Opinion
Conservatives bashed me for speaking out about the Zimmerman verdict
Hours after the George Zimmerman verdict, I found myself at my computer, calling to mind a text I had first read in seminary. The text, Is God a White Racist, By Rev. Dr. William Jones, is still studied by theologians and academics and taught in institutes of higher learning. The book called into question the chief construction of black liberation theology: that God is on the side of the oppressed.
Jones' thesis was simple: God wasn't on the side of the oppressed, and that the tortured history of African Americans' experience in America with slavery, violence and the civil rights proved it. The theme resonated with me as I sat down to write a piece reacting to the Zimmerman verdict for the online magazine Religion Dispatches. Little did I know that the book's title alone would cause an avalanche of vitriol against me, my race, my institution – even my hair.
The screeds came via Twitter, email to myself and my university, conservative blogs, and – the coup de grace – Rush Limbaugh's airways. The piece was hijacked and "repurposed" from its original meaning to show that I was a racist because I had dared to talk about race. I had dared to talk about an "American god", which was clearly not GOD.
In the wake of the Zimmerman verdict, several Black academics have received the hate tweet and email treatment from those disgruntled with our analysis of the role of race in the trial. Some, like Mark Sawyer of UCLA, even had social media accounts hacked. I created a Tumblr of racist tweets and emails to both chronicle the racist missives of my detractors, both for campus security and as a teaching tool. Several theologians wrote responses buttressing my piece, but the right wing spin machine portrayed me as a racist, liberal professor with bad ratings who should be fired.
What is the role of a public intellectual in the age of Twitter and soundbites? Is it to share your thoughts for the public good, or is it to curate the heaps of hate emails, tweets and right-wing articles that trash your intellectual and social work?
As an academic who occasionally appears on television and writes both for the academy and the public, these questions are at the forefront of my mind as I both teach and mentor graduate students. It is one thing to endure the ire of your peers, quite another to have hatred heaped on you publically. Tenure was a walk in the park compared to the harassment I receive. Since September of 2012, when I made a comment on Twitter about a movie that was then thought to be the reason behind the attack on the American embassy in Benghazi, I have been routinely subjected to screeds from Fox news, Weazel Zippers, Twitchy, News Busters, and a myriad of other sites that have targeted me for my "liburl" viewpoint.
The University of Pennsylvania, and my wonderful colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies have been routinely sent hate emails about me. Calls to fire me are numerous. Some have even come from within the university. The Penn Switchboard is flooded with calls, and the more conservative alums threaten to stop contributing.
In this age of pseudo parity, when everyone, anyone with a computer can critique one's work and life, what passes for knowledge? We know how to measure the worth of articles and books in the academy. The public has another standard altogether. In the age of conservative grievances about education however, how many people will be willing to go through what I do every time I publish an op-ed or in order to share what they have spent a lifetime to learn?
Not many. Because of what David Frum so aptly referred to as the "conservative entertainment complex", the feeding frenzy on the web to be the first to soundbite words and opinion pieces to get page hits and followers is fierce. Spin, spew and repeat is the name of this game. In the hopes of silencing me, they are willing to attempt to deny my first amendment rights through a barrage of hate in order to preserve theirs. Religion, race, and sexuality are all subjects they feel free to weigh in on, and these are the ones they so often attack when the viewpoints expressed are not conservative ones.
While I am a tenured faculty member, many younger scholars are being stymied from sharing with the public because of these types of attacks. There are plenty of battles within the academy about race and racism. When the right-wing echo chamber comes together to disparage and shout down voices engaging the public by accusing us of racism, they become the race baiters they so desperately seek to call me. I only wonder what William Buckley or Barry Goldwater would say if their could see their intellectual heirs today. I have no illusion that either man would like me, but I could imagine we could have a more civil conversation than what I experienced in this last academic year.
America is in a fragile place right now. Those on the right believe that they want to take their nation back, and those on the left believe that what our nation stands for is being eroded away by the policies of those on the right who want to return to the good old days. Universities and colleges are one of the few places in America that we can engage these ideas in the classroom without cursing and denigrating those we disagree with. Whatever side you find yourself on, ask yourself if the present state of discourse in print and on the air is what you want your children and students to grow up with.
