that I doubt they appreciate reading as a skill.

Reading, and the books we read, seems often to be as much about social positioning as it is about learning or gaining anything from the book read. Perhaps the most obvious example of a book whose main purpose is to be seen rather than to be read is the coffee-table book. 

When I, as a child, first heard of coffee-table books I was confused and perplexed at the very idea. In my world books existed to be read. Because my parents were frugal most of the books we read were borrowed from the local library. I visited the library on Saturday and came home with an armful of books.  I took my books to my room and was very careful never to leave a book lying on the coffee table since odds were it would be grabbed by the first member of my family who wandered through the room and thus end up in their room on their pile of books. We went to the library almost every Saturday and every visit I went into the building with my arms full of books I had read and I left the building with my arms full of books I was going to read.

My experience growing up was that books were things you read not things you wanted other people to think that you had read so the idea that one would buy a book not to read but to adorn one\’s coffee table made no sense to me.  When first I visited homes where such books were found I inadvertently embarrassed people by asking about the book since I presumed that if the book was on the table they were reading it and if they were reading it they would enjoy talking about it. This was not, I soon discovered, something that those who display coffee-table books like to do–or at least they don\’t like doing it if the discussion ventures far beyond what they themselves could have gathered from reading the blurbs on the back of the book and the New York Times book review.

What does this have to do with the subject line of this post? I think that many people who talk about reading and praise reading and want their children to do more are themselves very poor readers else they would not describe and discuss books as they do.


Reading is a skill. Not just learning to read as children do but READING seriously and thoughtfully as an adult. It needs to be taught well and it needs to be practiced. Left unused the skill will rust away and yet we may not realize that we have become unskilled at READING because we are still able to read. We can read the labels on the tins at the grocery store. We can read the roadsigns as we drive along. But we are no longer READING we are reading and books have ceased to become things we READ they are objects that we use to position ourselves socially.


If owning a book becomes an evidence of social position then the books themselves both gain and lose power. They gain because they are invested with talismanic powers. Parents will at the same time complain that their children are not reading and that their children are being exposed to the wrong type of books. They complain about their children learning the wrong facts–not because the facts are \”wrong\” but because knowledge of those facts might lead to what the parents consider the wrong conclusions. If those parents were truly in favour of teaching READING skills then they would not be in fear of books or facts since their children would have the skills necessary to check the facts and weigh the arguments put forward in the book.


Books also lose power when what is actually written gets lost as people worry about what owning that book says about their own social position and what having read the book says about them as thinkers and what having liked about the book says about them as people. The book becomes part of one\’s own social presentation and thus criticisms of the book are perceived as criticisms of oneself.

If reading the book allows me to maintain my chosen social presentation but READING the book undermines the book\’s value as a talisman of that social place then READING becomes the enemy of book.

The Examined Life: Images of Women in Fiction, Part 2

How does the reader decide if a book is good? It depends as much upon the reader\’s meaning of the word \”good\” as it does on the book. A book that is deeply moving to one person can be leaden to another. A book which excites the interest of one person will be dull reading to the next. For a reader (such as I) who likes to sit down after finishing a book, rate it and write a review of it, answering the question as to why I enjoyed a book can take longer than did reading the book.

That said–did I enjoy E. F. Benson\’s Mrs. Ames? Yes. Not, I think, for the reasons that many other reviewers seem to have enjoyed it. I expected another light book about the petty machinations of superficial women and men. I expected to read about upper middle-class people who spent their time manufacturing ways of keeping busy. I expected to read about people who cared more about who preceded whom into the dining room than who was returned in the next election. I expected to read about a small group of people who were so fixated on the petty comings and goings in their own village that they were unaware of the rising level of class discontent and the looming war to come.

Yes, all that was in the book. But there was more. This is a book about what it was like to be a woman in that time and in those social circles. At the heart of the book lies the story of two marriages. Each marriage looks staid and unexceptional from the outside and yet each of the wives is emotionally unfulfilled. The book follows less than a year in the life of the village of Riseborough and yet over that short period of time each woman comes to the realization that, on an emotional level, her relationship with her husband is dead. Or perhaps, had never really been alive. Each woman struggles to find a way out of the emotional deadness at the center of her life and each undertakes a different way of \”solving\” the problem.

I didn\’t pick up this Benson expecting a thoughtful and empathetic examination of the interior life of a woman exiting middle-age. And though Mrs. Ames attempts at regaining her husband\’s interest are often amusing, from the point of view of the cynical watcher, they are never mocked by the author. The reader sees into the secret corners of her life and so appreciates her quiet heroism even when she does not.

