Saturday, April 22, 2006

Duke Inkblot Test good reads: Dahlia Lithwick in The Washington Post on the Duke rape allegations as inkblot test on race, class, gender. Deanna Zandt at Alternet  on Natalee Holloway, the Duke victim, Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein as seen by Fox News. And for Earth Day, Richard Cohen in The Washington Post on Al Gore and "An Inconvenient Truth," his documentary on global warming. an excerpt from Cohen: You cannot see this film and not think of George W. Bush, the man who beat Gore in 2000. The contrast is stark. Gore -- more at ease in the lecture hall than he ever was on the stump -- summons science to tell a harrowing story and offers science as the antidote. No feat of imagination could have Bush do something similar -- even the sentences are beyond him. But it is the thought that matters -- the application of intellect to an intellectual problem. Bush has been studiously anti-science, a man of applied ignorance who has undernourished his mind with the empty calories of comfy dogma. For instance, his insistence on abstinence as the preferred method of birth control would be laughable were it not so reckless. It is similar to Bush's initial approach to global warming and his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol -- ideology trumping science. It may be that Gore will do more good for his country and the world with this movie than Bush ever did by beating him in 2000. 8:53:05 PM    comment []

Mad Housewife Flanagan     Not to worry about the Caitlin Flanagan book To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife. The basher of working mothers has written a muddled and flat book of essays that fails to ignite. Our friend Judy Stadtman Tucker of Mothers Movement Online has a review that will spare you reading the book. Stadtman Tucker gives you a taste of what makes Flanagan so maddening and pathetic: Flanagan takes too much delight in gunning down those around her, and never fashions an appealing persona for herself. While chastening "yuppie" women for their egoism and other shortcomings as wives and mothers, Flanagan presents herself as charmingly indisposed to self-reliance, "the girl who always needed to be bailed out of things… the one whose helplessness was among her most attractive qualities:" I didn't want to run the household. I wanted to live in it the way I had once lived in my mother's house: lightly and with ease, sleeping on fresh sheets and eating good meals and not having to account for how those things came into existence. I didn't have the mind or the patience for housekeeping. I am not an orderly or organized person. Beyond her child-like self-absorption -- which, in fact, is rarely endearing in a middle-aged woman, or anyone over the age of six -- Flanagan is blinded by her own privilege to an unfathomable degree. We get exorcised about Flanagan because she has such a visible gig at The New Yorker and The Atlantic. We working moms don’t want her for a spokeswoman or a model. But I’ve come to take her less and less seriously. She’s gone from being a clueless caricature to being scarily unhinged. If you haven’t seen it yet, you MUST look at her turn as a guest on The Colbert Report. The marital subservience she describes is beyond satirical – you'll want to dial 911. Colbert is at times nonplussed, which is quite a feat. -RH 7:53:38 PM    comment []

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