August 7, 2008 @ 4:04 pm | Category: media, politics, global issues
Why the world has chosen to reward China with the international attention of the Olympics is one of the outrages of the year. This is the first time an authoritarian government has hosted the games. While the Chinese government is guilty of systematic human rights violations including religious oppression, mandatory abortions, economic rape of its most vulnerable citizen in the countryside, and gross disregard for the environment the international media is lavishing upbeat attention. Transnational corporations are seeing the Olympics as another opportunity to sell their products via glitzy ads while ignoring mass silencing of free speech. As this NPR report indicates global companies like Nike and Coca-Cola see human rights as the problem of governments not marketers. Even NBC News is seeing its journalism compromised by a too close relationship with the Olympic committee. Hear this report from NPR. With a heavy investment in the games, NBC is apparently reluctant to embarrass the Chinese. If those who have freedom of speech sell it for profit, who will be left to speak out? I think I will leave the television off.
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June 26, 2008 @ 3:18 pm | Category: gender/feminism, politics, global issues
I haven’t been blogging lately because frankly the media noise has been so loud that it’s hard to figure out what’s important and what’s just noise. Well, I think this is important. After years in office this is the strongest statement by US Secretary of State Rice regarding violence against women worldwide. Here is another article about how rape is used as a weapon of war. Maybe with only few months left Rice feels like she can afford to speak up in a significant way.
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February 24, 2008 @ 2:40 pm | Category: gender/feminism, politics
For much of American history women’s solidarity, the way women identified with each other, was grounded in the fact that all women were either mothers or potential mothers. This solidarity drove women’s political and social involvement outside the home. After the reproduction revolution of the twentieth century, women’s solidarity has become significantly eroded. Now, motherhood is strictly an option and potential motherhood is receding in the minds of many western women. The result is that feminism has lost its political traction. What is left of liberal feminism? Check out this article by Utne Reader entitled “Shelf Life: Feminism 2.0″ which surveys the blogosphere for the conversations that are taking place. Twenty first century feminism has become a form of tribalism where every issue is equally valid, and therefore no longer politically or philosophically compelling. Check out the blogs and let me know what you find.
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January 29, 2008 @ 11:34 am | Category: social justice, politics
Check out this story about the abuse of a domestic servant. This a why we need to know who is in the country. We can’t protect people we don’t know are here. Women, I suspect, are more hidden than the day laborers standing on the street corner.
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January 24, 2008 @ 7:26 pm | Category: politics
Is it race, gender, class or religion that will persuade you to vote for a particular candidate? Oprah Winfrey, the queen of women’s empowerment is learning a hard lesson. See this story (apparently this link is off line right now, here is another.)of the tough time Oprah is having with her audience. After endorsing Barack Obama, Oprah finds she has angered many of her female viewers. Their message? How dare she endorse a black man over a woman, Hillary Clinton. The problem with identity politics is that nobody wins.
In the case of Oprah, I believe many white women don’t see her as black at all. They also don’t see that above all Oprah is a media business woman. Everything she does is calculated to promote her own name and pocket book. There is a reason why her magazine has featured her on every cover. Nobody is perfect. This time she may betting on the wrong thing.
What gets lost in all this are the issues of experience, character, and policy viewpoints. Sometimes one’s best ally may be an unlikely one. Sometimes those who you expect to share your viewpoints actually diverge radically. In politics, like in life, it’s hard to know who your friends are. It’s better to take people as they come than to read too much into the unchosen particularities of their birth.
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November 17, 2007 @ 7:09 pm | Category: politics, Pop Culture
Recently Time magazine featured a story about China’s up and coming me generation. These are the young people who are profiting from China’s new market economy. Reading the article they sound like any educated and affluent person in the West. They like good food, travel, fashion, and consumer culture. They also demonstrate a complete disengagement from politics. As long as they are free to consume what they like, and have the money, they don’t really care about the nature of the government they live under. Even if that government is a source of oppression for millions less well situated than themselves.
This week there was another story on the web noting a survey that measured the willingness of NYU students to sell their votes in the next presidential election. According to the survey, “Only 20 percent said they’d exchange their vote for an iPod touch. But 66 percent said they’d forfeit their vote for a free ride to NYU. And half said they’d give up the right to vote forever for $1 million.” What a relief, at least they weren’t willing to exchange their votes for a Prada bag.
I don’t know if we have ever seen this before. Somewhere the stuff became more important than intangible values like freedom, justice, and compassion. It reminds me of Esau who was willing to sell his birthright for bowl of lentils. It does seem the price for a person’s soul has dropped significantly and that the common denominator among the elites is not intangible values but the stuff. The difference between one person and another is no longer politics, values, or even race. It’s the stuff, who has it or who doesn’t.