Friendly rhetoric from Pope Francis on gay priests and women: But will it translate into action?
I've travelled on "Shepherd One", as the plane carrying the pope is known, and it's very clear when you're on board how keen the pope's PR men – and yes (sigh) they are all men – are on declaring a foreign trip a "triumph".
In the case of Francis' visit to Brazil, they're right. Today in Rio they're calling their famous beachfront the "Popacabana'' in tribute to the mass held there on Sunday, when three million camped on the sand to catch a glimpse of the pontiff on his first visit back to Latin America since being elected pope in March.
Virtually the worst thing that happened was when Francis's tiny Fiat Punto took a wrong turning, prompting fears for his safety. Not only did he come to no harm, but the new message of slimmed-down frugality was well and truly noted.
And it was this common touch – his ordinariness, his lack of pomposity, his humility – that we saw reflected back from Brazil; and the Catholic church will be the stronger, and more credible, for it. Perhaps at last we have a pope for the 21st century. Certainly the signals we have seen over the last few days have a whiff of modernity about them.
Even as a cardinal, Bergoglio had already clamped down on priests who refused to baptise children born out of wedlock; now he has gone further and said gay people should not be marginalised ("if a person is gay and seeks God, who am I to judge him?" he asked). On the role of women, (we're only 70 percent of the church's membership, so we really shouldn't push our luck) he said having girls as altar servers and employing a handful of senior women in the Vatican might perhaps not be quite enough. On the matter of women priests, of course, there was no debate to be had.
So we're seeing a thaw, though definitely not a revolution; a subtle but significant change of direction, yet from a man who remains deeply conservative. You don't need to be radical to be seen as a wind of change in the Catholic hierarchy (what they'd have made of Christ, one shudders to think). But as Francis is no doubt all too aware, the foreign trips are the easy bits. Because the truth is that it's in the Vatican, the smallest state on Earth, that most of his problems lie. None of his difficulties have gone away while he's been on the beach in Brazil. The fact is that by signalling a change of style, the new pope has raised expectations of a change of substance.
And there's certainly plenty there that needs tackling. The smell around the murky Vatican bank is very unpleasant in the Italian mid-summer heat; the issue of a non-celibate priesthood is crying out to be tackled; and even if giving women the chance to be priests isn't up for grabs, the church remains impoverished by failing to recognise and use its wealth of female talent. There's a sense right now that Francis is on the verge of moving on these fronts; and if his pontificate is to be a genuine triumph, and not just a PR one, these are the nettles Francis has to grasp.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Scientists no longer believe sex addiction exists --and that's bad news for Anthony Weiner
Although the New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner is unlikely ever to trouble British voters, that is not to say Mr Weiner can be filed away, with complete confidence, under the category "US politicians who have incautiously disseminated images of their private parts, using the alter ego Carlos Danger". For one thing, given the reach of social media, and the man's irrepressible ambition, it must only be a matter of time – unless some sort of technology can be invented to block transmission – before a young British subject, switching on her telephone, suddenly finds that she is Carlos Danger's latest penis pen-pal.
In the more immediate future, it seems quite likely, should Boris Johnson stand again, that Londoners could soon be asking related questions about sexual behaviour and fitness for office. Has Weiner really done enough, with his lame "sexting", to be considered a serious contender? In London, evidence of vigorous and sustained priapism has become so strongly associated with mayoral ambition as to be pretty much a prerequisite for office.
Long before Boris Johnson showed the world how to brazen out a vibrant history of extramarital impregnations and assignations, both short and long term, Jeffrey Archer, the perjurer and prostitute's john, was the Tories' favoured candidate, followed by a man actually nicknamed "Shagger". Shagger was beaten by Ken Livingstone, an unlikely but notably successful ladies' man, whose idea of drinks party chit-chat, awed Guardian staff once discovered, is the line, delivered with tremendous nasal authority: "When a woman opens her heart she opens her legs."
