Daily Archives: 17 Nov 04

Politics of Victimization

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[Props to adam for sending me this piece by Mel Gillies, first posted at Mathew Gross’ weblog and worth reprinting in full. This will make most sense to anyone who has worked with, or tried to intervene with, victims of domestic abuse, but the analogy is important to the rest of us as well. There is enough focus on the pathology of the dysadministration to go around; this is an attempt to grapple with the pathology of those of us at its mercy. It neatly complements my insistence that the Democrats’ lost grip on the direction of American politics and social policy calls for a bolder, more distinctive assertion of its identity and potential, not the cowed regression toward the insipid and meaningless least common denominator that some Democrats advocate. — FmH]

Watch Dan Rather apologize for not getting his facts straight, humiliated before the eyes of America, voluntarily undermining his credibility and career of over thirty years. Observe Donna Brazille squirm as she is ridiculed by Bay Buchanan, and pronounced irrelevant and nearly non-existent. Listen as Donna and Nancy Pelosi and Senator Charles Schumer take to the airwaves saying that they have to go back to the drawing board and learn from their mistakes and try to be better, more likable, more appealing, have a stronger message, speak to morality. Watch them awkwardly quote the bible, trying to speak the new language of America. Surf the blogs, and read the comments of dismayed, discombobulated, confused individuals trying to figure out what they did wrong. Hear the cacophony of voices, crying out, “Why did they beat me?”

And then ask anyone who has ever worked in a domestic violence shelter if they have heard this before.

They will tell you, every single day.

The answer is quite simple. They beat us because they are abusers. We can call it hate. We can call it fear. We can say it is unfair. But we are looped into the cycle of violence, and we need to start calling the dominating side what they are: abusive. And we need to recognize that we are the victims of verbal, mental, and even, in the case of Iraq, physical violence.

As victims we can’t stop asking ourselves what we did wrong. We can’t seem to grasp that they will keep hitting us and beating us as long as we keep sticking around and asking ourselves what we are doing to deserve the beating.

Listen to George Bush say that the will of God excuses his behavior. Listen, as he refuses to take responsibility, or express remorse, or even once, admit a mistake. Watch him strut, and tell us that he will only work with those who agree with him, and that each of us is only allowed one question (soon, it will be none at all; abusers hit hard when questioned; the press corps can tell you that). See him surround himself with only those who pledge oaths of allegiance. Hear him tell us that if we will only listen and do as he says and agree with his every utterance, all will go well for us (it won’t; we will never be worthy).

And watch the Democratic Party leadership walk on eggshells, try to meet him, please him, wash the windows better, get out that spot, distance themselves from gays and civil rights. See them cry for the attention and affection and approval of the President and his followers. Watch us squirm. Watch us descend into a world of crazy-making, where logic does not work and the other side tells us we are nuts when we rely on facts. A world where, worst of all, we begin to believe we are crazy.

How to break free? Again, the answer is quite simple.

First, you must admit you are a victim. Then, you must declare the state of affairs unacceptable. Next, you must promise to protect yourself and everyone around you that is being victimized. You don’t do this by responding to their demands, or becoming more like them, or engaging in logical conversation, or trying to persuade them that you are right. You also don’t do this by going catatonic and resigned, by closing up your ears and eyes and covering your head and submitting to the blows, figuring its over faster and hurts less is you don’t resist and fight back. Instead, you walk away. You find other folks like yourself, 56 million of them, who are hurting, broken, and beating themselves up. You tell them what you’ve learned, and that you aren’t going to take it anymore. You stand tall, with 56 million people at your side and behind you, and you look right into the eyes of the abuser and you tell him to go to hell. Then you walk out the door, taking the kids and gays and minorities with you, and you start a new life. The new life is hard. But it’s better than the abuse.

We have a mandate to be as radical and liberal and steadfast as we need to be. The progressive beliefs and social justice we stand for, our core, must not be altered. We are 56 million strong. We are building from the bottom up. We are meeting, on the net, in church basements, at work, in small groups, and right now, we are crying, because we are trying to break free and we don’t know how.

Any battered woman in America, any oppressed person around the globe who has defied her oppressor will tell you this: There is nothing wrong with you. You are in good company. You are safe. You are not alone. You are strong. You must change only one thing: stop responding to the abuser. Don’t let him dictate the terms or frame the debate (he’ll win, not because he’s right, but because force works). Sure, we can build a better grassroots campaign, cultivate and raise up better leaders, reform the election system to make it failproof, stick to our message, learn from the strategy of the other side. But we absolutely must dispense with the notion that we are weak, godless, cowardly, disorganized, crazy, too liberal, naive, amoral, “loose”, irrelevant, outmoded, stupid and soon to be extinct. We have the mandate of the world to back us, and the legacy of oppressed people throughout history.

Even if you do everything right, they’ll hit you anyway. Look at the poor souls who voted for this nonsense. They are working for six dollars an hour if they are working at all, their children are dying overseas and suffering from lack of health care and a depleted environment and a shoddy education. And they don’t even know they are being hit.

