Vote for single payer

Only two more days left to make Medicare for All one of Change.org’s top ten priorities.

Change.org says:

Final round voting begins on March 1 and ends on March 12. The 10 most popular ideas will be presented to relevant members of the Obama Administration, and Change.org will subsequently mobilize its full community to support a series of grassroots campaigns to help turn each idea into reality.

No, I don’t know what that means either, but it can’t possibly hurt. We need all the help we can get.

Go here to vote for single payer/Medicare for All.

Hiding the Truth in Plain Sight: Exhibition of Prepatriarchal Old European Artifacts

In honor of Women’s History Month, I’m pleased to present this guest post by my friend Artemis March. — V.S.

When I heard about the extraordinary exhibit of 250 artifacts from prepatriarchal “Old Europe” (c. 6500-3500 BCE) that will be shown at 15 East 84th St, NYC—the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW)—until April 25, I wanted people to know about it. For those of us who are familiar with Old Europe and its monumental implications for women, it becomes a matter of: when can I get to NY? But for anyone who doesn’t—and that’s probably most of us—why should she bother to fit it into her busy schedule?

Rest assured that I wouldn’t be making a big deal about this exhibit if it were just about recovering more pieces from the past that enrich the Old Story—which is the direction in which the NY Times and the archaeological establishment would point us. It’s much more than that. It’s about undoing the erasure of women, gender-balanced social worlds, the sacred conceived and imaged as female, and of scholars who dare to see and tell Another Story. It’s about countering the erasure of those whose research threatens the monopoly of the patriarchal story and its alleged innateness and universality. It’s about forestalling the co-optation of the most powerful paradigm-breaking case yet unearthed.

As Mary Daly used to say, by distorting and disappearing our past, they have ravaged and purloined our present and our future. Disappearing acts have gone on for millennia, and they are going on right now, right in front of us. They can be blatant and concrete, as in the absence of women on our currency, our stamps, and the paucity of female statuary in our public life—a situation Lynette Long has recently taken on. They can be as elemental and profound as changing cosmological deities and their stories from female to male—a transition that the late Paula Gunn Allen tracked in numerous Native American traditions, and observed is still taking place. Disappearing acts can be far more devious, complex, and multi-layered as is the case with bringing these Old European artifacts forward.

The well-presented, beautifully-lit exhibit of artifacts on loan here from museums in Bulgaria, Romania, and Moldava gives visibility to the physical residues of Old European cultures. It is not to be missed. At the same time, the cultural meanings and political significance of those artifacts are being distorted and disappeared by those who have framed and interpreted the exhibition in its catalogue, wall panels, and lectures. These same biases are reflected in the NYT article that alerted many people about the exhibition, thereby beginning to shape the lens through which they see it.

Reading that article or the wall panels at the exhibit, you would never know that the Lithuanian-born archaeologist Marija Gimbutas was the one who had discovered and named Old Europe, excavated many of its artifacts, and brought forward many more that had been languishing in the back rooms of Eastern European museums (she could read about 20 languages). You would never know that it was she who recognized that these artifacts belonged to distinct-yet-related cultures in southeastern Europe—thus giving rise to the umbrella term Old Europe. You would think that the current crop of (predominantly male) archaeologists came up with this idea all by themselves.

Reading the NYT article or the wall panels at the exhibit, you would never know that her recognition of their distinctive commonalities arose via their marked contrast with the weapons-focused artifacts of the Indo-Europeanized cultures that replaced them and in which she was a world-class authority. You would not have a clue as to why this Old European civilization was “lost.” You would think that it had been “rescued from obscurity” by the male archaeologists who put together the exhibition rather than by Marija. You would never realize how these unnamed archaeologists are advancing their own careers by appropriating parts of her work that they can safely reframe and slip into the Old Story.

You would never know that Old Europe points to Another Story behind the patriarchy. Instead, they slide it into their one and only Story—the Androcentric Story, in which all societies and cultures are assumed/projected to have been formed by men, about men, for men, and organized around hierarchy and domination. Take one example.

As you enter the gallery that displays some of the gold artifacts found in a cemetery at Varna (a mid-fifth millennial trading center on the western edge of the Black Sea), the very first wall panel slips in the phrase “Old European chieftains” to identify those buried with the biggest stashes of gold ornaments. The curatorial archaeologists who framed the exhibit are not at all shy about assuming that only chieftains could warrant such gifts in the afterlife. Such boldness contrasts sharply with how agnostic the wall panels are on many subjects, especially with regard to how this civilization came to be “lost.”