Until last week Mr Weiner appeared to be getting an equally tolerant hearing in New York. He had become a mayoral candidate having been forced to resign from the US Congress, in 2011, after sending photographs of his penis to, he finally admitted, "about six women". He said he would seek "professional treatment". Announcing his candidacy in May he asked for a second chance and let it be known, via an emotional, New York Times interview, that he had undergone therapy. And before he was exposed as Carlos Danger, his comeback suggested considerable acceptance of ostensibly resolved sexting issues. Weiner was ahead in the polls when news broke, last week, of another, illustrated, six-month, "cyber liaison" forged on a website called the Dirty, which seems to have coincided with his period of supposed penitence.
Within days, the Carlos conquests had multiplied to three; at least, Mr Weiner said, comfortingly: "I don't believe I had any more than three."
Even then, some reporters' questions suggested that, if Weiner's conduct could be defined as an illness, some further extenuation might be available. Was he in therapy? Was his difficulty, as many have speculated, sex addiction? Although Mr Weiner demurs – "I don't believe it is" – this could well be a reluctance to over-dramatise activities he has characterised as "background noise"?
For Weiner has been happy to exploit, as a token of his seriousness about rehabilitation, the language of addiction, therapy and recovery. "I worked through these things," he reminded a press conference.
He had professional help, he went on a journey to triumph over a problem that, if not actually that big a deal, was way more complicated a tale, you gathered, than some undignified urge to get pervy with strangers.
If his Carlos problem needed "work", as well as acknowledgement, then the public probably owes Weiner the same kind of support it has previously extended to alpha sex addicts such as David Duchovny, Tiger Woods and Michael Douglas, and our own premier sufferer, Russell Brand, former owner of "a harem of about 10 women, whom I would rotate in addition to one-night stands and random casual encounters".
"I think there is such a thing," Brand writes in My Booky Wook . "Addiction, by definition, is a compulsive behaviour that you cannot control or relinquish, in spite of its destructive consequences. And if my life proves nothing else, it demonstrates that this formula can be applied to sex just as easily as it can be to drugs and alcohol." Neuroscience, on the other hand, tends to take issue with Mr Brand's analysis of his harem-keeping. Recently, sex addiction was excluded from the DSM 5, the US manual of mental disorders, along with behavioural addictions to food, the internet and caffeine.
"We looked at sex addiction," said one of authors, "but there was no science at all. None."
Now a new study casts such doubt on previous assumptions about sex addiction that questions are even being asked about Boris Johnson's alleged satyriasis. Could he be, in fact, normal? Shouldn't NHS Choices take another look at its claim, on its sex addiction page (with hilarious, addict-face illustration) that: "This addiction is similar to substance abuse because it is caused by the powerful chemical substances released during sex."
Who wrote that – Tiger Woods?
Because researchers at UCLA tested brain activity in self-diagnosed hypersexual people and found no evidence to separate their participants' reactions from those of normal people with a high sex drive.
"One of the frequent critiques of sexual addictions is that it pathologises normative, socially unaccepted, sexual behaviours," say the authors. "These data appear consistent with that perspective."
For sufferers such as Duchovny, Sheen, Douglas et al, their feelings on discovering that their affliction is no more than a culturally constructed disorder designed to buttress sexual norms can only be compared to the female shock and fury each time that another cherished diagnosis, PMS, is discredited, as a convenient means of portraying women as hormonal nutters.
What will the sex addicts do now? If celebrities must quickly find an alternative to incarceration in a private clinic, as the immediate response to a sex scandal, the de-addicting of compulsive sexual behaviour also leaves civilian sufferers without an accessible, 12-step approach to their troubles, one that a US psychologist has disparaged as "the addiction made me do it".
Beyond that, it's hard to see the disappearance of sexual addiction from the lexicon of celebrity/political excuses as anything but an advance. Not only because of the lack of physical evidence for sex addiction, but because any definition of out-of-control sex must relate to social norms.
When harems were in, for example, Brand's outfit might have been quite appealing. Compared with Boris, or Clinton or Berlusconi, or even John Major, Weiner, phone sexing in his bedroom, is Saint Anthony of the Dirty; US politics' answer to Nicholson Baker.