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October 29, 2007 @ 11:14 am | Category: politics
The Christian Century (October 2007) arrived a few days ago with the cover story ” Getting Religion:How Democrats are Learning to Talk about their Faith.” Inside the covers, we have a quote from Mississippi gubernatorial candidate John Arthur Eaves, ” I am a Democrat because I am a Christian,” along with a photo of his praying family around a dinner table. Good for him! So why does it make me uncomfortable? While I firmly believe in the American principle of separation of church and state, I also believe people have the right to advocate according to their beliefs. Everyone advocates based on their view of how the world should be, including all the current presidential candidates. Thanks to Jim Wallis’ book God’s Politics, people have become more open to the idea that religious beliefs have political consequences. The American people have warmed up to this so much that Beliefnet.com has God-o-Meter ,” scientifically measures factors such as rate of God-talk, effectiveness—saying God wants a capital gains tax cut doesn’t guarantee a high rating—and other top-secret criteria.” To me, this marginalizes religion by making it silly.
I am not encouraged by the current vogue of politicians wearing their faith on their shirt/blouse sleeves, regardless of their party. I didn’t like it with the Christian Right, and I don’t like it with the Christian Left. It makes me uncomfortable, because there is no way for me to test their claim that they “have been born-again,” or that they have “Jesus in their heart”. I am just suppose take their word for it. It’s code for ” God is on my side.” Rather, I will judge any politician by what he/she does and the things I can actually see — like their record. I would like for us to go back to the good old days when Gerald Ford refused to bring his faith into the political race, while Jimmy Carter was becoming the first “born-again” president. While I will never deny that someones faith will shape their decisions, on the campaign trail there is no way for me to differentiate between an expression of faith and manipulative pandering. I think there are some hidden dangers. The trumpeting of religion on the part of politicians may result in a severe backlash against religion we haven’t yet imagined.
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April 16, 2007 @ 6:00 pm | Category: politics
I am usually not inclined to comment on political issues. Partly, because I believe that everything has political implications but politics is not everything. I think that we talk too much about politics as a way to hide from what civil society, (you and me) needs to be doing. It also gets boring and predictable. But sometimes the political conversation gets too close to home. When one set of political leaders talk about a troop surge and another set talks about a DRAFT, the value of any war comes into question. As a mother of two sons, 20 and 16, I can tell you that I am not for a draft for any of the wars we are currently fighting. They don’t want to be drafted either. Does a vision of Canada swim in my head. Yes, it does. This brings up a question, for what war would I be willing for my sons to be drafted? This get war out of the abstraction mode into reality. It’s a question all of us need to be asking. From my point of view a “just war” is impossible because it can never meet its own requirement, and pacifism is unrealistic in a world where aggressive evil is real. It’s one of life’s imponderables, so for right now I will just go with the mom test, or maybe it’s more appropriate to call it the parent test. I believe fathers feel the same way.
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January 21, 2007 @ 11:42 am | Category: politics, theology/church
Yesterday I started the day by laughing at the idea of a Christian Taliban like in this blog posting by Bible Girl. It’s the sort of accusation that comes up when Christian parents are trying to control what their own children are being taught or exposed to. It’s usually voiced by westerners who have no clue what it is to live under the Taliban. In Christianity the idea of compulsion in belief goes smack against the voluntary nature of the faith. By the afternoon, I had gained sobriety with this story. It reports that the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has dismissed Sheri Klouda, professor of Hebrew, for being a woman. Some at the institution believe that it’s unseemly that a woman teach men biblical Hebrew. If they are to remain consistent to their view that a woman should not exercise “authority” over a man, any man, I don’t think they will care for the possibility of a woman being president of the US either. If this mentality was to have any cultural traction women ( and the whole society) would be in a whole lot of trouble. Women occupy too many positions where they exercise authority over men and are indispensable like the police and judges. Fortunately, this idea and those who hold it will remain in the dusty nooks of their own private institutions. Can we say irrelevant?
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January 7, 2007 @ 11:57 am | Category: politics
I am starting to work on a research project in which I am looking at women and power. Our relationship to power, how we use it and how it has been used against us. With all the negative historical association of women and power we now have this image of Nancy Pelosi, the new speaker of the US House of Representatives, to haunt us. It has been coming up in more than a few places on the web. I would love to hear from any of my readers on how you respond to this image. Do you think it’s a positive or a negative image of female power?
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