June 2006 – Page 21

Take Back America

A fantastic conference in DC that you should go to, if you can. I was invited to speak, but couldn’t make it because of this whole summer abroad thing. However, many fantastic feminist bloggers will be there, including Liza Sabater and Susie Madrack. Several political notables will be there as well, including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Cecile Richards, John Kerry, and Harry Reid. I’m truly disappointed that I won’t be able to make it. However, I have to extend my thanks and support to Christian Norton — he made sure to reach out to the feminist blogosphere, and went out of his way to accomodate the needs of unpaid bloggers like us. He’s fantastic. Ditto for Anasa of Progressive Majority. These two have really come out swinging for the feminist blogs, and are working to make sure that Take Back America has a strong feminist presence. So if you can go, I’d highly recommend it. I wish I could!

Greek Week

A vanity update: I’ve officially been here for one week. Things are good. The place I’m living is outside of the town of Legrena, and it’s completely isolated. All that’s here is the place I work, the place I live (which is next door), one restaurant, a bakery, a church and a store that sells cigarettes and ice cream. That’s it. At 5pm everyone goes home, and it’s just me. Which is a little strange, but I’ve been putting in some serious reading time at the beach, at the harbor, and in my room. Recommendations: Out of Place, Edward Said’s memoir; The Satanic Verses (I finally finished it, and wow — read it, it’s unbelievable); and The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante. Next up: On Beauty by Zadie Smith.

My first few days here were busy with getting settled and figuring things out. I don’t speak a word of Greek, so a co-worker drove me to the grocery store and helped me get everything I needed. Friday night I went into Athens and had a big Greek dinner, then went to a jazz festival. Saturday I went back to Athens and just walked around. I got there early, and spent the whole day wandering aimlessly — the best way to see a city, I think. I ended up seeing all the major tourist sites anyway — the Acropolis, Agora, Plaka, the flea market, etc. I didn’t think I’d like Athens, since I’d generally heard that it was hot, dirty, and run-down, but I found it really pleasant. Maybe I liked it more after being stuck out in the boonies all week, who knows, but I had a good time. Sunday I took a day trip to the island of Aegina with two other interns. It was very pretty, and we had some great seafood, so no complaints there. I also tried cheese pie, at the suggestion of someone in the comments here — and what a fantastic choice! It was delicious. Definitely going to repeat that. I’m also a big fan of their Greek salads (feta cheese is 100 times better here) and stuffed vine leaves. Yum.

Overall, it’s been a good time. I do miss New York and the convenience of urban life, though. The only way to get anywhere here is by car (which I obviously don’t have) or regional bus, which only comes once an hour, takes almost two hours to get to Athens and is fairly erratic — Sunday morning I was waiting for 2 1/2 hours before it finally arrived. And the last bus leaves Athens at 6:30pm, so if I want to go out I have to make sure I can stay with friends who live in the city or the suburbs. I’ve considered moving closer to the city, but that would mean riding the bus to and from work every day — difficult, frustrating, and expensive (it’s about 4 euro each way, which adds up to about $200 a month). So I think I’ll be staying here, in my deserted little village. But that’s ok — every time I’ve gone, I’ve had the beach entirely to myself.

Things here are generally quiet, which I think is good for me (for two months, at least). And I’ve already got a sick tan (but don’t worry, Mom, I’m using sunscreen!). Now, pictures:

beach
“My” beach. More below the fold.

I’m gonna miss you guys!

So this weekend, I exploded a burrito in the microwave,* dropped the weights on my chest,** and apparently might have given myself pinkeye.***

Go me!

*This was actually kind of cool, except for the part where I had to scrape the burrito innards off of the walls and ceiling of the microwave, and then pray I wouldn’t get ptomaine poisoning from eating something that had touched those surfaces.

**I was doing sets to exhaustion. I didn’t so much drop the bench-press bar as fight a losing battle with gravity until it was pressing on my chest. I was saved, ironically enough, by my breasts. Since I was doing a decline press ( tilted back so that my head was below my feet), the bar stuck there rather than rolling down onto my collarbone or windpipe.