Suppose Weiner had not had, at his disposal, the routine narrative of inexplicable compulsion followed by much work and hard-won redemption, the public might have had to consider the gravity of his online experiments, their implications for his politics and, given that she has volunteered for popular inspection, for his wife.If diagnoses of sexual addiction help promote repressive or unrealistic definitions of normal sexual behaviour, they also provide a watertight defence against allegations of betrayal: "God knows – I must have been mad."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story
The press has lost the plot over the Snowden revelations. The fact is that the net is finished as a global network, and that US firms' cloud services cannot be trusted
Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world's mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.
In a way, it doesn't matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.
Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA) had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users' data.
Similarly, without Snowden, we would not be debating whether the US government should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and, in the process, high-level security clearance to thousands of people who shouldn't have it. Nor would there be – finally – a serious debate between Europe (excluding the UK, which in these matters is just an overseas franchise of the US) and the United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies.
These are pretty significant outcomes and they're just the first-order consequences of Snowden's activities. As far as most of our mass media are concerned, though, they have gone largely unremarked. Instead, we have been fed a constant stream of journalistic pap – speculation about Snowden's travel plans, asylum requests, state of mind, physical appearance, etc. The "human interest" angle has trumped the real story, which is what the NSA revelations tell us about how our networked world actually works and the direction in which it is heading.
As an antidote, here are some of the things we should be thinking about as a result of what we have learned so far.
The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty.
Second, the issue of internet governance is about to become very contentious. Given what we now know about how the US and its satraps have been abusing their privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become untenable.
Third, as Evgeny Morozov has pointed out, the Obama administration's "internet freedom agenda" has been exposed as patronising cant. "Today," he writes, "the rhetoric of the 'internet freedom agenda' looks as trustworthy as George Bush's 'freedom agenda' after Abu Ghraib."
That's all at nation-state level. But the Snowden revelations also have implications for you and me.
They tell us, for example, that no US-based internet company can be trusted to protect our privacy or data. The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system. Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their "cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA. That means that if you're thinking of outsourcing your troublesome IT operations to, say, Google or Microsoft, then think again.
And if you think that that sounds like the paranoid fantasising of a newspaper columnist, then consider what Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, had to say on the matter recently. "If businesses or governments think they might be spied on," she said, "they will have less reason to trust the cloud, and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out. Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes? Front or back door – it doesn't matter – any smart person doesn't want the information shared at all. Customers will act rationally and providers will miss out on a great opportunity."
Spot on. So when your chief information officer proposes to use the Amazon or Google cloud as a data-store for your company's confidential documents, tell him where to file the proposal. In the shredder.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
More than 1.5 million workers living in U.S. make less than minimum wage
This week marked the four-year anniversary of the last time Congress increased the minimum wage — from $5.15 in 2007 to $7.25 in 2009. Groups demonstrated across the country, demanding increases at both the state and federal level. President Obama…
[Stock Photo: Young Female Gardner Wearing Gloves Over White Background via Shutterstock]
Don't smoke spliffs during childbirth or have sex with a prince
If the Duchess of Cambridge wanted to live like common people, she should have given birth like common people do. Here's my guide
Conception: Do not have sex with a member of the royal family. Whatever they promise, your prince has not come.
Pregnancy: You will be bombarded with advice when you start feeling dreadful and only want to eat Haribos. Ignore it. You will decide not to tell anyone, except your 10 new best friends, that you're pregnant until after the 12-week scan. Ordering mineral water will confirm everyone's worst fears: that you could be responsible for another human being. In the sociological experiment that is my so-called life, I had a baby each decade, for three decades, starting in the 80s, so I can confirm that pregnancy advice is as changeable as hemlines. Amazingly, I preferred the advice of a French midwife who took our ante-natal class one week. When asked about alcohol she said: "Oh no. Only the wine with dinner and the cognac after." She was certainly more appealing than the usual midwife, who had knitted a uterus. She apologised for the fact that it was navy blue as she had run out of pink wool. The plain knit was the uterus and the ribbed sock bit was the cervix. She then proceeded to push a tennis ball through it. That, she said, was "birth".
