by Erin Solaro

When I voted for Barack Hussein Obama, I did not vote for him to continue the policies of his disasterous predecessor, George Walker Bush.

To continue two disasterous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that have emptied the US Treasury and broken our military.

To continue Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Combat Exclusion Rule that says to servicewomen, you are not members of the Profession of Arms.

To continue to uphold the unconstitutional–on 1st, 9th, and 14th Amendment grounds–Defense of Marriage Act.

To continue to throw money at Wall Street while unemployed and poor working Americans on foodstamps think it wrong to buy themselves such pathetically small pleasures as coffee and soda.

To continue a for-profit model of medicine that enriches insurance companies while leaving approximately 16% of Americans uninsured and meaning that 45,000 a year (almost as many as died during our entire, misbegotten war in Vietnam) die for lack of care.

To continue corporate policies that destroy small-scale, family and community-based agriculture, export our remaining industrial base, and import millions of aliens (legal and illegal) to do the work that remains because they will work for less than Americans, under worse conditions. While almost 20% of the country is either unemployed or grotesquely underemployed.

Tonight, President Obama will announce to America that he is laying upon us the final straw that will smash our spine: deepening our involvement in Afghanistan.

You know, when the Soviets saw what they were doing was destroying them, they left.  Then they began to reform themselves, a reform that in some ways continues to this day.

Al-qaeda watches us and thinks, now we will draw them into Somalia, again. And Yemen. And Mexico and Latin America.

And the men who lead the nation that ought to be our friend and ally in the wars of the ways now upon us, President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin, watch us lose our minds.

Liberals and Treason
by
Erin Solaro

There is a reason why liberals like myself are typically reluctant to call things, such as Major Hasan’s treason, by their proper name.

Two, actually.

The first is that you will be attacked, and quite savagely, by your fellow liberals. So-called. Anything is grounds: minor grammatical errors, using formal, dignified language. Facts (like a number of incontrovertibly dead bodies) become meaningless and context (shouting Allahu Akbar before butchering your comrades, as opposed to offering it as a prayer of gratitude for being allowed to save someone’s life) changes nothing. Everyone who’s spent any time on the internet knows exactly what I’m talking about and has probably experienced it once or twice. Anonymous people will feel free to attack you and other anonymous people will quote them. As someone whose real, legal identity is readily visible even when I write under a screen name, I have a word for this kind of behavior, whether on the left or right. Cowardice. (As an aside, I have to tell you that the largely conservative forum of which I am a member believes the issues it handles are important to us all, so it simply does not tolerate that kind of behavior.)

The internet is a giant vomitorium, largely because of anonymity, but that doesn’t mean that this behavior doesn’t go a long way towards justifying, indeed causing many people who are decent and moderate in their behavior towards others, to seek anonymity. But even when one has obscured one’s identity, these kinds of attacks are profoundly unpleasant. I’ve been subject to them more than once and I always feel contaminated by observing this behavior: disgusted and shamed for the perpetrators and saddened for my country and its culture. This is what we have done with our freedom. Many thoughtful, intelligent people are subjected to that once and decide Never Again. Not Worth It. I don’t blame them. I have, from time to time, a hope that spirited but very civilized public conversations are possible with people who are anonymous. I have unfailingly been disappointed.

The second is that you can quickly find yourself in some unsavory company. I had a woman write me about my assertion that Major Hasan’s actions are, in fact, a prima facie case of treason. Within two emails, she was asking me what I thought about people like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright? After I got over my Who? reflex, I said that they had nothing to do with the problems America faces, but I knew of some Treasury Secretaries and Fed Chairmen who were very responsible. In the space of 4 emails, she went from telling me we were liberal conservatives or conservative liberals who could disagree with each other to telling me we couldn’t discuss politics. Then there was an email I received from a man who liked what I had written about Major Hasan who thought I would like to know that he had posted it on his website, along with a formal accusation of the usurper President and his evil wife for treason. I have an impulse, which I have so far resisted, to email the man back and ask him whether or not he is able to read. I know he can cut and paste: he excerpted from my previous post the Constitutional definition of treason. So in the off-chance he can read, I repost it here.

The Constitution defines only one crime, and that is treason. ‘Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.’ The Framers clearly had no intention of allowing policy disputes and political disagreements or even criminal stupidity and misconduct to defined as treason—much less on the basis of hearsay, rumor-mongering or racism. Moreover, the only evidence accepted is two or more witnesses to the same overt act, or a confession in open court. And every American attempt to expand that definition has failed.

I have come to accept that my experiences saying things that people don’t expect from someone of my political views are a reflection of this country. An ugly, unpleasant, profoundly true reflection. There is an enormous amount of justifiable anger out there: ordinary working people across the demographic spectrum have been sold out and betrayed by the political and commercial elites across the political spectrum and there is no end to that betrayal in sight. However, we are a nation far gone in learned helplessness and passivity: we pay people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and, very likely soon, Lou Dobbs to get angry for us. And if as a writer, you say something people disagree with or dislike and can’t refute, they explode with anger and vitriol, rather than face the oncoming freight train that is America’s future.

My poor country. My heart bleeds for this Republic that I so love.

Major Hasan and Treason
by
Erin Solaro

The issue is not whether Major Nidal Malik Hasan is a terrorist.  It is whether or not he is a traitor.

Here are the known facts.

Major Hasan, a field grade officer in an Army of a nation at war contacted and maintained contact with for an unknown period, an imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, known to be linked to al-Qaeda, who is, if not a known operating agent, most certainly a known agent of influence. Major Hasan was a medical officer, not an intelligence or foreign service officer acting under orders and supervision.

Major Hasan’s emails have been described as pursuant to his official duties researching post-traumatic stress disorder, and their contents as relatively benign. “Relatively benign” is, of course, only in relationship to their very existence, which was profoundly malevolent. We can say with near-certainty that any information on PTSD al-Awlaki could have offered Major Hasan, Major Hasan could have obtained from far less problematic sources: Jonathan Shay, one of the world’s preeminent experts on combat trauma, is extremely approachable and if Major Hasan did not know of him, he was beyond incompetent. There is simply no good reason for a military field grade medical officer to contact someone like Anwar al-Awlaki. The standard of prudence for a field grade officer is not the standard of prudence for Private Snuffy or Joe Bag of Donuts.

We also know that Major Hasan is alleged to have cried Allahu Akbar while killing and wounding dozens of his fellow Americans. That is a jihadi war cry.