Reward for proof of serious voting fraud raised to $200,000

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“A non-profit music advocacy group has raised their reward to anyone with evidence of voting fraud that could change the outcome of the presidential race to $200,000…

The group, Justice Through Music, said that one of their major donors from Ohio had agreed to front the first $100,000 for the award; they are now raising donations to increase the reward through PayPal. Ohio was the battleground state that decided the 2004 election.” (Blue Lemur)

The Truth About Hybrids

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Truthaboutcars editorial: “Because of the low speeds involved, the city portion of the EPA’s test is accomplished in battery-only mode. As the gasoline engine is off-line for a significant part of the test, the eventual mileage figure is grossly inflated. The test fails to consider the fuel needed to recharge the batteries later on. What’s more, all energy-draining, electrically-powered accessories (including AC) are switched off during both the urban and highway tests. These variables contribute to the huge discrepancy between the EPA’s official numbers and hybrid owners’ real world experience.

Few people realize that a hybrid’s power train adds roughly 10% to the weight of a car. Even fewer realize that manufacturers try to offset the weight penalty– and add to the hybrid’s headline-grabbing mileage figures– by the extensive use of non-hybrid gas-saving technology. Engine shut-off at idle, electric power steering, harder and reduced rolling resistance tires (at the expense of comfort and traction), reduced option content, reduced engine performance, and, in the case of the Ford, a continuously variable transmission (CVT) all help raise the cars’ overall efficiency.

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Of course, if gas mileage is the ultimate goal, all of these strategies could be applied to a “standard” car. A non-hybrid model with the equivalent modifications would significantly narrow the mileage gap with its hybrid sibling. In fact, in normal use, the margin between truly comparable hybrid and non-hybrid cars could be less than 10%– hardly enough to justify the extra purchase price. And, lest we forget, the hybrid’s gas-saving advantage is not without its own particular environmental costs…”

The-Beatings-Will-Continue-Until-Morale-Improves Dept:

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New C.I.A. Chief Tells Workers to Back Administration Policies. (New York Times ) This missive can be understood on many levels. It is not difficult to understand that, given the purges Goss has embarked upon at the CIA over the seven weeks since his arrival, disloyalty to the dysadministration will continue to be dealt with by dismissal. Secondly, during the first administration, Bush and Cheney built alternative ‘pipelines’ to receive the selective intelligence they wanted to hear to fit their agenda, in so doing alienating the CIA and relegating its analysis function to obsolescence. Now Goss is making sure that the dysadministration does not have to bypass CIA channels, since they will be in accord with Bush policy. Tensions between the new CIA leadership and senior career intelligence officers have never been so poor; it will be fascinating to watch as they intensify even further under Goss and make the CIA even more irrelevant than it has already become…

There Is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World.

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“For one amazing week in November, Adobe Bookshop in San Francisco has agreed to allow its estimated 20,000 books to be reclassified by color. Shifting from red to orange to yellow to green, the books will follow the spectrum continuously, changing Adobe from a neighborhood bookshop into a magical library—but only for one week.

Adobe Bookshop in San Francisco’s Mission District, and all of its contents, will be transformed. It will take a crew of 20 people pulling an all-nighter fueled by caffeine and pizza and following a master organizational plan—but come Saturday morning it will be like a place that would only exist in a dream.

This temporary public installation will be assembled by the San Francisco artist Chris Cobb and a staff of volunteers, who will reorder all the books in one night and, when the week is over, return them to their original locations. ” (McSweeney’)s

Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

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I am excitedly anticipating the new Malcolm Gladwell book.

“Best-selling author Gladwell (The Tipping Point) has a dazzling ability to find commonality in disparate fields of study. As he displays again in this entertaining and illuminating look at how we make snap judgments—about people’s intentions, the authenticity of a work of art, even military strategy—he can parse for general readers the intricacies of fascinating but little-known fields like professional food tasting (why does Coke taste different from Pepsi?). Gladwell’s conclusion, after studying how people make instant decisions in a wide range of fields from psychology to police work, is that we can make better instant judgments by training our mind and senses to focus on the most relevant facts—and that less input (as long as it’s the right input) is better than more. Perhaps the most stunning example he gives of this counterintuitive truth is the most expensive war game ever conducted by the Pentagon, in which a wily marine officer, playing “a rogue military commander” in the Persian Gulf and unencumbered by hierarchy, bureaucracy and too much technology, humiliated American forces whose chiefs were bogged down in matrixes, systems for decision making and information overload. But if one sets aside Gladwell’s dazzle, some questions and apparent inconsistencies emerge. If doctors are given an algorithm, or formula, in which only four facts are needed to determine if a patient is having a heart attack, is that really educating the doctor’s decision-making ability—or is it taking the decision out of the doctor’s hands altogether and handing it over to the algorithm? Still, each case study is satisfying, and Gladwell imparts his own evident pleasure in delving into a wide range of fields and seeking an underlying truth.” (amazon.com)

We usually think a snap judgment is worse than one which is thoroughly considered. I fall into that trap; one of the most frequent complimentary adjectives I use in my posts here on FmH is “thoughtful”. Yet as someone who often makes snap judgments, I am reassured to think both that this process can be superior to a more deliberate thoughtful approach in some instances and that it can be refined further. It will be fascinating to read Gladwell’s take on this. Of course saying a Gladwell book is about snap judgments is like saying DNA is about eye color.