Nor did I pick up this book expecting a thoughtful and empathetic portrait of the interior life of a woman who has \”lived on\” her beauty and charm but is now facing the depredations of middle age. Although the reader does not inhabit the mind of Mrs. Evans to the extent they do that of Mrs. Ames Benson presents a finely-etched picture of a woman who has never felt deeply about anything and wants finally to experience some of the emotions she has missed.

Did I like Mrs. Ames? Yes. I plan to read it again, soon. I also plan to read the books its author published before and after in the hopes that I will find something similar.

Was I surprised by Mrs. Ames? Again, yes. Because I have learned not to expect a deep, thoughtful and loving examination of lives of middle-aged women, irrespective of whether the book in question was written yesterday or a hundred years ago. Too often now I hear the excuse that author A or writer B should not be criticized for their misogyny or their racism or their homophobia because everyone was like that then.Well, I would not claim that Benson does not show evidence of racism or elitism or gender essentialism but Benson does not despise his characters. He may not approve of their actions, he may doubt their wisdom, he may be aware of their petty motivations and cognizant of all their weaknesses and vices but at the same time he embraces their humanity.

I wish I could say as much for many other writers.

Are Women Really People: Images of Women in Fiction, Part 1

Some time ago I was involved in a rather heated discussion on another blog about the expectations that readers may reasonably have of writers. Among the many questions under debate was how unreasonable it was of me to \”be hard on\” male authors who portrayed women in 1 dimensional and stereotyped ways if those authors themselves lived in a time and culture where such attitudes were normal. 
The discussion soon focused on a rather narrow moment in time as one poster responded to criticisms of an author by making the argument that it was unreasonable of me to expect a more enlightened attitude toward women from an author writing in the late 1960s. When I demonstrated that other authors writing at roughly the same time had been published (and received awards for) books that showed far more nuanced, varied and challenging images of women the poster countered by claiming that such writing was extraordinary and exceptional and that thus it was unreasonable of me to expect it of the author in question.

I will leave for a future post a discussion of the tendency of people to find it personally insulting a writer they enjoy(ed) is racist, exist or homophobic in order to write to the poster\’s claim that to see and write about women in a way that recognized their varied abilities, intellects and interests and that recognized and valued them in a way that did not objectify them was, in 1970, extraordinary and exceptional.
I have been, for the last day, reading Mrs. Ames, a book written by E. F. Benson and published in 1912. Benson is probably best known and remembered today for his Mapp and Lucia series and for his ghost stories. He was a popular and successful writer who wrote both fiction and nonfiction but is not considered among the great writers of his time. Yet in reading this book, which follows the life a number of upper middle-class families in a sleepy English town in the years leading up to what they would come to call \”The Great War,\” I find a deeper, more thoughtful and, sometimes, chilling picture of interior and exterior life of women than in many books written in the intervening years..
The titular Mrs. Ames becomes involved in the Suffragette movement. As the book opened she had been vaguely in support of it and she becomes more active in it as a \”stunt\” to reclaim her place as social leader of village society. However her involvement has an unexpected effects on her and the others who follow her:

And no less remarkable than this growth of the league was the growth of Mrs. Ames. . . . The bonds of her barren and barbaric conventionality were bursting; indeed, it was not so much that others, not even those of \” her class,\” were becoming women to her, as that she was becoming a woman herself. She had scarcely been one hitherto; she had been a piece of perfect propriety.

The chairman asked Mrs. Brooks to address the meeting. Another and another succeeded her, and there was complete unanimity of purpose in their suggestions. Sir James\’ meetings and his speeches to his constituents must not be allowed to proceed without interruption. If he had no sympathy with the cause, the cause would show a marked lack of sympathy with him. . . . And as the discussion went on, and real practical plans were made, that strange fascination and excitement at the thought of shouting and interrupting at a public meeting, of becoming for the first time of some consequence, began to seethe and ferment. Most of the members were women, whose lives had been passed in continuous self-repression, who had been frozen over by the narcotic ice of a completely conventional and humdrum existence. . . . To the eagerness and sincerity with which they welcomed a work that demanded justice for their sex, there was added this excitement of doing something at last. . . . To this, a sincere and wholly laudable desire, was added the more personal stimulus. They would be doing something, instead of suffering the tedium of passivity, acting instead of being acted on. For it is only through centuries of custom that the woman, physically weak and liable to be knocked down, has become the servant of the other sex. She is fiercer at heart, more courageous, more scornful of consequences than he; it is only muscular inferiority of strength that has subdued her into the place that she occupies, that, and the periods when, for the continuance of the race, she must submit to months of tender and strong inaction. [Bolding added. Note: This work is in the Public Domain]



Benson is, in many ways, the most conventional of writers. One might theorize that he, the son of woman who found companionship in partnership with another woman after her husband, the Archbishop of Canterbury, died, might have observed some of what he was writing about over the dinner table at home. Neither Benson nor any of his siblings married and some have claimed that he was himself was gay. What is clear is that this good, but clearly not exceptionally good, and thoughtful but anything but ground-breaking author was able to observe, and empathize with, the realities of life for women of his class.
So, to answer that poster, I do not think it was unreasonable of me to not \”give a pass\” to a man writing in the 1970s. I was only asking him to be at least as observant and empathetic as was Benson writing over 50 years earlier.