It is instructive to note what they dance around (the role of external groups, especially the “steppe elements” putatively equated with the Indo-Europeans, in disappearing Old Europe) and what they conveniently treat as fact: male centrality and hierarchy in Old Europe—despite all the evidence against the existence of chieftains, hierarchy, and domination, and favoring matrilocality, matrilinearity, and gender balance. Such evidence is trumped by unstated androcentric assumptions: gold jewelry found with men = prestige items = hierarchy = domination = male authority. When women are buried with gold jewelry (as some were) or ceremonial ornaments, the assumption is that they were trying to look attractive to men, or that they were a big man’s wife—not that they were honored as clan mothers, wise elders, or priestesses.

Yet it is the latter interpretation that fits with the traditional burial patterns of Old Europe prior to the acceleration of trade, the appearance of the Varna cemetery, the infiltration of “steppe elements” into the Danube Valley, and the appearance of defensive measures such as fortifications—all beginning around 4400-4300 BCE. Old European burials were communal, and grave goods symbolic of the person’s gifts and skills in the life just passed. Elder women were the most honored and clearly central to the symbolic and spiritual life of the community. By contrast, Indo-European burials were for individual men. Grave goods were his possessions for the afterlife; they sometimes included women, servants, and/or horses. The Varna cemetery appears at that transitional moment, and does not seem to fit either pattern.

Despite its not being representative of Old Europe, the curators not only use gold artifacts to map hierarchical assumptions onto Varna, but also project them back onto 2000 years of Old European development and fluorescence. They thereby conflate the social structure that they impute to Varna with the social structure of Old Europe of the preceding two millennia. By setting the parameters of Old Europe between 5000 and 3500 BCE and naming the exhibit by this period, the curators have conveniently blurred all that, mixing up traditional Old European patterns with those affected by the intrusion of expansionary elements whose values and social structures were their antithesis. The consequence (and the purpose?) of this conflation is to perpetuate the lie that all societies of any complexity are organized around male hierarchy and that its seeds are present in all societies.

To appreciate the enormity of what’s at stake here, I invite you to read Joan Marler’s summary of Gimbutas’ work discovering and reconstructing Old Europe (OE), and another about her interpretation of its demise and the prehistoric transition to patriarchy in Europe. Marler is executive director of the Institute of Archaeomythology, dedicated to developing interdisciplinary approaches to the study of prehistoric and present cultures.

The disappearing acts perpetrated through the OE exhibit are hardly unique. Another example is the archaeological team at a key Neolithic site in Asia Minor (Çatalhöyük). Marguerite Rigoglioso exposes the strategies and tactics through which they deny evidence of, and even the possibility of, prehistoric female deities and female authority, and try to marginalize and discredit Gimbutas and others who have the courage to name what they see rather than project a patriarchal pattern onto every prehistoric society.

Marler’s and Rigoglioso’s work helps to bring home an appreciation of the some of the layers and complexity of the struggle to reverse millennia of female invisibility and the intense political struggles over the all-important issues of patriarchal origins and its finite existence rather than its alleged innate nature. Male entitlement, sole male authority, and male control over women are not god-given or “how things are,” but integral to an historically finite, socially constructed type of socio-political system that’s been around for only a few thousand years.

Logistics: The ISAW museum is closed on Monday, open 11-6 Tuesday-Sunday and until 8 on Friday. It is housed in a lovely, six-story townhouse just off Fifth Avenue. It is handicapped accessible, with an elevator just to your left as you come in that takes you up the ten steps or so to the first floor where the two galleries are. Another elevator goes to all floors, including the basement where restrooms are located. If you drive into the City, street parking is possible even during the day, but you do have to slug the meter every hour. A quarter gives you ten minutes, so bring a roll of quarters.

Admission to the museum is free. On the first floor, there is an unattended coatroom, and three guards on duty. Cameras are not allowed. There is a guest book, and you can also get a form from the office to give feedback. Catalogues are kept in that office. The 4-pound, $50 “catalogue” is a beautifully designed, hardcover book produced in Italy, full of gorgeous photographs, letters from museum directors who loaned the artifacts, and ten articles by archaeologists. It is an excellent record of a once-in-a-lifetime exhibit, the mentality of the archaeological establishment, as well as of how the process of erasure works.