At this point, it is time to drop the nonsense about terrorism and the other nonsense about PTSD and understand that Major Hasan’s attack was an act of treason. The more so since Muslims kill other Muslims all the time. Nor was it an act of existential and professional anguish, such as locking himself in his office and downing too many pills and too much alcohol, or hacking up his wrists and bleeding all over his copy of Achilles in Vietnam. Or his case notes.

If Major Hasan is found to be sane according to the McNaughton Rule and there are not enormous extenuating circumstances, his acts were those of treason, not terrorism. 

Major Hasan chose to ally himself with enemies of his country and kill and wound his country’s soldiers. That meets the definition of treason laid down in the Constitution: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.” And this is true whether he acted alone, as is likely, or with accomplices.

Relax. This is not your usual piece on pornography, your usual “We know porn does real and terrible damage to millions of human beings and their society, but no one seems to know how to deal with it.” Nor is this to sneer at those simple souls who claim they do know. Bring back that old-time religion? Fine, if that’s what you want for yourself. But this is an essentially libertarian, diverse society that should remain so, and God is not a citizen. Nobody’s God. Other simple souls, religious or not, demand renewed censorship: an alternative that founders on the small matter of who does the censoring and what happens once they get rolling. Others, usually feminists and often not so simple, would like to see porn, carefully and narrowly defined, subject to civil action for damages because it hurts real women and devalues and contributes to the degradation of women as a group. An approach with some merit, especially for those directly hurt in the production of porn or by porn’s consumers, but one that misses a few larger points.

Rather, I should like to address this issue by noting a bit of etymology and then ask and answer a simple question.

The word “pornography” derives from the classical Greek; its literal meaning is “the graphic depiction of whores.” The Greek pornē were not high-class hetaerae, mistresses, courtesans, or beloved companions. They were the sex slaves of public brothels, to whom virtually anything could be done with impunity. Nor are we talking here about fancy frescoes on walls or cute little paintings on urns. This is about, literally, the exploitation and degradation of some human beings for the profit and pleasure of others—a matter that is never noted in the standard definition of pornography as reading or viewing material intended primarily to excite sexual interest.

Now to the question. What is so great about pornography that we are willing to pay such a high price for it, individually and as a civilization, in so many horrific ways? If it were only a matter of sexual arousal for a Republic that would collapse without constant immersion in commercialized sexuality, we could conclude that we’re simply insane and let it go at that. But more is involved. Much more. For porn is something we do with our freedom and is, in many ways, symbolic of many other things we’ve done with our freedom. We tolerate it, not just for the titillation, but because porn is an accurate depiction of who we are.

Today, there is scant debate, even among First Amendment absolutists, that the harm ascribed to porn is real and irrefutable. The women and girls brought into porn are almost invariably poor and often desperate; some are slaves. Many have arrived via prostitution. (Here we might note that because porn involves the exchange of sex, this time public through the images made of it, for money, it is itself a form of prostitution.) Many others, perhaps nearly all, have experienced prior sexual abuse. Some have known little else; many accept such abuse as their normal way of life. As for how children are entrapped with pornography to be sexually used by pedophiles, and what it does to them: we need not itemize here.

Economically, porn is a means of making sexual slavery and trafficking more profitable. It is also an adjunct to other activities, some criminal. Porn really is used in sexual assaults: by the assailants to desensitize and arouse themselves, and to train their longer-term victims. Porn really is a factor in divorces and estrangement between lovers in less permanent but nevertheless profoundly important relationships. How would you feel if your lover or wife couldn’t approach you without first immersing herself in images of the degradation of other men…or simply preferred the company of such images to yours and proved it every night by locking herself away with her Internet products? When she reaches climax, can you hear it through the walls? And if she doesn’t, how happy are you to have her emerge and expect to be serviced?

An occasional psychotherapist argues that porn “legitimizes” the unusually intense desires of those who have them, but might be reluctant to explore them and seek their fulfillment. But it might be more accurate to say that porn forces these people to contend with the fact that their desires, wonderful when shared with a loving partner, have been dirtied by the commercialized degradation of women, and men, and sex, that is porn. And porn really does make it harder for men to relate to women and for that matter other men, as genuine human beings.

In very real human terms, porn harms almost everyone it touches, users or not, most deeply women. But it also corrupts manhood. What it does to children need not be itemized here.

Those who will argue that porn is simply “free speech,” are free to do so. I would use my right of free speech to point out that this particular freedom isn’t free and that those who espouse this freedom aren’t the ones who pay directly for it. Perhaps an analogy might be useful. On some brutally cold nights of winter 1986/87, Ed Koch, then mayor of New York, ordered his public safety and health people to get the city’s homeless off the streets and into temporary shelters. The ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union responded by passing out little cards to the homeless, reminding them of their right to stay on the street. The libertarian attitude was clear. They didn’t deny the reality of mental illness or that their little cards might contribute to the deaths of others. They simply chose to regard this as a civil liberties issue, even if people froze to death.

Others take a more humane approach. Many feminists argue—to me correctly—that one simply should not harm other human beings, or use products derived from that harm, for one’s pleasure. But this elides the larger issue of why we as a society not only tolerate it but glorify it and permit it to fester in and infect our culture. Is it because, in America, everything gets reduced to entertainment and entertainment more and more means either porn or clearly pornographic motifs? And if so, what does that say about us?

Porn, like entertainment, is a huge global enterprise: Family Safe Media  estimates that in 2006, pornography generated, worldwide, a $97 billion in revenue—larger than the revenues of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix and EarthLink combined. (This estimate includes only sixteen nations reporting and does not include the related industries of prostitution and human trafficking. If it did, we would be talking trillions.) Of this $97 billion, America was directly responsible for $13 billion. But the American involvement goes deeper than dollars. Over four million web pages, or twelve percent of the total, are pornographic. The leading producer of video pornography in the world is the United States; we are responsible for 89% of the world’s pornographic web pages. Although the porn industry has been affected by the recession, that $13 billion/year American “industry” was nearly 5 times the $2.7 billion Internet revenue that American Journalism Review  estimated went to newspapers in 2007.

One of economics’ (few) great truths is the concept of “opportunity cost.” Money is fungible. The real cost of anything is all the alternatives foregone. That $13 billion would have been enough to fund a flourishing newspaper industry, for example. What might have been done with the rest of that money in the under-developed world? Opportunity cost also includes the time and energy spent using porn, or dealing with someone who uses porn, could have been spent tending to and being tended by, one’s spouse or lover or just about anything else. For the 10% of Americans who admit to Internet sexual addiction, porn represents time and money that could certainly be put to far better uses.