Women\'s Rights and the Decline of Democracy, Part Two


In yesterday’s blog I argued that the attitude that the rights of women’s were negotiable should be viewed as the crack in the apparently solid wall of democracy into which the wedge of the anti-democratic movement was being inserted. 
It may have appeared to the reader that I was engaged in hyperbole in order to make my point. Unfortunately I was, if anything, underplaying the lack of support for the basic rights of women that can be found among many in the political chattering class of America.
Consider, for example, Justice Antonin Scalia\’s statement:
  Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn\’t. Nobody ever thought that that\’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws. You don\’t need a constitution to keep things up-to-date. All you need is a legislature and a ballot box. [California Lawyer]
 Scalia was arguing that since the rights of women not to be discriminated against were not specifically mentioned in the text of the 14th Amendment and since it is doubtful that those who framed that the amendment envisioned it as forbidding sexual discrimination then the amendment itself should not be read as constitutionally prohibiting sexual discrimination.

For those who are not familiar with the amendment in question the relevant text is
All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Notice that the words used in this amendment are \”persons\” and \”citizens\” rather than the sometimes contentious word \”man.\” One might argue as to whether the word \”man\” actually means \”person\” but not whether the word \”person\” means \”person.\”

Would I argue against Scalia\’s claim that those who wrote, and voted for, this amendment did not envision it as an effort to prevent laws discriminating against women? 
No. 
But neither would I claim that when the founding fathers referred to \”inalienable rights\” they considered those rights to apply to people who happened to be female or African-American. That political thinkers in the past were incapable (or unwilling) to consider women and African-Americans people should not give a modern politician latitude to call into question the personhood of members of either group.

How fragile are the rights of women of women in the United States? Scalia\’s comments did not result in a firestorm of criticism and demands that he be impeached and removed from the bench. A member of the Supreme Court of the United States publicly stated that his reading of the 14th amendment allowed him not to consider women people unless it was clear that the original framers of that amendment considered its protections to extend to women and he is not publicly excoriated by politicians across the political spectrum.

Given Scalia\’s method of constitutional interpretation nothing short of a constitutional amendment clarifying that women will henceforward be considered \”people\” will prevent Scalia, other judges and politicians from chipping away at women\’s rights. Given the realities of American political life that passage of such an amendment both needs to happen to ensure the rights of American women and will not happen because so few powerful political figures consider those rights important.
Some insight into the legal importance of the argument as whether the writers of a constitutional document meant the word \”person\” to include women can be seen in a series of court cases and rulings in Canada. These give some idea as to the importance for the women\’s rights movement of arguments about legislative intent and strict constructionism.
In the British North America Act (the act of British Parliament that created the Dominion of Canada) the word \”he\” is used when referring to an individual and \”person\” when referring to more than one individual. The question was whether the word \”he\” was generic and if \”persons\” included women. In 1917 the Supreme Court of Alberta held that the word \”person\” did include women but that court\’s rulings only applied to the province of Alberta.

Prime Minister Robert Borden actually stated that a woman could not be named to the Canadian Senate since she did not fulfill the legal requirement of being a person. In 1927 five women appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada whether women were, for legal purposes, persons. In 1928 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that women were not legally persons. The court\’s reasons, that at the time the  BNA Act was written women could not vote and would not have been considered for political office, sound very like Scalia\’s argument about  the 14th Amendment.

With the support of Mackenzie King, then Prime Minister of Canada, the women appealed the Supreme Court\’s ruling to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in England which was at the time the highest court of appeal for Canada. In 1929 the Lord Chancellor of the Privy Council announced that \”yes, women are person.\” Lord Sankey further wrote, 

that the exclusion of women from all public offices is a relic of days more barbarous than ours. And to those who would ask why the word \”persons\” should include females, the obvious answer is, why should it not?\”
The idea that Lord Sankey\’s question still needs to be asked almost a century later indicates just how fragile are the rights women have won in the intervening years.


Women\'s Rights and the Decline of Democracy

As I have been watching and reading about the protests that led to the resignation of Hosni Mubarak I have more than once been struck by the fact that many of the \”horrible conditions\” that commentators spoke of in Egypt are also present in American life today. Indeed some, such as increasing social inequality, are actually worse in the United States than in Egypt. Yet the American commentators I listened to on American television almost to a person talked down to the protesters of Egypt from the Olympian heights of an achieved democracy.

