Something strange about discourse on DSK, a weird schizophrenia. We chastise the French for having given him a pass all these years, for going okay, boys will be boys, so we won’t call DSK on his groping, his obscene texts, etc. Why do we chastise the French for not speaking out earlier? Because had DSK been halted earlier he would not have perpetrated this rape. Okay. We imagine then that there is a logical progression: harassment, groping, rape.
On the other hand, we deny any logical progression. We Americans draw an absolute line between harassment and rape. Rape is a crime of violence. It is not the logical end to flirtation, even groping. We are now re-examining Arnold Schwatzenegger – cad, sleazebag, sexual harasser - but we do not expect him now to rape someone. Because we do not believe that rape is simply an exaggerated form of harassment, unlike medieval theologians who thought that the beauty of a rape victim counted as a mitigating circumstance for the rapist.
And this is an advantage; it’s enlightened. By refusing to excuse rape as something that a woman can bring on herself through flirtatious behavior, we place it firmly out of the realm of excusable offenses.
But with DSK we are trying to have it both ways. We are assuming that he is guilty. No question of this – just look at the news. And why don’t we assume that he’s innocent until proven guilty? Because he has been an outrageous chaser of women. And yet, we do not accept that aggressive flirts, gropers, shade over into rapists. We can’t, because if we did believe in a logical progression we would consider certain circumstances to be mitigating. We don’t. A rape is a rape. It isn’t like murder where there are degrees. If the woman says no, even quietly, if she feels pressured by her inferior position, it’s rape. When the Republicans tried to invent a category of “forcible” rape, we vigorously opposed them, rightly so. Rape means nonconsensual and there is no gray area.
So let’s stop pretending that we know that DSK is guilty because he is a known dirty old man.
And let’s stop pretending that suspecting that someone may have set the crime up is the equivalent of believing in highly complicated, implausible conspiracy theories, like the one that says that the US government staged 9-11 or that the moon landings were faked. It is hardly unprecedented that political rivals set each other up, break the law to get the dirt on each other. It would not be complicated to find someone willing to claim rape for a lot of money. The police routinely consider the possibility that someone accused of a crime was set up. Why not in this case? All the more so given DSK’s reputation.
In fact, I think that our American eagerness to believe DSK guilty is probably more his role at the IMF than anything else. We are so furious at Wall Street and international banks in general that his alleged crime, rape of an immigrant by a fabulously wealthy sleazebag of a banker who pretends to be a Socialist, serves to focus our outrage. We don’t really care whether he in fact violated every rule of civilized behavior by forcing himself on a physically vulnerable woman, because he has done that again and again in a metaphorical sense. He is guilty of rape in the largest sense.
Friday, May 20, 2011
Friday, May 13, 2011
Why Newt and not me?
Another complaint from exile - worse than a complaint, actually. A shriek of outrage.
Newt Gingrich has announced his candidacy, and it’s going to be just too infuriating for those of us exiled from the Catholic Church because of divorce and remarriage to hear himself-righteously intoning about his appropriation of the religion. Since when does he own it? Unlike the rest of us who came up through the ranks, trying to live as Catholics, he storms in and demands annulments of not only one but TWO marriages (Jackie seems to be alive still) AND GETS THEM! Although I guess I shouldn’t be surprised – when wasn't the the institution itself owned by rich old guys swaggering around importantly?
Still, it is easier to read about all those convenient medieval annulments, like Charles IV’s after he had assented to having his wife locked up on the pretext of adultery, than this one. This one cuts too close; I have not taken communion since I remarried, figuring that I didn’t write the rules of the system, but when I entered into it as a married person, vowing before God and man that I would stay with Chris until death parted us, I was going to be playing within the rules of that system. Otherwise I would have just gotten married by a justice of the peace in the first place. It’s not like the Catholic Church is ambiguous about what it requires of you when it agrees to marry you.
But Newt, for some reason, is special. He doesn’t have to play by the rules that hold for the rest of us peons. No, despite the fact that he dumped wife number one for wife number two while wife number one was suffering with cancer, cheated on wife number two with wife number three for six years, all the while working for Clinton’s impeachment, he still gets to waltz up to take communion. Can someone explain to me why he does and I don’t?
So what does the Pope have to say about this? According to Zenit, “Addressing the issue through his Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist, ‘Sacramentum Caritatis,’ the Pontiff underlined the relation between the Eucharist and indissolubility of marriage. Benedict XVI says that the Church must welcome with special love the divorced faithful who have remarried and, as such, cannot receive Communion. ‘We all know that this is a particularly painful problem for people who live in situations in which they are excluded from Eucharistic Communion, and naturally for the priests who desire to help these people love the Church and love Christ,’ said the Pope during a meeting July 25 in a church at Introd, the northern Italian town near where he spent his summer holidays."