They do not allow chairs in the two galleries, but when you need to sit, there is a bench in the foyer that overlooks two spectacular pieces and has a map mural at which to gaze (which is in the catalogue as well). I was there around 5 PM prior to a lecture, and then again mid-morning into early afternoon. I saw a small but steady stream of quietly engrossed visitors—predominantly women, but many men as well.

©Artemis March, Ph.D

Christmas and New Year’s and Hanukkah

In honor of International Women’s Day, I thought it would be fun to consider what Obama hath wrought. Seeing as how he’s a Superfeminist and all. (The title of this post, for the non-cognoscenti, is an allusion to a sad and frightening piece of performance art by Naomi Wolf.¹)

I’ll just quote from the action alert NOW sent out a few days ago:

White House Health Care Reform Bill Denies Women’s Basic Rights

Statement of NOW President Terry O’Neill

March 4, 2010

Today the White House announced that it has set March 18 as the deadline for Congress to pass a final health care reform bill. President Obama has embraced the Senate’s version of health care legislation. This bill is no panacea for the nation’s broken health care system. It has major flaws that probably cannot be fixed within two weeks. However, the National Organization for Women is not about to give up — not with women’s basic human rights at stake.

We cannot hope to achieve social justice without universal access to health care. At a minimum, health care reform should contain a strong public option, which would provide an incentive for the profit-driven health insurance industry to control skyrocketing premium rates. At a minimum, health care reform should allow states to adopt their own single-payer plans. The president’s approach does not meet either of these minimum requirements.

What President Obama calls “moving forward” on health care reform is in fact a giant leap backward for women. The Senate’s version of health care legislation, which the House is now poised to pass, contains sweeping anti-abortion language and fails to eliminate gender and age rating. Lawfully-residing non-citizen immigrants will have to wait five years to qualify for purchasing health insurance through new health exchanges, while undocumented immigrants will not have any access to health insurance under either the Senate or House bills.

Rep. Bart Stupak and his radical anti-abortion rights coalition are threatening to vote against the Senate bill because its restrictions on abortion coverage are not as extreme as those contained in the House’s Stupak-Pitts amendment. Even if Stupak does not succeed, the Senate bill is already bad enough. It places burdensome requirements that would likely result in no coverage for abortion care for either the millions of women purchasing insurance in the new insurance exchanges or the millions of women now covered by large, employer-based group plans, the majority of which currently provide abortion coverage.

Additionally, we have repeatedly been told that gender rating would be eliminated, yet the Senate bill contains language that allows that practice for insurance plans provided to companies with more than 100 employees. It also permits insurance companies to charge older policy holders up to three times the premiums they charge younger customers — a provision that will disproportionately harm middle-aged women. As it stands, this bill is discriminatory against women, and these injustices will not be corrected in the reconciliation process without the ardent advocacy of groups like NOW.

The National Organization for Women refuses to compromise on our most basic principles. We will not accept a health care bill that trades off the rights and needs of some women for the benefit of others. And we will never stop fighting for the right of every woman to have equal access to the full range of reproductive health care, including abortion.

###

Happy International Women’s Day!

---

¹ “Christmas and New Year’s and Hanukkah Rolled Into One.” By Naomi Wolf. Perf. Naomi Wolf. CNN, New York. 15 Jan. 2009. Performance.

Oh, hey, a java party…

Hey, all you third-party rebel types — check this out in the Times:

Democrats Need a Rally Monkey
By KATE ZERNIKE

“Wake Up and Stand Up.” So urges the bold motto of a seedling movement calling itself the Coffee Party, a leftish alternative to the Tea Party movement.

The Coffee Party! Jeesh, why didn’t we think of that? But hang on:

[I]t’s going to take more than a jolt of java, which so far amounts to not much more than a wishful exhortation, to energize the left. The buzz and the intensity for some months now have been on the right, led by Tea Partiers as they’ve zealously and methodically marched with plans for what Sarah Palin called “another revolution” come the fall elections.

Well, yeah.

What would it take to get back the intensity Democrats had just a year ago?

Some say it can’t be done.