Natural childbirth: For some unknown reason (fashion?), I had one of these, even though I took recreational drugs. It was the wrong way round, but I was young. A neighbour had told me: "Three spliffs and it will slip out of you like a wet pig." Not true. At all.
Doctors: Doctors often know way less than midwives and some treat you as an aberration. One junior doctor calculated my due date without looking at me. "But that will mean I have been pregnant for nearly two years," I said, bewildered. This startled him, as did the consultant who came in bellowing: "Is she one of those awful natural childbirth women? Take her pulse!" No pulse could be found. "She has a pulse, man! She is not dead, is she?" They suggested I be induced as I was overdue (very common), but I refused, preferring instead the traditional method of a vindaloo, a bit of the other and a tin of Andrews Liver Salts. Nothing. A week later, I met a more sympathetic doctor who asked if he could stimulate my cervix. I imagined this would involve some sort of machine. It didn't.
Drugs: You already know what sort of person you are and whether or not you like feeling out of it or not. Giving birth is as animalistic and as out of control as it gets, so understand that gas and air give you something to do; pethidine, like all opiates, will gloopily distract you from the pain, but only an epidural will stop it.
Birth plans: Have one. Water. Whalesong. Whatever. Know it's going to get ripped to shreds and Raw Power by the Stooges is more appropriate.
Siblings: The psychologist Adam Phillips has it just right. Imagine explaining to your spouse: "I love you so much, darling, that I am going to get another girlfriend/boyfriend just like you, whom you must love too." That's what we ask our children to do. My eldest seemed incredibly well-adjusted when her little sister was born, until, at one parents' evening, I found her entire school project was called "Babies are Annoying".
Men: Having been with a couple of friends giving birth, I feel sorry for men. If you don't want to go down "the business end", then don't. Your role is to act as an advocate for your partner. Take your cues from the midwives and know that, at some point, your loved one may wish you dead. Do not say, as my child's father did when asked if he could see the baby's head crowning: "I am not sure it is a head. It's more like a dog's knee." Do not suddenly plonk a wet flannel on your beloved's brow in the middle of a contraction and do not, if you ever want it again, mention sex.
Stuff: 99% of the stuff you can buy for babies is overpriced and useless. The more stuff you have, the more stuck you are. Travel light and you and your baby will be far more sociable. Such advice is commonly ignored.
Caesareans: To the person who told me it was like going to the hairdressers – are you mad? But thanks to the friend who said don't look up at the ceiling lights as you can see the reflection of what they are doing to you. Having had two "normal" births and one C-section, I don't know why anyone thinks they are the easier option. You take a lot longer to recover. But whatever a woman decides, it should be her own guilt-free choice. Etc.
Feelings: You may be overwhelmed by unconditional love, or it may build slowly. It is OK not to be happy. The moment I gave birth, I knew it was no longer all about my generation, but having a baby didn't make me any more interested in other people's babies than before I had my own, ie not very much.
Being child-free: Children are wonderful, of course, but many people have fabulous and fulfilling lives without them. Accepting each other's choices would give us all more freedom, surely?
Paparazzi: The one advantage of being a commoner is that you don't have to deal with them and, anyway, you are so busy papping your offspring on an hourly basis that you forget to feed them.
Top tip: If you need stitches, insist on the most experienced person there. You don't want medical students practising their needle work on that part of your anatomy, do you? That's what the drunks in A&E are for.
Mr. President, why are there so many bad jobs at McDonalds and Walmart?
And you thought the government didn’t have a jobs program. It does. The problem is that the pay and benefits are lousy, and in many cases the working conditions ain’t so great either. We’re not talking about the civil service. No, as one of two…
Food stamps helped me serve my country. Please don't cut them now
My single mom struggled to put food on the table sometimes, so government assistance was part of what made me a soldier
I've eaten government food during two periods in my life: as a child and as a soldier. The first led to the second in more ways than one, and permanently influenced the way I look at food aid.