Well, not much of a painful problem for Newt. Only for the rest of us. The rest of us are told, sorry, a marriage is a marriage. To a divorced person. In a Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, church, whatever. Marriage, all of them, count for the Catholic Church as INDISSOLUBLE. Newt, in contrast, gets his annulment from wife number 2 because she had been married to someone else. As for Jackie, I don't know. Did he in fact manage to get that one annulled? Information is not easily available.
I think that I deserve an answer to why Newt and not me. I deserve to know why Newt, Rudy Giuliani, the Kennedys, etc., get to participate in the sacraments and I don’t. Or, to be more precise, I deserve the courtesy of an honest answer to my question. Because obviously the answer is that because they are important white guys and I am an insignificant woman. I want the Pope to come out and say it.
Newt Gingrich has announced his candidacy, and it’s going to be just too infuriating for those of us exiled from the Catholic Church because of divorce and remarriage to hear himself-righteously intoning about his appropriation of the religion. Since when does he own it? Unlike the rest of us who came up through the ranks, trying to live as Catholics, he storms in and demands annulments of not only one but TWO marriages (Jackie seems to be alive still) AND GETS THEM! Although I guess I shouldn’t be surprised – when wasn't the the institution itself owned by rich old guys swaggering around importantly?
Still, it is easier to read about all those convenient medieval annulments, like Charles IV’s after he had assented to having his wife locked up on the pretext of adultery, than this one. This one cuts too close; I have not taken communion since I remarried, figuring that I didn’t write the rules of the system, but when I entered into it as a married person, vowing before God and man that I would stay with Chris until death parted us, I was going to be playing within the rules of that system. Otherwise I would have just gotten married by a justice of the peace in the first place. It’s not like the Catholic Church is ambiguous about what it requires of you when it agrees to marry you.
But Newt, for some reason, is special. He doesn’t have to play by the rules that hold for the rest of us peons. No, despite the fact that he dumped wife number one for wife number two while wife number one was suffering with cancer, cheated on wife number two with wife number three for six years, all the while working for Clinton’s impeachment, he still gets to waltz up to take communion. Can someone explain to me why he does and I don’t?
So what does the Pope have to say about this? According to Zenit, “Addressing the issue through his Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist, ‘Sacramentum Caritatis,’ the Pontiff underlined the relation between the Eucharist and indissolubility of marriage. Benedict XVI says that the Church must welcome with special love the divorced faithful who have remarried and, as such, cannot receive Communion. ‘We all know that this is a particularly painful problem for people who live in situations in which they are excluded from Eucharistic Communion, and naturally for the priests who desire to help these people love the Church and love Christ,’ said the Pope during a meeting July 25 in a church at Introd, the northern Italian town near where he spent his summer holidays."
Well, not much of a painful problem for Newt. Only for the rest of us. The rest of us are told, sorry, a marriage is a marriage. To a divorced person. In a Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, church, whatever. Marriage, all of them, count for the Catholic Church as INDISSOLUBLE. Newt, in contrast, gets his annulment from wife number 2 because she had been married to someone else. As for Jackie, I don't know. Did he in fact manage to get that one annulled? Information is not easily available.
I think that I deserve an answer to why Newt and not me. I deserve to know why Newt, Rudy Giuliani, the Kennedys, etc., get to participate in the sacraments and I don’t. Or, to be more precise, I deserve the courtesy of an honest answer to my question. Because obviously the answer is that because they are important white guys and I am an insignificant woman. I want the Pope to come out and say it.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
God Save the Queen?
We had been playing with the idea of getting dual citizenship, adding a New Zealand passport to our American one – I’ve always thought it would be so cool to carry multiple passports. Besides, we could go to Cuba, and who knows when the plane we are travelling on might get high-jacked, in which case it would be an advantage to be carrying a kiwi rather than American passport.
But then came the explosion of debate on the British royalty brought on by the Royal Wedding, and it suddenly occurred to me that to become citizens we would have to raise our right hands and pledge allegiance to the queen. (Actually, the exact expression used in the oath, it turns out, is “honour” the queen.)
Let’s think about this. Because if you are not the sort of person who raises your hand to swear to whatever, in other words, if have any principles at all and are not a feeble piece of crap loser ready to denounce your neighbour for a dollar, this can only mean that you accept the premises of the monarchy.