***My eye is clear, but it hurts a little bit, and there’s some minor swelling below.

Neat!

Eteraz has moved, or rather evolved

Cat Mommy Driveby

Zuzu’s post received a few unpleasant responses, to the effect that she’s wrong to give up her animals rather than attempt to take them to the Maple Leaf State. That she shouldn’t offer them up to a good home in their original stomping grounds, even. She’s not talking about making them into casserole. (I suggested it, but she said she prefers babies.)

She commented on those responses, and will apparently be taking a blog break. I hope I’m not being rude by commenting on the issue myself.

Elizabeth Dole Speaks for Me!

Qgrrl, in comments on Amp’s thread about how, ceteris paribus (this is important!), he’d vote for a woman candidate over her otherwise indistinguishable male counterpart:

I don’t quite know where to begin. Let me first say that I find it offensive that men would suggest which candidates women (feminists) should vote for based soley on genitalia. Way to reduce feminist politics to our bodies and essentialism! But, hey, that’s an entirely different rant there.

All this is true, and worth saying, but I think Amp’s prescription comes with a vital caveat. I don’t think he’d vote for Hilary Clinton over Paul Wellstone, but he might well vote for Hilary Clinton over John Kerry. I don’t see anything wrong with that. It’s absolutely true that women can be really, really sexist–I mean, who made it her mission to destroy the ERA?

But I think there’s also a case to be made for the idea that a woman is more likely to recognize problems affecting women. I’d put greater trust in a gay candidate to “get” homophobic bullying in schools, because it’s infinitely more likely that the gay candidate suffered that kind of attack. Likewise, I’d assume that a transsexual candidate would be aware of insurance-carrier discrimination, because he or she would probably have experienced it at some point.

And, AEBE, I might vote for a woman candidate just so that I could point to her and say to my daughter, “See, sweetie? Don’t you want to speak truth to power, just like her? Now turn off the goddamn TV.” There’s a lot to be said for simple representation, particularly in terms of destroying stereotypes that say that women can’t, or won’t, do important things. There’s a reason my first career ambition was “ballerina princess,” and it wasn’t because I liked to dance or wanted to sit around in a tiara all day; it was because the children’s books at my preschool contained little else. It was either that, or become a teacher. When I met my pediatrician two years later, I started thinking about maybe becoming a doctor.

The idea of representation is one with a long and conflicted history. People do frequently vote on identity, even when it’s either fake or clearly meaningless to the person who happens to hold it. Politicians have exploited this tendency to want someone from your home state, or someone who looks like you, or someone who supposedly has the problems you have. The examples I just used are not entirely reliable. Mary Cheney will never take a stand against school bullying. A transsexual candidate who never hurt for an extra five or six or ten thousand dollars might not care overmuch that certain of his or her constituents need more coverage.

When There’s No Plan B

Anti-choice politics of limiting birth control cause more abortions than they prevent. This should be obvious, and one woman demonstrates it here.

General idea is this: Busy married couple with two kids find some private time, and they have sex. In the heat of the moment, woman forgets to insert her diaphragm. Woman does not want to be pregnant, as she already has two kids and is on medications that cause severe birth defects. The next day she calls various doctors trying to get emergency contraception, and is routinely denied. Woman gets pregnant.

Had she been able to get Plan B over the counter, chances are that she would never have gotten pregnant, and would never have had an abortion. But actually preventing abortions is secondary to the anti-choice right, which is more interested in stripping away women’s human rights than protecting babies.

After making the decision with my husband, I was plunged into an even murkier world — that of finding an abortion provider. If information on Plan B was hard to come by, and practitioners were evasive on emergency contraception, trying to get information on how to abort a pregnancy in 2006 is an even more Byzantine experience.