Then there are those, who use it, at least occasionally, but would not if they had to seek it out. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they wouldn’t use it if porn and pornographic motifs weren’t thrown in their faces a hundred times a day. Remember: By definition, porn is designed primarily to appeal to and excite sexual interest, whether the mercantile goal is to sell videos or soap or beer. In this sense, porn is a continuum, from the pandering commercials and entertainment that cheapen our culture to the hardest of the hard core excrement of the spirit. For ours is a culture more and more dominated by pornographic motifs that drive out all else. It is what we have done with our freedom in so many ways, screaming at us from computer screens and television screens, from bookstore shelves and supermarket check-out aisles, from magazine ads and music, from athletic events and so much of the merchandise available in our malls. Screaming: Come on, you know you want it. Perhaps we do, even those of us who would never visit an Internet porn site, patronize a prostitute or visit a “gentlemen’s club.” Perhaps we want it because this is what we’ve done with our freedom. Perhaps this is what we are.

Of course, “Come on, you know you want it” does not provide the constitutional justification for regarding adult porn as protected free speech. For several decades, the Supreme Court wrestled with pornography as a First Amendment issue, crafting a series of decisions that focused on porn as free speech, regardless of the harm it did. This free speech über alles fixation was ratified, not to say enshrined, in the decision American Booksellers Association v Hudnut, 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals, 1985, upheld without comment by the Supreme Court. This decision explicitly acknowledged the harm porn does, even as it found unconstitutional an Indianapolis ordinance that carefully defined porn, then established such material as a civil rights violation subject to civil suits. The Circuit Court’s reasoning here must be understood:

“The ordinance discriminates on the ground of the content of the speech…. The state may not ordain preferred viewpoints in this way. The Constitution forbids the state to declare one perspective right and silence opponents…. Therefore we accept the premises of this legislation. Depictions of subordination tend to perpetuate subordination. The subordinate status of women in turn leads to affront and lower pay at work, insult and injury at home, battery and rape on the streets…. Yet this simply demonstrates the power of pornography as speech.”

In short, the 7th Circuit and thus also the Supreme Court explicitly acknowledged the genuine human suffering of women whose actual rapes were modeled on specific pieces of porn and who were forced into porn—both raped women who testified themselves and raped and murdered women whose surviving next of kin and estates testified for them. The Court nonetheless found the pornographer’s “speech” trumped their lives and their right to be free from unwanted contact and unwanted photography and films.

But the 7th Circuit Court’s opinion that porn is free speech regardless of the physical acts—including prostitution, rape, torture, murder, kidnapping and slavery—involved in producing it, is a standard that applies to no other type of speech. Obscenity, which is defined far more ambiguously than the porn that the Indianapolis Ordinance addressed, is not constitutionally protected free speech. Historically, obscenity has been used to suppress the dissemination of accurate information on birth control. The federal gag rule on abortion funding violates the First Amendment. Sexual harassment is not constitutionally protected free speech, even when it is entirely verbal or if it involves the forcing of pornography on women (and men) through, for example, the display of such materials in the workplace. Neither are such highly verbal crimes as bribery, terroristic threatening, incitement to crimes, hate speech and fighting words, racial and religious discrimination, libel and slander, insider trading and price fixing, conspiracy and accessory to after the fact. Child pornography is not constitutionally protected speech. And need we add that free speech has no legal standing whatsoever when it comes to prohibiting or regulating advertising for tobacco, alcohol or other legally salable products, no matter how humane the conditions of their production.

Further, in many other areas, such as environmental regulation, the law restricts activities in order to prevent harm, even when no harm to specific persons has been alleged. Has anyone ever claimed that a dirt-spewing chimney or a toxic landfill are actually “symbolic speech”?

And one final example. In 1954, the Supreme Court overturned the segregationist doctrine of “separate but equal”. In Brown v. Board of Education, it relied heavily on the testimony of experts to conclude that separate was never equal, whether or not harm could be proven in any particular case. The mere existence of “separate but equal” facilities, even if materially equal, screamed loud and clear that some people were lesser than others. Why does the tonnage of evidence that porn is harmful to everyone and deadly to some, not receive the same humane regard as the psychological damage done to African Americans even in the absence of physical harm?

So what does America get out of pornography that justifies its huge human, financial and opportunity costs? What is so spiritually enlightening about this form of “speech” that we grant it freedoms available to no other form? What is so socially and culturally redeeming about it that we tolerate its ubiquity? And let’s add to this another set of considerations:

If porn were to vanish tomorrow, would Americans stop fucking? Would those who have intense, loving sex stop? Would all our imaginations be curtailed? Would those who write and draw erotica for their lovers and themselves no longer be able to write, or read, or draw or imagine? Would we all suddenly be unable to react to the sexual stimulus of non-pornographic material? Would we no longer be able to mine cherished memories for ideas about current pleasures? Would we stop having children? More largely, would we be unable to obtain accurate information about birth control or homosexuality? Would our political speech be curtailed? Would we speak to each other any less? Or maybe, with porn no longer taking up so much of our common world, would we perhaps speak to each other a bit more? We all know the answers to these questions. So why, then, do we insist that porn is some kind of right when we know full well the harm it does, and offers some kind of redeeming and vital benefit when we know it does not?

The Roman historian Tacitus, no enemy of the Roman Empire, said of that when Rome brought rebellious provinces to heel, it made a desert and called it peace. Today it might be said that we have made a cesspool and called it freedom, and that we celebrate our freedom by wallowing therein.

Porn is something we do with our freedom. Of course, we do other things with our freedom. Perhaps they fit together. Although other nations spend more on porn, America is the world’s largest producer of porn and the largest exporter of porn in terms of videos and web pages. We are also the largest exporter of weapons, often to nations whose governments are not as democratic and humane as most Americans would prefer. We are one of the world’s largest exporters of tobacco, especially cigarettes.  We are the world’s largest exporter of wheat, corn and sorgum, thanks to a corporate agriculture that ruins American farmlands and faming communities to feed Americans unhealthy food in such vast quantities that obesity and related lifestyle diseases are now major public health concerns.  We are the largest producer and exporter of trash pop culture short of porn and all that it entails.  And if you consider pollution generated overseas through the manufacture of goods to be imported here, we are the world’s largest producer of pollution.  What we’ve done to ourselves we also do around the world.

America poses as the world’s beacon and its benevolent hegemon even as America has also become the chief polluter, not only of the world’s ecology but also of the spirit of civilization. Porn, the porn of a country that purports to believe, not only of the equality of women and men before the law, but of the equal human dignity of all people, is a horribly apt symbol of what America has become. From “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” to “Come on, you know you want it”—it’s been a long and graceless way down.