“When a party’s snakebit, it’s really snakebit,” said Charlie Cook, the independent political handicapper, who is predicting a thumpin’ for Democrats in November. “That happened to the Republicans in 2006 and to a certain extent in 2008, and it’s true of Democrats now.”

Snakebit? Okay, whatever. Snakebit.

But why are the Democrats snakebit? Why oh why oh why?

The Times quotes Stanley Greenberg:

“[O]ur side is demoralized by the lack of progress. It’s almost independent of the energy on the other side.”

Yes! So far, so good.

But then, sadly, the article departs the universe of logic, physics, and Euclidean geometry, and sails off into the parallel universe of Barack Can Do No Wrong.

The problem, we are told, is that “we” let Barack down. Here’s Jonathan Alter (who’s writing a book called — oh joy — The Promise: President Obama, Year One):

“Obama had that line in his campaign, ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for,’ ” Mr. Alter said. “But ‘we’ didn’t show up.” People believed it was enough to have Democrats controlling both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. They failed to understand that not every Democrat was a liberal, and got hung up on — or turned off by — party leaders’ unwillingness to push things like the public option as part of health care reform.”

“‘We’ didn’t show up.” Just savor that. Just roll around in it for awhile. Soak it in.

What voters need to do, according to Alter and his co-twits, is stop fixating on those silly things they thought they were voting people into office to do, and instead get excited about whatever it is that the Democrats are actually doing. You know: rolling back abortion rights, bailing out the health insurance industry, torturing prisoners, giving gigantic wads of billion-dollar bills to Wall Street. Though the twits don’t say it like that.

See, this is the fundamental disconnect. These clowns in the beltway, these pollsters and columnists and Village idiots, think of politics as a team sport. The problem they’re analyzing is why the Democratic Team isn’t selling out the stadium anymore. Why has star quarterback Barack’s Q score dropped? What do we need to do to freshen the brand?

There is no sense, none whatsoever, that people in a republic vote for representatives to act in accordance with their wishes on certain issues. And that when that doesn’t work anymore, the fucking system is broke.

Fucking twits.

The best spam comment ever

Hello, people! I apologize for my inattention to the Smoking Lounge; we (by which I mean the secret feminist cabal that rules the world) are getting ready to launch our new thingy. Hopefully tomorrow. Yeah, I know it was gonna be a few weeks ago, but talk to the hand.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share the latest pearl from my spam filter. I don’t usually save spam comments, but this one is wonderful:

Advantageously, the article is really the sweetest on this precious subject. I harmonize along with your conclusions and will eagerly watch for ones own incoming updates. Saying thank you will not just be ample, for your great clarity in your writing. I will without delay snap up your rss to keep privy of every updates. Authentic work and much success in your business enterprise!

My first thought was that it was a machine translation, but it’s almost too perfectly machine-like, if you know what I mean. It’s almost like a human being trying to sound like a machine — a reverse Turing, if you will.

Thoughts?

“And now, the always enjoyable giant inflatable beaver”

The immortal Bob Costas makes the call.

The closing ceremonies in Vancouver were even more hilariously weird than the opening ceremonies. I’m officially in love with Canada.

Can you imagine the Soviets Russians doing something like that? Don’t get me wrong; I revere Russian culture. But the Sochi preview show was fucking terrifying. Were those gunshots? Was somebody being executed in Red Square? “We have Tchaikovsky, we have Shostakovich, we have KGB. Come to Russia. You will enjoy.”

Olympics final weekend: open thread

I’m here, I’m at my computer, but I’m extremely busy. So no post; just this lousy open thread.

The figure skating has been absolutely glorious this year. Kim Yu-Na is God. Virtue and Moir are the King and Queen of the Universe. Johnny Weir is the Grand Duke of Cool.

I can’t wait

Only a few more hours until the ice dancing! Tonight, in the original dance competition, reigning world champions Domnina and Shabalin will perform their Sensitive and Respectful Tribute to Brown People.

The figure skating has been truly delicious this year. I’m glad Evan Lysacek beat Lord Plushenko, though I would have preferred to see Johnny Weir on the podium. That wasn’t going to happen, of course.

In other news, I’m also glad to see that Bode Miller finally won his gold medal. Now I wish he would disappear into the same black hole that I keep praying will swallow up Tiger Woods. Is there or is there not a god? I ask you.