Read More…Read More…

AIDS at 25

A must-read op/ed in the LA Times from a doctor who treated one of the first recognized AIDS patients in the United States, and was the first to publish his findings. His stories are heart-wrenching, and his passion obvious. I’m heartened to know that, at the very least, we have people like Michael Gottlieb on the front lines.

Since my first report to the CDC, more than 500,000 people have died of AIDS in the United States. Globally, 25 million people have died of the disease, which is now the leading cause of death worldwide among those between the ages of 15 and 59.

As a doctor working on the epidemic’s front lines since its inception, I find this anniversary one of intense emotions: despair about the lives lost to the disease; frustration with the Bush administration’s promotion of abstinence over condoms for HIV prevention; anger at the denial, stigma and prejudice that still fuel the spread of HIV around the globe. But mixed in with those feelings is also pride in the remarkable medical progress we’ve made in HIV treatment. Twenty-five years ago, AIDS meant certain death. Even when my patient Rock Hudson was diagnosed with AIDS in 1985, the best I could do was recommend an experimental — and ultimately ineffective — treatment.

It wasn’t until the advent of the AIDS “cocktail” 15 years into the epidemic that we began to turn this disease around. Those new treatments were truly revolutionary: Almost overnight, people with HIV left hospital beds and were back at work and living their lives. In one year, the number of Americans who died from AIDS dropped by 43%, and over the last decade, the death rate fell more than 70%.

This is remarkable progress, and it’s important to emphasize that HIV is not an immediate death sentence. But the drugs are expensive, and big pharma isn’t exactly generous with its patents. While wealthier people in developed countries have better access to these drugs, people in developing nations are often without hope. And equally as problematic are the people in the “middle nations” — those which aren’t poor enough to receive aid from richer countries, but where the people still can’t afford the treatment they need. And even people who are relatively “rich” by world standards and who live in developed nations aren’t able to afford life-extending drugs. Further, conservative governments promote ideological solutions, and cut off research that they find personally problematic. Combating AIDS requires cutting through dogma and doing what’s necessary to save lives.

I believe overcoming AIDS means extending our medical progress to everyone — and that’s a tall order. HIV is spreading disproportionately among African Americans and Latinos, and those infected are still less likely than their white counterparts to get the care they need. Worldwide, 5 million people with HIV in developing countries need medicine urgently.

Thanks to initiatives by the United Nations, the U.S. and others, 1.3 million people began therapy over the last five years, and an estimated 350,000 deaths were averted in 2005 alone. But 40 million men, women and children are still living with HIV. Nobody should die from AIDS (or for that matter malaria or TB) because of where they live or their economic status.

Will there be a 50th anniversary of AIDS? Since I saw those first unfortunate patients 25 years ago, medical science has worked miracles. But the end of AIDS is not yet in sight. Minimizing the impact of another quarter-century of this plague hinges on our collective will to prevent new infections, find a vaccine and cure and get lifesaving medicines to all who need them.

Politics of Hate

Does anyone else think it’s sad (and infuriating, and disgusting) that the president thinks that the best way to reach religious voters is through scapegoating gays and lesbians? A party that sets its platform squarely on hate and discrimination is, I hope, a party that will soon find itself without many followers.

But I’m not too optimistic. Conservative politics has relied on hate-mongering and discrimination under the guise of “tradition” since this nation’s founding. There’s no reason to think that they’ll stop any time soon.

“Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society,” Bush said in his Saturday radio address. “Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all.”

Considering that recognitions of pair-bonding relationships have existed in societies that have both suceeded and failed miserably, I’m not sure this is the greatest argument. And whatever happened to that old conservative mantra of “govermnent out of my life”? Shouldn’t Republicans be arguing that the federal government should have no influence at all on marital laws?

And shouldn’t they just back off and discuss, oh, the fact that the Pentagon is asking for $66 billion more dollars to continue fighting a failing, unnecessary war?

“In our free society, people have the right to choose how they live their lives,” Bush said. “And in a free society, decisions about such a fundamental social institution as marriage should be made by the people, not by the courts.”