Memories of growing up poor still bring a tingling flush of shame to my cheeks.
We live in the richest county in the country now, my husband and I, in a nice house with decent cars and solid jobs. But the insecurities of living in such a bad neighborhood that some of my friends weren't allowed to sleep over when I was a girl run deep. We went to an election-watching party a few blocks away once, and when we pulled up in front of the house, I blurted out, "We can't go in there – we don't belong!" My husband had to remind me that this is our neighborhood, too. This is what we worked for, I needed telling: we're living the American dream.
But the news never lets me forget that many of my fellow citizens despise the poor – and if the rest of us don't speak up, kids today may be denied the opportunities that let me succeed.
Like many on public assistance, my family was made up of a working single mom struggling to make it and provide for her child. She was a small business owner, an artist who ran a series of galleries. There were good years, when we did pretty well. And then the economy sagged, and there were lean years – years of food stamps and bland government cheese, Christmas presents from charities, peering around the corner to watch my mother sobbing into piles of bills, wondering if the landlord would get fed up with how often we were behind on the rent and kick us out.
Even when I was young, I could pick up on the looks we got when buying groceries with food stamps. In high school, it was mortifying to hand over tickets for free or reduced-price school lunches. Those tiny colored scraps of paper might as well have been a scarlet "P" sewn to my shirt, announcing to the other teenagers that I was poor.
Hindsight may convince me that my peers were probably too absorbed by their own problems to notice mine, but at the time, it crystallized in me a deep conviction that I would never live like that again. I used the fear and shame and anger to fuel years of effort, working through college and working two jobs so I could buy my first house when I was 22.
Then, I joined the army. Like most of my peers, I had many motivations for enlisting: I was seeking money to continue my education, but I also craved the discipline, a challenge, the chance to travel and acquire new skills.
And I was driven by a desire to give back to the country that had given so much to me. My fellow citizens had helped me succeed, made sure I never went to bed hungry, provided a safety net when my family needed it. I could repay that debt as a soldier.
On 9/11, I was learning Arabic at the Defense Language Institute, and it was immediately clear that war was in our future. I deployed to Iraq with the 101st airborne division (air assault), where I saw people so poor they wanted our empty cardboard boxes for flooring. I was back to eating government rations – this time, in the form of Meals, Ready to Eat (MREs). At least some of this government cheese came jalapeno-flavored.
When my five-year hitch was up, I didn't re-enlist, choosing to help my combat-wounded husband recover, and later using the GI bill for graduate school. Today, I am deeply aware of how privileged we are to live in modern America.
And I am horrified at efforts to cut Snap – or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, its proper name, though most of us still call it "food stamps".
The House passed a farm bill that strips out food aid to the poor, promising they'll get to it later. I don't believe it: Republican rhetoric demonizes those who need a hand, implying they are lazy moochers. The reality is that 47% are children, 30% are working poor (those who have jobs that don't pay enough to cover all their bills), and 21% receive supplemental security income for the aged or disabled.
This includes those who currently serve our country or who already have – the Department of Defense estimates that 5,000 military families will lose food stamps if these cuts go through, and food stamp spending has been up at commissaries, where only service-members, retirees, and their families can shop. When you hear about cuts to food stamps and picture whom this affects, add the image of a second world war veteran whose retirement benefits aren't quite enough, the children of a national guard soldier who lost his civilian job in the economic downturn, and a young military spouse with small kids who can't figure out how to pay the bills.
This is not just a moral issue; there's also a national security component to food aid. The national school lunch program that helped me was established shortly after the second world war: a senior military leader testified at the time that malnutrition or undernourishment likely caused about 8% of potential recruits to be rejected from service (pdf) or placed in the limited service class. School lunches were designed in part to help correct that problem and increase the pool of eligible recruits. Who knows how many other kids like me grew up knowing the debt we owe our nation and choosing to repay it through service?
The safety net is part of what makes us strong and secure as a country. This is the wrong time to destroy it. No child in America should go to bed hungry. Tell your elected representatives not to cut Snap. Today's kids – some of whom are tomorrow's soldiers – deserve the same help I got.