Day 4 of the Mop ‘n Glo preliminary rounds

Here’s my problem with curling (okay, one of my problems with curling): I don’t believe it. I don’t think it’s true. The people with the Swiffer mops, furiously scrubbing in front of the rock? Bullshit. I don’t think they’re accomplishing anything.

Think about it. Curling is basically bowling on ice. Can you imagine if bowling was played this way? If after the bowler let go of the ball, it was accompanied down the alley by two people scrubbing the floor in front of it to get rid of whatever microscopic piece of Cheeto dust might be in its path? And all the while shrieking at the ball, shrieking at each other, shrieking back to the bowler to tell him/her how fast the ball is going, while the bowler in turn shrieks things like “more to the left!!!!” I mean, I can imagine bowling like that if you were on acid or something. Or maybe if you had a serious case of magical thinking, and thought that you could control the trajectory of inanimate objects by yelling and scrubbing a little broom on the floor.

But I’m sorry, I just don’t believe that the Swiffer mop people in curling are making a goddamn bit of difference to where that rock goes or how fast it goes.

I want to do an experiment to see. First, we’ll need a split-screen video. Then we’ll need a Schrödinger wave-collapser to split reality in two at the moment the curler releases the rock. In one world line, the rock will be accompanied by the usual shrieking Swiffer people scrubbing the floor in front of it. In the other world line, there will be no Swiffers and no shrieking; just the rock gliding on its merry way. I bet there won’t be a Cheeto particle’s worth of difference.

That’s my bet. Anybody wanna take me up on it?

Why I love the Winter Olympics

They’re fast. Everything at the Winter Olympics is fast — except the curling, which proceeds at a normal, floor-waxing, houseworky kinda pace. But other than the curling, everything is fast. People ski, skate, and slide at superhuman speeds.

The Summer Olympics, on the other hand, is just sweaty people running. The 100-yard dash is glacial compared to the slowest round of anything at the Winter Games (excluding, again and forever, the curling). The cycling is fast, but cycling is the single most boring sport to watch in the history of civilization. It’s just a bunch of people hunched over, peddling in a circle. Identical hunched-over helmeted people peddling in an identical, unvarying circle. Christ.

But the Winter Olympics looks like fun. I like snow and ice, I like cold, I like bundling up in warm clothes in the cold, and I like (or used to like, when I was healthier) moving fast. The Summer Olympics just looks so goddamn hot and humid. Go sit in the air conditioning, you want to say. Get out of that heat. You’re so sweaty! Yuck. Take a shower. And for chrissake, put on some clothes.

The Winter Olympics also offer fewer occasions for offense to my feminist sensibilities. They’re offensive enough, mind you: women banned from sports at which they excel, patriarchy on ice, the arbitrary insistence that all the women’s events be smaller and shorter and easier than the men’s.

But the Summer Olympics has all that and more. All that to the tenth power, times a billion. From the Parade of Nations, with the gender apartheid (WHY IS SAUDI ARABIA ALLOWED IN THE GAMES??? SOUTH AFRICA WASN’T ALLOWED, WHY IS SAUDI ARABIA ALLOWED???) to the porn outfits female athletes are forced to wear, the whole thing is a goddamn travesty. And don’t even get me started on the gruesomeness that is female gymnastics.

Besides, it’s boring. And sweaty. And slow.

I do like the equestrian events, mostly because I like the horses. I worry about them, though: what if they fall on that jump? What if they break their legs? Are they happy? Do they want to be there? And so on.

I also occasionally become transfixed by something weird at the Summer Games, like the diving. I think the highboard divers are really secret suicides. They’re death wish people with a closet yearning to go head-first into some concrete about 20 stories down. That’s the only thing that makes sense. (Of course, you could argue that the Winter Olympics athletes are death wish people too, but I think there’s a difference. At least the winter sports involve a thrilling ride — down a hill, down a track, whatever. The divers just jump off a ledge.)

But overall, the Summer Olympics are dull.

The Winter Games, though! Now that’s a party. People going 80 goddamn miles an hour! Swooshing down a mountain! Spinning in the air! Sliding and gliding across the ice! Love the Winter Olympics. Love the figure skating, the speed skating (especially short track), the ski racing, the snowboarding, the bobsledding. I even like the hockey.

Now if NBC will just let me see it.