True, the internet is filled with nauseating and half-assed defenses of the monarchy from people who do not believe in it. Bizarrely, loads of Brits are willing to maintain the wacky institution as good for tourism or because it “holds the country together.” Mark Vernon writes on his blog that the “mystery of the monarchy is that it holds all sorts of things for us that other political systems struggle to do. A modern monarchy speaks of the pre-political values necessary for democracy, values like charity and trust, and which the modern royal dignifies in his or her day job. These can't be voted in, and they are not rational.” Vernon attributes this ability of the queen to serve as a sort of social glue for the irrational to the fact that she is “symbolic” and therefore capable of encompassing contradictory values. Let’s be clear about this: as Vernon admits, the queen is just a cipher upon which to project pretty much anything. But you don’t get to create a society around what you freely admit to be a cipher. In fact, if everyone came out and agreed that the monarchy is a benign collective fantasy, the whole thing would collapse. The system presents itself as a reality; the queen IS the queen. Her queenship is itself as a predicated on the assumption that some people are better than others by virtue of genealogy. It isn’t as if she could get on TV, wink and say, “We all know that this is a bunch of horse shit, but it’s good for tourism, so I’ll pretend to be your queen and you pretend to be my subjects.” Either she is the queen or she isn’t, and those capable of demystifying royalty and still wanting to keep her around are either morons or cynics.
We how believe in republics rather than monarchies rally around fantasies, too, around various values and offices, as Vernon not very insightfully points out. But the difference is that under no circumstances are we asked to believe that we are distinguishable on the basis of our blood. We have been through the Enlightenment, and we have been warned by the Dialectic of Enlightenment of the necessity of myth in our everyday lives to keep horrors like Hitler and his nutty mythology at bay. Still, the point is that we are never asked to swear that we believe in our own myths. We are asked to accept a set of values, a set of ideals, but when we raise our right hands we are asked only whether we will uphold the law. On the other hand, the myth of the monarchy demands our assent to an insane fantasy that some blood is more valuable than others. Most of the time here in New Zealand this nutty idea lingers in the background, emerging occasionally on TV in the form of a royal wedding. I can live in this country (although I do it under protest). But I will not volunteer to become a subject of the queen of England. My God, what would be left? The British monarchy is a totalizing system of belief. Anyone who subjects oneself to it has to believe in it: that, or admit to living in a strange world of half light and fantasy, or, even worse, to having no beliefs at all.
But then came the explosion of debate on the British royalty brought on by the Royal Wedding, and it suddenly occurred to me that to become citizens we would have to raise our right hands and pledge allegiance to the queen. (Actually, the exact expression used in the oath, it turns out, is “honour” the queen.)
Let’s think about this. Because if you are not the sort of person who raises your hand to swear to whatever, in other words, if have any principles at all and are not a feeble piece of crap loser ready to denounce your neighbour for a dollar, this can only mean that you accept the premises of the monarchy.
True, the internet is filled with nauseating and half-assed defenses of the monarchy from people who do not believe in it. Bizarrely, loads of Brits are willing to maintain the wacky institution as good for tourism or because it “holds the country together.” Mark Vernon writes on his blog that the “mystery of the monarchy is that it holds all sorts of things for us that other political systems struggle to do. A modern monarchy speaks of the pre-political values necessary for democracy, values like charity and trust, and which the modern royal dignifies in his or her day job. These can't be voted in, and they are not rational.” Vernon attributes this ability of the queen to serve as a sort of social glue for the irrational to the fact that she is “symbolic” and therefore capable of encompassing contradictory values. Let’s be clear about this: as Vernon admits, the queen is just a cipher upon which to project pretty much anything. But you don’t get to create a society around what you freely admit to be a cipher. In fact, if everyone came out and agreed that the monarchy is a benign collective fantasy, the whole thing would collapse. The system presents itself as a reality; the queen IS the queen. Her queenship is itself as a predicated on the assumption that some people are better than others by virtue of genealogy. It isn’t as if she could get on TV, wink and say, “We all know that this is a bunch of horse shit, but it’s good for tourism, so I’ll pretend to be your queen and you pretend to be my subjects.” Either she is the queen or she isn’t, and those capable of demystifying royalty and still wanting to keep her around are either morons or cynics.
We how believe in republics rather than monarchies rally around fantasies, too, around various values and offices, as Vernon not very insightfully points out. But the difference is that under no circumstances are we asked to believe that we are distinguishable on the basis of our blood. We have been through the Enlightenment, and we have been warned by the Dialectic of Enlightenment of the necessity of myth in our everyday lives to keep horrors like Hitler and his nutty mythology at bay. Still, the point is that we are never asked to swear that we believe in our own myths. We are asked to accept a set of values, a set of ideals, but when we raise our right hands we are asked only whether we will uphold the law. On the other hand, the myth of the monarchy demands our assent to an insane fantasy that some blood is more valuable than others. Most of the time here in New Zealand this nutty idea lingers in the background, emerging occasionally on TV in the form of a royal wedding. I can live in this country (although I do it under protest). But I will not volunteer to become a subject of the queen of England. My God, what would be left? The British monarchy is a totalizing system of belief. Anyone who subjects oneself to it has to believe in it: that, or admit to living in a strange world of half light and fantasy, or, even worse, to having no beliefs at all.
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