Pardoning Alan Turing is a pointless exercise
Ben Summerskill, The Observer
Happily, in recent weeks, the House of Lords has put itself convincingly on the right side of history by overwhelmingly supporting gay marriage. So what might a revising chamber that has proved rather unexpectedly – even to itself – that it has become determinedly 21st century do next?
On Friday, peers debated whether Alan Turing should be pardoned. Turing was convicted of gross indecency with another adult in 1952. The argument is seductive. This brilliant man helped crack Hitler's Enigma codes, thus shortening the Second World War by up to two years. Hundreds of thousands of lives were probably saved as a consequence.
Lords were told that a pardon for Turing would recognise the "esteem in which he is now held". Baroness Trumpington, the formidable 90-year-old who worked at Bletchley Park at the same time as Turing, agreed. Interestingly, Lady Trumpington is a veteran opponent of legislative equality for gay people. But I do trust she felt very slightly better after having voiced her support. In 1952, the apparatchiks of the British establishment – from police and politicians to doctors and judges – also knew full well about the esteem in which Turing was held. Yet they still forced him to take female hormones as an alternative to going to prison. This imposition is described less politely, when despots do it, as "chemical castration". Turing committed suicide by eating a cyanide-poisoned apple two years later.
The 1940s and 1950s were a shabby, shameful era in Britain's history. During the war, thousands of gay servicemen had their sexuality quietly overlooked by commanding officers. Army psychologists, my grandfather among them, were told to turn a blind eye if an officer made a private admission of homosexuality. However, these heroes were then returned to a nation where simply having a loving private life led almost automatically to prison, unless an obliging Metropolitan police officer was happy to be blackmailed while he kept your little secret.
That's why, on balance, perhaps we shouldn't be pardoning Alan Turing at all. It's quite proper we've started writing off convictions for people who are still alive for trivial matters that would no longer be criminal offences. (Oddly, I've only met a single senior police officer who admits to having been involved in such prosecutions, even though 16- and 17-year-olds were still being charged with having consenting gay sex as recently as 1998.) However, it's already too late for the countless thousands of innocents, not as eminent as Turing, who had their lives ruined as well. And perhaps rather pointless.
A more proper apologia might be to ensure that Turing's achievements, and his treatment by the nation that benefited, are included in every pupil's school curriculum. The 55% of gay pupils in our secondary schools who were homophobically bullied in the last 12 months might derive lasting reassurance from that.
No one doubts the good faith of peers from all parties and none who have now discovered the importance of equal treatment for Britain's 3.7 million gay people. But it may be more therapeutic for them, rather than helpful to Alan Turing, to be offering good wishes at this stage.
[image via Flickr user Photoverlam's photo stream, Creative Commons licensed]
The world is aghast over Trayvon Martin. The U.S. needs to look at itself
The jurors who acquitted George Zimmerman say they acted in strict accordance with U.S. law. That in itself speaks volumes
"O, wad some Power the giftie gie us /
To see oursels as others see us! /
It wad frae monie a blunder free us, /
An' foolish notion."
– Robert Burns
The US is always collectively amazed, on those rare occasions when it has cause to glimpse at how it is perceived by its less friendly critics abroad. The most egregious example, of course, was 9/11, when even the brutal enormity of the attack against America was not quite enough to still the hateful tongues of people crass enough to insist that the US had got what was coming to it. The citizens of the US have an absolute right to go about their business without being slaughtered. Of course they do. Which is why the world is aghast that this right does not extend as far as Trayvon Martin.
When the unarmed 17-year-old was shot dead by neighbourhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman on 26 February 2012, the killer wasn't even arrested for 44 days, having said that he fired in self-defence. Self-defence? He'd already called the police, telling the operator that Martin was acting suspiciously – "up to no good, on drugs or something". Zimmerman had been told by the operator not to follow the teenager. But nevertheless he found himself and his gun right next to Martin, provoking a struggle. What kind of self-defence is this, when you decide that someone is trouble, and that you're going to stalk him, safe in the knowledge that if things get out of hand … well, you're armed? Yet a jury decided that going out armed, looking for a particular person to defend yourself against, is still self-defence, and on 13 July Zimmerman was acquitted of murder.