To put it even more bluntly: For every foreigner who thrills to the words of our Declaration of Independence, millions thrill (if such is the word) to our garbage. And millions more despise it…and us for producing it and thrusting it upon them.

Now, it would be comforting to say that, whatever porn’s ubiquity, only a small percentage of us are heavy users; of the crimes committed by pornophiles, most are the work of serial predators. It would be true. But the fact remains: That we should tolerate this ubiquity and criminality bespeaks either insanity or an agenda. It would be comforting, also, if we could dismiss this agenda as First Amendment absolutism and leave it at that. But to say that porn is something we have done with our freedom is also to say that porn is something we continue to do with our freedom. We did it throughout decades of prosperity and the long-overdue lifting of some outworn repressions. But we continue to do it now that the old easy-credit rampant consumerism (“Come on, you know you want it”) is gone and there ain’t a whole lot of repression left. Why?

The appeal of porn—this is not an easy thing to say in a society that has come so far toward genuine equality and mutual respect—is not so much that its users want to hurt and degrade women. It’s they want to watch others doing it for them, and to know that those women are out there for them to hurt and degrade in such ways, should they so choose. To be very honest, this is particularly important in America. Equality is good in the abstract. But when you’re on the downwardly-mobile slide and your future is vanishing and you can’t even pay for necessities, other values and emotions kick in. To understand this requires no great wisdom, although it takes a bit of honesty to understand that it has, does and can happen here, this brutality associated with loss of status and prospects.

We’re angry these days, we Americans. Angry about a lot of things. At the same time, we may well be the most stupefied nation in history. We know all about the Russians and their vodka habit; we remember how, not so long ago, they used to forcibly medicate dissidents with psychoactive drugs. But who needs the KGB when we do it to ourselves? Millions of us cannot exist or function apart from psychoactive drugs. Millions more depend upon them whenever things get rough. Liquor is everywhere, including endless new brands of potent, cheap white liquors, such as vodka. So are the illicit drugs that numb so many millions of our underclass…and above. In this sense, porn doesn’t simply incite. It also numbs and is, along with popular culture, drugs and alcohol, one of the ways we stupefy ourselves against what is happening to us economically and in the world.  And porn does so in a way that inherently pits men against women, rather than leaving them natural allies in the quest to live in the world. In this sense, porn is hate speech.

The horrible truth, one that I never, ever thought I would write about my country is that porn has become what we do with our freedom and symbolizes what we have made of our civilization. Porn has come to define our sexual freedom and our freedom of the press, of the written and spoken word; it has come to define artistic freedom. Not accomplishment or value, just freedom. And we accept that there is no accomplishment here, nothing of value, only freedom to produce the same dreary product, over and over.

So what to do? Most attempts at “zoning,” from parental controls and ratings systems to forcing porn parlors and related enterprises into certain (usually and unjustifiably) lower-class districts, are palliatives at best. The aggressive prosecution of pornographers who use not just children but also trafficked women and men, and confiscation of all such images and profits, could help. There is, after all, no right to retain the profits of illegal activity. Except when porn is involved. But the final answer to porn lies in refusing to tolerate it in our lives, no matter how badly we want its transient whatevers. For if there was no demand, there would be no porn. And one of the things porn says, primarily to men, but also, to a startling extent, to women, is, Come on, you know you really want it. It’s easy, it’s cheap, it’s always available. Men, you need this. Women, if you don’t like it, you’re prudes, while if you are sexually intense, this is what you need and want too.

If we’re not going to return to censorship or enforced “traditional values,” if we’re not going to keep on pretending that this stuff is harmless or benign or that we wish to live saturated in it…how to say No? For some, “Just Say No” is enough. But just saying No is not enough for most people. We need to know Why, no easy question to answer in a society indoctrinated with the strange notion that all values are inherently equal and no one is ever to judge. But Why is the first question we ask and one of the most important we will ever ask. “Why?” and “Why not?” lead us out of the realm of authoritarian ethics, where the only issue is, “The rules say…” no matter who made the rules, to what end, and what those rules actually say, and into the realm of what is known in philosophy as virtue ethics. Here the fundamental question Is not, “What are the rules?” but “How shall I live?” Virtue ethics do not tell us how to live. They tell us how to think about how to live. They make us understand that this is the most fundamental question each of us will ever face, the question that determines our attitudes and actions. How shall I live?

One of the tests of the worth of a thing is how we feel about it—after, not during. Many of us have done things during which we cursed ourselves for fools and worse, only to reach our goal and look at our accomplishments with stunned satisfaction. Do I really want to do this? we ask ourselves as we commit to the project, whether football practice or knitting delicate lacework. Rather often, the question lingers throughout. At the other extreme, there are things that we want—come on, you know you want it—when we want them, but which fill us with perplexity and disgust afterwards. Why did I do that? What was I thinking of? And why on earth am I doing it again?

So which is porn: the difficult thing that exalts and ennobles us or the easy thing that cheapens and disgraces us? Or to put it differently, when somebody important to you asks, “What did you do last night?” would you answer her (or him) proudly, “Porn.”

But if we decide that we do not wish porn in our lives, that this is not something we do with our freedom, we must do more than shun it. We must shun the products associated with it and the motifs that now permeate our civilization. None of us in our right minds would buy a book entitled Incompetent Horsemanship: How to Ride Like a Sack of Potatoes or How to Abuse Your Right to Bear Arms and Endanger Your Family and Neighbors by Sloppy Weapons Handling. However, such things, were they to exist, would be less of an insult than How to Make Love Like a Porn Star (which apparently consists of making noises like a poorly-tuned engine and trying to remember whose name to call while being genuinely hurt, physically and emotionally).

The decision to shun porn and its motifs is personal and has nothing to do with holier-than-thou censoriousness. As a feminist and an American citizen, I’ve always despised porn. But I realized that I had made the decision to shun porn only as it happened, one day at the mall. I have a weakness for perfume and a perfume store had just opened up. It turned out that they had a scent I was interested in, for a very reasonable price. I was appreciating the scent and the genius behind the scent when I realized something about the store bothered me. A lot. I looked around to find a larger-than-life cardboard cutout of Paris Hilton staring at me. I couldn’t help myself, for I spoke without any thought whatsoever. “I see you’re selling the whore’s perfumes.” For whatever the truth about how that pornographic DVD went public—and I should never speak this way about some anonymous performer or a woman who had risen above such a video—her career (what exactly does this woman do?) has taken wings after its release. Nothing about it, or her, attests to any appeal other than the sexually salacious.