In other words, a free society is good as long as we can use its institutions to make some people less free. Brilliant.

Racism at the World Cup

I’m excited for the World Cup, if only because all my TV channels here are in Greek, and sports are the only thing I like to watch because you don’t have to understand what they’re saying. But apparently some football fans have been on their worst behavior lately.

As he left the soccer field after a club match in the eastern German city of Halle on March 25, the Nigerian forward Adebowale Ogungbure was spit upon, jeered with racial remarks and mocked with monkey noises. In rebuke, he placed two fingers under his nose to simulate a Hitler mustache and thrust his arm in a Nazi salute.

In April, the American defender Oguchi Onyewu, playing for his professional club team in Belgium, dismissively gestured toward fans who were making simian chants at him. Then, as he went to throw the ball inbounds, Onyewu said a fan of the opposing team reached over a barrier and punched him in the face.

Very nice, guys. And it’s escalating as European teams sign more players from Africa and Latin America.

Players and antiracism experts said they expected offensive behavior during the tournament, including monkey-like chanting; derisive singing; the hanging of banners that reflect neofascist and racist beliefs; and perhaps the tossing of bananas or banana peels, all familiar occurrences during matches in Spain, Italy, eastern Germany and eastern Europe.

“For us it’s quite clear this is a reflection of underlying tensions that exist in European societies,” said Piara Powar, director of the London-based antiracist soccer organization Kick It Out. He said of Eastern Europe: “Poverty, unemployment, is a problem. Indigenous people are looking for easy answers to blame. Often newcomers bear the brunt of the blame.”

And perhaps the intense xenophobia and stringent immigration laws in many European nations sets the cultural tone.

After making a Nazi salute, which is illegal in Germany, Ogungbure of Nigeria was investigated by the authorities. But a charge of unconstitutional behavior against him was soon dropped because his gesture had been meant to renounce extremist activity.

“I regret what I did,” Ogungbure said in a telephone interview from Leipzig. “I should have walked away. I’m a professional, but I’m a human, too. They don’t spit on dogs. Why should they spit on me? I felt like a nobody.”

I wonder if they also investigated the person who make racist comments and monkey noises at him.

It’s pretty clear that Ogungbure made the Nazi symbol as a comment on the fan’s behavior, reminding him of where racism led German society before. Maybe not an ideal reaction, but an understandable one. And perhaps in addition to cracking down on racism, Germany should consider free expression rights. I understand that their past is deeply marred by hate, but illegalizing gestures because they evoke a painful past seems a little heavy-handed. That said, of course the authorities are justified in removing offending fans from soccer stadiums.

Gerald Asamoah, a forward on Germany’s World Cup team and a native of Ghana, has been recounting an incident in the 1990’s when he was pelted with bananas before a club match in Cottbus. “I’ll never forget that,” he said in a television interview. “It’s like we’re not people.” He has expressed anger and sadness over a banner distributed by a right-wing group that admonished, “No Gerald, You Are Not Germany.”

That’s certainly disturbing. But the fact is, as much as Germany passes anti-racism laws, xenophobia is deeply entrenched in their laws and culture. Try and immigrate to Germany from a developing nation (or, heck, any nation) if you lack German heritage and let me know how easy it is. The German govermnet sends a clear message with its laws: If you aren’t ethnically German, then no, You Are Not Germany.

That isn’t to say that all racism can be traced back to the government, and if only the laws would change, minds would follow. Clearly, this right-wing hatred operates independent of the law. But German institutions send a clear message with their approach to immigration, and limiting public gestures isn’t going to do much to change the cultural mentality. It’s easy to say that racism doesn’t exist (or to say that you aren’t racist) when you’re surrounded by people with your same skin color — it’s another thing to have people who look differently from you living in your neighborhood, working in your ofice, and playing on your sports fields. This is what supposed bastions of liberalism in Europe are facing now. They’re not doing a great job.