Only protest from the public ensured that Zimmerman was tried for killing Martin at all. Only protest from the public has ensured that this killing has been seen through the prism of race. Yet to an outsider, it is obvious that Martin died because he was black, and that Zimmerman walked free after killing him for the same reason.
The jurors say that they acted in strict accordance with the law of the land. They probably did. The law of the land in the US was formulated so that settlers could carry guns in self-defence against their enemies – Native Americans. Later, similar rights over the lives and deaths of slaves pertained. All that is so deeply embedded in the US collective psyche that it's easier to forget that it's there than remember it.
Even though equal civil rights for black Americans are still so new, their achievement still so clear in living memory, the US just can't see what the rest of the world sees – that inequality so entrenched in the history of a state doesn't disappear in matter of decades; on the contrary, the baleful fruits of generations of inequality can be used to justify the very prejudice that promoted the inequality in the first place.
Not that the UK has room to be too superior. British people went off to win the west, and having won it, imported slaves to make it pay. Later, we invited Afro-Caribbean men and women to come and work in Britain, at the jobs that didn't pay enough to attract the incumbent population. Our own history of racism may not have been formalised in a written constitution. But Britain is just like the US in its reluctance to admit that the casual, widespread racism of the past has far-reaching consequences that give succour to those who wish to be racists still. Our own Trayvon Martin is Stephen Lawrence. The awful depths of the hostility of the police to the idea of prosecuting his racist killers is still being revealed, 20 years on, as we learn how undercover officers gathered intelligence into the Lawrence family as they campaigned for justice for their son. Modern states that are worthy of the name are meant to protect their citizens from violence, protecting all of us equally, under the law. In the wake of 9/11, the US and Britain were the most active nations in the world in the quest to take up arms in the cause of spreading liberal democracy. Why neither nation is quite able to see why the targets of this largesse don't quite trust them, when both of us are still demonstrably unable to spread liberal democracy with impunity even among our own citizens, is quite the little mystery.
It's a little-acknowledged fact, yet an unanswerable one, that states exist in great part to maintain a monopoly on violence, either through the activities of their armed forces or via the upholding of the law. The really disturbing thing about cases such as Martin's and Lawrence's is that they reveal how cavalierly states abuse this responsibility. The disconnect in the US can be seen more plainly than in Britain, because the US, as land colonised in recent history, maintains vigilantism as an integral part of its identity so avidly. That's what's at the root of its liberal gun laws – that's what killed Trayvon Martin.
This is one of those moments when the US – and its great ally, the UK – would do well to take a long look at itself. Zimmerman's right to kill in "self-defence" does not contrast well with Edward Snowden's fear of retribution. By exposing the fact that the emails of the citizens of the land of the free (and ours here in Britain) could be plucked from the internet at the state's leisure, wasn't Snowden too defending himself, his fellow citizens, and the idea of the US and of liberal democracy? But no reluctance to arrest Snowden is evident.
We are told that this is all for our own protection – the fight against terrorism is an important part of the state's protection of its monopoly on violence. Yet, not for the first time in these troubled years since 9/11, one wonders how the US can have pretensions to being the world's policeman, when it doesn't even police its own citizens with impartiality. And one wonders how the US can believe that part of its purpose is to be a beacon of democracy and freedom throughout the world, when it clearly believes that it should be able to spy on the private lives of the world's citizens with impunity.
If the Martin case were "just" about racism, then that would be grotesque and awful enough. But it's even more basic than that. It's about the fragility of freedom, and how imperative it is that one person's freedom, like one community's, and one country's, cannot be pursued at the expense of another's. Zimmerman's freedom to get on with his own life has been won at the cost of another man's annihilation. The disregard of the idea that all US citizens have an equal right to freedom and protection could not be made more painfully obvious than this. A monopoly on violence is a terrifying monopoly to hold. It should quite definitely not be shared so casually with self-appointed men from the neighbourhood watch.
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