The shop girl looked at me as though I had said something we all knew to be true but none of us dared say, and was therefore best ignored. “Yes,” she replied chirply, shock appearing to have disconnected her voice box from her brain. “Would you like to try it?” She was referring to Can-Can, Hilton’s latest perfume release.

I smiled. “Thank you, no.” And I walked out without the Cabotine I’d admired and craved.

There was a saying amongst Western gunfighters. I don’t get my courage from a bottle. I don’t get my erotic imagination from porn. My pleasure is not purchased with the suffering of other human beings. I do not get my orgasms or my ideas by watching other people being hurt and degraded. I do not watch it done, whether for real in porn or “simulated” in pop culture. If you do, you are either a sadist or a masochist and either way a voyeur. You are also supporting a multi-billion dollar industry that deals in the mass production of sexualized cruelty. And while it may be your “right,” it really is an evil things and I’m not going to help you pretend otherwise.  Porn is what the producers think we are worth, and when you buy it or tolerate it, you agree with them.

Has porn been worth it? Has it made us happier in our personal lives? Has it made us a nation to be proud of in the world? Are we proud to say that this is what we have done with our freedom?

A final thought, for those (of both sexes) who think that porn is either a necessary or a desirable part of being male. My husband, a former Marine officer, has told me of his experiences watching young American servicemen, the first time they encounter the degradation that some humans inflict on others for the sake of selling it to others. The venues may differ—Saigon, Subic, Court Street, 14th Street, a thousand other locales. But the process is always the same. The young man realizes, consciously or not, “How I respond to this will tell me what I am.” Many, perhaps most, try it once or twice, then recoil or drift away. Others become heavy users and, as always with heavy users, crave company and the validation that the participation of others can bestow. So many of those young men knew instinctively that porn (and prostitution) were wrong but lacked an explanation they could articulate. Unless they could claim religious faith, marriage or a committed relationship, and sometimes even then, they risked the opprobrium of being labeled—an evocative word at many levels—”pussies.”

Yet virtue ethics provides all the answer they or anyone needs. I don’t use porn and I shun it’s motifs because I don’t want them in my life. I choose not to participate in this with others because I don’t want them in my life, either. Why don’t I want such things and such people in my life?

Because I’m better than that.

I write and knit at the same time.  Write a few words, knit a few stitches, write a few, knit a few. 

I am now working on Defiance in Time of Peril:  An Open Letter to America’s Young Womanhood.  At the same time, I have begun knitting what will be a sweater coat, “Morocco”, from Joyce William’s Latvian Dreams:  Knitting from Weaving Charts.  I calculate that there will be approximately 150,000 stitches in this coat, worked on needles 2.5 mm in diameter.

This a coat entirely made in America.  Joyce Williams is an American, Schoolhouse Press, her publisher, is an American press that printed her book in America, and I am working this in approximately 1682 m (500 g) each of Alpine Violet and Storm in sportweight by Brown Sheep, which supports America’s dryland sheep farmers. 

I could say that it is people like these women who will repair this country, if indeed it can be, not speculative energy traders like Andrew Hall, who is in line for a $100 million annual bonus for ruinous energy speculation.  And that is true. 

But I thought I would show you what can be done by an inexperienced knitter, one stitch at a time.

This coat is made in pattern repetitions:  the lower center back panel is one, 77 stitches wide by 77 rows high, and on either side I show 1 of 5 24 w x 77 h repetitions.  (The lower center front panel is split in half by what are called steeks.)  These pictured were taken about 24 rows into that first 77 row chart.  So what you see here is about 3125 stitches, not counting the Storm facing below.  (All told, I’ve worked about 14,000 stitches so far.)

For a law-abiding citizen to bear personal arms is an act of civilization.

Not just an act of self-defense or an act in defense of civilization, but an act of civilization.

This is true for men and it is even more true for women. For a woman to bear personal arms means that she will not be deprived of her legal rights: to go any lawful place she pleases at any time; to be free in her body, meaning that she need not be defenseless against assailants; to live. And it means that the uncivilized, those who would deprive her of life and the liberties of a free citizen, including freedom from unwanted sexual contact, do so at absolute risk to their lives.

That is the fundamental moral principle. These are the facts.

A handgun is not magic. You need to learn to use it and you need to be willing to use it, i.e., to employ deadly force. If you are unwilling or unable to do this, then guns are not for you.

However, a reliable handgun of man-stopping caliber (most commonly, 9mm and .45) is a terrific equalizer. And equality is the basis of citizenship.

This is the foundation of civilization: that we live and posses our property and are free in our bodies by no man’s leave, but by right under law. This is as true for women as it is for men. And unless civilization includes women, it does not exist.

The “argument from prudence,” otherwise known as “yes, but . . .” has no place here. Our rights as women citizens are unalienable, and the argument from prudence inevitably segues into “blame the victim” and the attempt to limit or abrogate those rights – to argue that there are things we may not do, places we may not go, ways we may not dress or behave, because we are women.

For women to bear arms routinely and commonly, in order to defend their lives, their property and their liberty – the simple freedom of a realtor to show a client a property, to use the gym and shower during unstaffed hours, to drive cross country alone, to go for a walk or a hike or a run or a ride alone, to be at home alone, all without fear of being overpowered – to not need a chaperone or a protector – is our right. It is also an act in defense of civilization, if only because those who commit violent crimes against women are often sadists for whom pleasure provides much of the motivation, and thus serial predators. And it is an act of civilization because it insists that we are part of civilization, a full and equal part. These things may not be done to us with impunity.

Now, try saying this to other women. Especially feminists, like myself. They’ll look at you as though you’ve suddenly grown horns. Then they’ll respond with a litany of objections that I know by heart. Yes, there are women, as there are men, who refuse to defend themselves with potentially lethal force for religious or philosophical reasons, or because they know themselves to be genuinely incapable of it for other reasons. But for the vast majority of women, the refusal to consider firearms or to grant the legitimacy of that choice to others, is based on little more than cowardice. What matters now is to review the standard objections, then determine why they amount to not just physical, but also intellectual and moral cowardice.

These come in four flavors of cowardice, and you can tell the degree of cowardice by the degree of departure from reality. All of these objections have been said or written to me. I am making none of them up; in one case, I still have the correspondence.