I leave to another day a discussion of the paternalistic and colonial presumptions that laid behind much of their rhetoric. Today I am  examining one the premises that underlay their patronizing comments.

PREMISE: The United States of America is a functioning democracy.

 I think it is reasonable to question to the stability of democracy in the United States today and to have rather gloomy expectations for its future. I am not alone in this questioning and it is not only those on the loony fringes of political thought who share my concerns. Read, for example, Bob Herbert\’s opinion piece When Democracy Weakens in today\’s New York times.

At this point the reader may be assuming that I intend to write about the ways in which the rights women have won in the United States will be weakened as democracy is undercut. I would agree that the weakening of women\’s rights and the weakening of democratic rights go hand in hand but I would argue that the former is not a result of the latter as much as the latter is being achieved by means of the former.

Even if one looks to the American political parties and political movements that have been historically the greatest friends of the rights of American women one finds a disturbing willingness to treat the rights of women as negotiating points. Consider, if you will, the outcry that would arise if Democratic members of congress were willing to negotiate away the rights of African-Americans to whole areas of health care in return for a few Republican votes on an upcoming bill. Yet that is exactly what they have been willing to do to women. Since, apparently, the guaranteed right of every woman to life saving medical care is optional to many of the members of the house and senate, the health care bill they passed was written without a guarantee of universality of treatment. Of course in the future those limitations will be extended to include more and more Americans but the opening necessary to make that future gutting possible exists because the vast majority of political representatives, both Democratic and Republican, don\’t really believe the rights of women to be equal to those of men.

Similarly, if you look at the many programs that the Obama administration has slated to be gutted or canceled in order to cut the budget, those that serve the needs of women are disproportionately represented. Why, one might ask? Because these are the programs that the elected representatives of the American people are least likely to fight for. Will the kyriarchy stop at these programs? Of course not. Indeed even now it is not only the programs that primarily serve women that are under attack. But it is those programs that will slashed with the least amount of effective outrage. And so democracy slows dies.

The pattern is clear. If the powers that be wish to successfully to carve away at the rights of the public in general the best place to start is with the rights of women.
  

When realism and cynicism collide

Whenever I wonder if my attitude towards real, lasting changes in the power and status of women is overly cynical some real world event comes along to show that I am not being cynical enough.

Haiti\’s cataclysmic earthquake killed hundreds of thousands, left this capital in ruins and sent more than a million people into a life in crowded, squalid camps.

It also devastated a strong and surprisingly successful women\’s movement, which, a year later, struggles like the rest of the nation to recover, even as women are being subjected to horrific sexual violence.

 \”We started receiving reports of rapes from the very first day after the quake,\” said Jocie Philistin, one of the women who run Kofaviv. \”At first we thought, this can\’t be true! But it was.\”

Whatever \’state of nature\’ or \’breakdown of civil society\’ means for men it guarantees one thing for women: sexual violence. Among the ruins of Haiti women are being systematically stalked by gangs of rapists. It matters not if the woman is old enough to be a grandmother or young enough to still be described as a toddler. She is female and therefore the nature prey of men. 

Young women are easy prey for uneducated, unemployed men who populate the camps, often stoned and with time on their hands. They see women and girls as fair game. 

The men in authority are no better:

Many women have denounced camp leaders, always male, for demanding sexual favors in return for tents, food and building materials.

It is sad that I am not surprised to read about what is happening in Haiti. It is sad that I am not surprised that we are hearing so little about what is happening in Haiti. Damage to women, it appears, is always acceptable collateral damage. Protecting women is seldom the first goal of rescue/aid missions and indeed it often the very last. It is only after life has returned to normal for the men in a community that the needs, concerns, fears, safety and health of the women will be addressed.

If then.

Re: reading as a tool against hegemony OR Rereading as a tool against hegemony

It is dreadfully difficult for the fish to see the ocean in which they swim. That is one of the strengths of any hegemonic system. It is difficult for those living within it to realize that they are, indeed, living \”within\” a construct when so much of what they see seems natural, right and normal.

One of best ways to demonstrate hegemony induced blindness is to read a book one first read several decades ago. [I would suggest watching a television show or a movie but changes in production value can make it difficult to see past the technological changes to issues of social construction.] One finds upon rereading the book that apparently an evil genie crept into the text during the intervening years to change everything from language to plot details to aspects of characterization. \”How could I have missed that!\” one cries.

One missed it the first time for the same reason that fish do not notice the water–because it was such an automatic and unquestioned part of the universe in which one lived that it barely impinged on one\’s consciousness. One missed it because the reader and the author shared the same prejudices, understandings and stereotypes.

And as you put down the book or come to the last frame of the movie perhaps you should take a moment to wonder about all of the other things one had taken for granted or not noticed.