First is the use of incomplete, distorted or simply wrong statistics to prove the following:
· Guns cause crime.
· Guns cause crimes in cities.
· Guns cause crimes in poor and minority neighborhoods.
· Guns cause otherwise law-abiding people to kill each other or themselves.
· People rarely use guns in self-defense.
· Children will be accidentally killed by guns. Yes, and any idiot adult who permits children access to firearms should be punished. But the vast preponderance of gun deaths and woundings of children don’t happen to genuine children at all; they involve late-adolescent criminals, often gang members.
· Guns cause crimes against women.

In truth, reliable statistics reveal precisely the opposite. John R. Lott, Jr., an economist at the University of Maryland, College Park, presented his findings in a 2005 interview with the University of Chicago Press. “States with the largest increases in gun ownership also have the largest drops in violent crimes. … For each additional year that a concealed handgun law is in effect the murder rate declines 3%, rape by 2% and robberies by over 2%. … When states passed shall-issue laws ["These laws allow adults the right to carry concealed handguns if they do not have a criminal record or a history of significant mental illness"], the number of multiple victim shootings ["These were incidents in which at least two or more people were killed and or injured in a public place; in order to focus on the type of shooting...shootings that were the byproduct of another crime, such as robbery, were excluded] declined by 84%. Deaths plummeted on average by 90% and injuries by 82%. … The total number of accidental gun deaths each year is about 1,300 and each year such accidents take the lives of children 14 years of age and under… . Children are 14.5 times more likely to die from car accidents than from accidents involving guns. … An additional woman carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women by about 3 to 4 times more than an additional man carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for men. … High crime urban areas and neighborhoods with large minority populations have the greatest reductions in violent crime when citizens are legally allowed to carry concealed weapons.”

Some will automatically complain that Lott is a conservative, as if that invalidates his research. So let’s turn to an interview with liberal criminologist Gary Kleck of Florida State University, the world’s preeminent expert on defensive gun use, in the Winter 2009 issue of Research in Review. Kleck’s research played a role in D.C. v. Heller, which overturned Washington, DC’s handgun ban. After the handgun ban was passed in 1976, homicides increased, and even when they dropped, the proportion of homicides committed with handguns was higher than before the ban was passed. Kleck notes that the common pro-gun-control claim, that when victims attempt to use guns defensively, which they did approximately 2.5 million times in 1993, for example, nearly three times as often as the 850,000 criminals used guns in that year, offenders will take them away and use them on the victim is simply false. “Over the period from 1997 through 2006, an annual average of 4.8 police officers in the U.S. were killed with their own guns, out of a total of 665,555 full-time, sworn officers in the nation. … [As for civilian crime victims being hurt because they used a gun to defend themselves] It wasn’t using the gun that got them hurt. [“Researchers reported instances of people being hurt and using guns defensively, but these were cases where someone was first hurt and then used the gun for self protection, Kleck explained.”] And once this flaw in the research was fixed, it was found that people who use guns for protection are almost never injured after that. … Criminals interviewed in prison indicate that they have refrained from committing crimes because they believed a potential victim might have a gun. … Victim defensive use of guns almost never angers or otherwise provokes offenders into attacking and injuring the resisting victims. It’s extremely rare that once a victim shows or uses a gun, he is injured. …” [“In any case, Kleck says, summarizing this crime scenario, it is clear that regardless of whether gun use occasionally provokes the offender, the net effect of victim gun use is to reduce the likelihood that the offender will hurt the victim.”] Kleck has also run statistical simulations that suggest that if criminals substitute long guns (rifles and shotguns) for handguns, the result would be more homicides, for the simple reason that these weapons have longer ranges and are more lethal.

The second form of cowardice reduces itself to “Defending me is somebody else’s job, not mine.” The most common argument here is that it is the job of the police and the judicial system to stop crime, and if a woman feels endangered, she should get a restraining order. Leaving aside the widespread, well-known reluctance of the law enforcement and judicial system to take crimes against women seriously, the police do not so much stop crime as manage it in the interest of public safety. In Castle Rock v. Gonzales the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that a woman does not have the right to have a restraining order enforced. That’s optional on the part of the police. In this case, the police department’s repeated refusal to enforce led to the murder of the plaintiff’s three children. Castle Rock went far beyond the common sense rule that none of us have an automatic right to a police security detail to make the very clear point that if a woman and her children need their intervention in a crime in progress to prevent their murder, they are not part of the public to be protected and served.

And now we come to the “rational (more or less) hypotheticals.” The problem would be solved if only:
· We should make law enforcement take these crimes seriously! (Yes, we should, but they’ll still be doing it after the fact.)
· What about a restraining order? (Even had the Supreme Court had ruled 9-0 in favor of Gonzales in Castle Rock, it is paper, not protection: approximately a quarter of women killed by domestic abusers have restraining orders against their murderers.
· You might have an accidental or negligent discharge. (True, but people do far worse, far more often, with cars and swimming pools.)
· Most crime against women is committed by people they know so it wouldn’t help women in that situation. (As if reducing stranger assaults is bad and no woman will defend herself against an intimate or domestic abuser.)
· You might kill your assailant. (Considering the highly recidivistic nature of sexual crimes, you’ve saved yourself, many other women, probably some children and possibly even a few men from a lot of really ugly memories that your assailant wanted to impose.)
· Your best way to protect yourself against sexual assault and domestic violence is to be really, really careful in where you go, how you dress, how much you drink, and with whom, who you choose to be involved with, then pray you’re right. (Take this argument to its logical extreme – burkhas, chadors and sequestering women. Maybe you don’t, but a billion or so other people do.)
· We might make a mistake and 1. shoot the wrong person, 2. misunderstand their intentions, and 3. shoot someone we really didn’t have to. (Sexual assault victims are similarly impugned all the time by rapists, their defenders and apologists. Now we have women, feminist women, doing the same to women who refuse to be victimized.)
· We don’t want men to be afraid of retribution. (In the immediate aftermath of a crime, why should your assailant believe you can do nothing but call the cops?)
· Your assailant might kill you rather than just beat you or rape you. (Just barely within the realm of statistical probability, but he’s far more likely to if you are unarmed. Why do you assume you can’t win when you it is extremely likely you will?)

Finally there are, to put it kindly, the delusional.
· Most women shouldn’t own and use handguns in self-defense because it’s too easy and too cheap. (Why it should be more difficult for a civilized person to defend her life and liberty and property than for the uncivilized to take them from her? )
· It’s terribly difficult to use a handgun accurately and reliably when you’re tanked on adrenaline but it’s very easy for you to rip off a man’s ear, crush his throat or just simply pass him out in a life-or-death situation. However, because of the average strength differential between men and women, women should not use handguns because they can be taken away from them.
· I bought my daughter a knife; she can just poke an attacker with it and run away.
· The violence is in our heads. (Not when other women are raped and murdered, it’s not.)
· I want women to be respected by law enforcement and the judicial system. (If you’re not willing to kill in self-defense, why should others be willing to die for you?)
· You’re terrified of the world around you, think men are the enemy and women are victims by nature. (See my writings from Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly the first few chapters of my book Women in the Line of Fire .)

And my so-far-all-time favorite:
· Feminists like you, who believe women should use handguns to defend their lives and liberty, do more harm to feminism than sexists, including those who murder and torture and terrorize women for being feminists.

Understand that when we hear these arguments, the speaker or the writer is not a rational woman making a rational decision for herself, based upon, for example, a serious problem with depression, or such anger for the real crimes committed against her that the justice system refuses to punish appropriately that she fears punishing the innocent. Owning and carrying a handgun isn’t for everyone, male or female, no matter how law-abiding and even brave, or even the same person at all the times in her life. And that’s OK.

When we hear these arguments, we are dealing with cowardice and a slave mentality. And the more ridiculous the arguments against a woman owning and carrying, such as “You might go into Starbucks, find a teenager brandishing what looked like a real gun and threatening to kill people, and kill him only to find out that he was only 13 and it was a toy,” the deeper the cowardice.  (Incidentally, I worked very near and frequently walked past a DC Starbucks where three people, unarmed because they were law-abiding citizens, were shot to death.)  The more you hear idiot statistics and hypotheticals, the more you know you’re dealing with cowardice. The more you hear women telling you how much they’d give up or suffer just to stay alive, let alone how much you should give up or suffer just to stay alive, the more you are dealing with the mentality of slaves. There is a rule about being killed: being killed clothed involves far less suffering and humiliation than being killed naked. You get bonus points (in terms of reduced pain and degradation) if you die standing.

One of the most poignant things I’ve heard was, “Women who’ve been battered (like children who’ve been abused) have often had their sense of self and self-worth deliberately destroyed as part of the process therefore you can’t expect them to believe they have a self worth defending.” That is so terribly true. And hearing from women that they should not defend their lives, their liberty and their property with deadly force, is not going to help them resurrect their selfhood, their belief that those who try to take that from them deserve to die. They need to hear loud and clear, starting with women, especially feminist women, including in the anti-violence movement, battered women’s shelters and rape crisis movement, then continuing to the police and law enforcement, that their lives and liberty and property are worth the lives of those who want these things from them.

The truth is that many women carry around a great deal of fear, fear that is profoundly realistic. The belief that our bodies are not our own and rape in particular is a tax upon our existence in the world, a tax we should pay, is alive and widespread and very well. We fear that we can’t defeat an attacker and so we engage in many magic rituals and a great deal of magical thinking: if I don’t wear this skirt, if I don’t shower at the gym or go running after dark, or hiking alone or… or… or… I’ll be safe. Because I can’t possibly win a fight.

But that’s simply wrong. The magic rituals and the magical thinking will not keep us safe. But we can defeat an attacker. A handgun that you can use effectively and are prepared and willing to use that way is a powerful equalizer. You don’t need a lot of training or money to buy a good handgun, learn to use it safely and well, and carry it discretely just about everywhere doing so is legal. A handgun is simply the single best means for a woman to defend herself.

Tell me again why this is controversial.

Feminism is the simple proposition that women are equal in human and civic worth to men. Either our lives and liberty and property are as valuable to us as men’s are to them, and we have not only the personal right but the responsibility of the citizen to civilization to defend them with deadly force or we don’t.

If you don’t think they are and we don’t, you’re not a feminist, you’re a misogynist, which is to say someone who doesn’t.

Yes, it really is that simple. And no, we can’t agree to disagree. This is death ground, where you have to fight or die. If women do not fight for their lives and liberty, they will continue to be murdered and raped and assaulted with their perpetrators assuming little, if any, risk. We’ve seen enough of that.

No more victims.

Posting this two weeks after the speech, in an era of instant news, would seem a little OBE, except for articles like John Vinocur’s Central and Eastern European Countries Issue Rare Warning for U.S. on Russian Policy in today’s New York Times.  Mr. Vinocur, who really ought to know better, seems unaware that all the Yalta agreement did was acknowledge the fact of millions of Soviet troops on the ground in Eastern Europe.   Or that the Soviet Union collapsed of its own, and when it withdrew from Eastern Europe, it did so without a shot fired:  compare that to how Europe withdrew from its African and Asian colonies, and the mountains of corpses they piled up, not during colonization, but decolonization alone.  And someone please tell me what on earth America’s interests are with Ukraine and Georgia, Georgia still being proud of having given to the world those two fine human beings Joseph Stalin and Lavrentii Beria.

One reason I voted for President Obama was because I didn’t want to be humilated by John McCain and Sarah Palin dealing with President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin.  Try to imagine either of them giving an interview like Medvedev’s with Novaya Gazeta.  Well, Obama has done better by this country with the Russians, but marginally. 

On July 7, he spoke to the graduating class of the New Economic School in Moscow. It was an incoherent speech full of platitudes more appropriate to posturing commencement speakers than affairs of state. It was also the latest example of his refusal to talk to anyone, including his own citizens, like they were adults with a grasp of reality: a failure only exacerbated by his innate articulateness. After this sin of omission, Obama then insulted Russia’s senior leadership by not making himself available to them for informal meetings, choosing instead to spend some private time with his wife. Taking your spouse along on business trips is fine, unless it gets in the way of business.  Especially on a two-day trip.

We can see that Prime Minister Putin (does anyone realize that he and President Medvedev appear to have a very efficient good cop, bad cop routine down?) is considering himself insulted, once again, by stupid Americans.  (The photos Time magazine shot of him when they named him Man of theYear were just unbelievable.)

Having just finished writing a novel about Russia and America, I was exceptionally attuned to his failure, and I took it very seriously. Normally, I have little use for writing of the alternate-history variety, but given what is at stake in our relationship with Russia, I thought it worthwhile to write the speech President Obama should have given, but did not.

There are three reasons he did not give it. The first is that American political elites are brain dead to even speak of “resetting” relations with Russia, an unfortunate word that translates into Russian as “raising the price.” The second is that there are many Americans who do not want improved relations, usually as an excuse to keep defense spending ruinously high, and the President figures he has enough enemies and more immediate problems. The third reason is that what is said herein is true, and contemporary American politics is all about placing the delusional above the real, even when reality offers more.

Since I would have asked to speak to the Duma, the Russian Parliament, I have set this text there.

President Medvedev, Prime Minister Putin, ladies and gentlemen of the Duma, thank you for inviting me, and thank you for allowing me to speak before you here. It is a great honor .  This will not be the usual speech given on such occasions. It will be plain speaking, intended for American ears as well as Russian. That an American president should come all the way to Moscow to speak to his own people may seem strange. But I can think of no more appropriate setting to say what I have to say about our two countries and a future we might share, have we but the vision to see it and the will to pursue it.

America’s understanding of Russia has been shaped by two forces, both of them unfortunate. The first was our intense enmity during the Cold War. The second force, in some ways more destructive, has been our attitude toward Russia since the end of the Cold War: an ugly, unavailing combination of condescension and neglect, coupled with patronizing praise every time you did something that made you seem a bit more like us. What America, including too many of our so-called experts, managed to forget was the fundamental fact of Russian history.

For the past thousand years, no nation has accomplished so much while suffering so much, and Russia cannot be understood without giving full due to both. American political culture was shaped by centuries of geographical isolation from mortal enemies. Russia stood open to repeated invasion from East and West. We inherited the Western European Renaissance and Enlightenment. You suffered for centuries under the Tartar yoke. You have been invaded by Sweden and by Poland; you fought the British and the French in the Crimea. Your heroic resistance to Napoleon is legendary, but how many Americans know what Tschaikovy’s 1812 Overture really commemorates? Then there were the two World Wars, vicious climaxes of the centuries-old German Drang nach Osten, or “Push to the East.” Your World War II dead alone, without mentioning the horribly hurt and disturbed, number approximately 26 million men, women and children. By contrast, American dead from that war number only approximately 300,000. Such losses as you endured happened because the Germans, aided by many other nationalities, invaded you for the explicit purpose of exterminating you, wiping you from the face of the earth, with enslavement just a brief, if tormented, station on that Calvary road.

I will not mention here the horrors that the Romanovs and the Soviet Union inflicted upon your own people and others. I only note that the original meaning of the word Slav is Slave, and that Russia for a thousand years has struggled to change the meaning of that word. It is fashionable now to speak of “failed states.” But for much of the 20th century, Europe was a failed civilization and its barbarisms, so many inflicted upon you, occasioned many of your own responses. To understand is not to excuse, nor to forgive. In any case, you do not need my forgiveness. You need to do as you are doing, to come to terms with your own past, with what others have done to you, what you have done to others, what you have done to yourselves. Come to terms for the purpose of taking your rightful place in the world as a great and civilized nation, working with other civilized nations on matters of common urgency and concern.

That is why I am here. To talk a bit about what we might do together. For although our histories are very different, today we share a common failing. Our nations have lost their ways, and for some of the same reasons. If we can understand that much, we may have a foundation on which to build.

Today, having survived twenty difficult and challenging years of transition, you are slowly, painfully learning to reassert yourself as masters in your own home, to establish a vibrant economy and civil society that work for Russia, and secure your near abroad. No nation can tolerate instability on its borders or the domestic domination of thieves and criminals who think the national patrimony and the savings of ordinary people should be looted for private gain. These are the tasks before you.

These are also the challenges facing America.

To build on Prime Minister Putin’s speech at Davos, there is a great deal to be said for capitalism as Adam Smith conceived it: people exchanging value for value, rationally and freely, in trade that leaves both parties better off and benefits society. This is not what we have today, no matter who invokes Smith’s legacy. Smith was enormously concerned for the material dignity of ordinary men and women, farmers and laborers and craftsmen and domestics, and their children: that they have enough good food to eat, that they have clean clothes and sound footwear, that they live in homes, not hovels, that they be able to entertain themselves decently, that they not have to sell themselves into slavery or prostitution, which are virtually one and the same. He thought that capitalism was a means to that end. He certainly did not think that there was neither life nor reality nor value outside the market, or that everything had its market price and if it didn’t, it had no value. He did not believe that everything was either for sale or should be for sale. He did not believe that human beings were for sale.

As an American citizen and a human being, it grieves me terribly to say that Adam Smith’s is not the capitalism most American corporations practice today; they have not for many, many years. Nor is it the capitalism our experts urged upon your nation as it struggled and still struggles to create a market economy. You had enough problems of your own. We did you no favors.

Today, American economic life is dominated by oligarchies and corporations with no loyalty to anything beyond themselves. In their greed for profit and obsession with short-term manipulation over long-term creation, they are destroying my country. And they are taking the world down with us. They forget that, whatever a corporation’s legal responsibility to make money, human beings do not exist for corporations. Not in America and not anywhere else.

Legally, a for-profit corporation has only one purpose: to maximize profits for its shareholders. What would we say of a human being who said, I only want to make money and I don’t care who I hurt or what I harm to do it? How much would we tolerate from such a person? In his 1937 inaugural speech, Franklin Roosevelt, said: “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics. Out of the collapse of a prosperity whose builders boasted their practicality has come the conviction that in the long run economic morality pays.” Economic morality as Adam Smith intended it, a morality that, in its moral essence, is no monopoly of any system.

And perhaps what we say of corporations we might also say of nations. The age of the glorification of ruthless self-interest is over, not least of all because, in the long run, it doesn’t work.

So, what might we accomplish together? By this, I do not mean, how may we help you? It’s high time America got out of the business of “helping,” high time we got into the business of working together.

Since Russia and America have a great many interests and concerns in common, I propose we take a number of immediate, practical steps together to benefit our two nations.

 We are, for which all America should give thanks, cooperating in the fight against Islamist terrorism and separatism. In many concrete ways, you have been of far more help to us than most of Western Europe has. That cooperation should be deepened and broadened and it should, of course, be very bilateral. We understand that Islamist terrorism, separatism and insurrection present grave dangers to your country and to the millions of Russian Muslims who wish to live in peace. We are ready to do what we can. We are certainly ready, as a government, to stop the self-righteous criticism of your desire to remain a single country, even if it comes to force of arms. Abraham Lincoln, I think, would understand.

Economically, in many ways the Russian Far East and the North American Northwest and Far North constitute a single trading area, rich in natural resources and possibilities for human development. I should like to consider the possibilities of joint exploration, development and marketing, perhaps regional agreements on everything from timber and coal to fish, as well as environmental and other energy issues. Canada would be a logical participant in many of these. So would Japan as a consumer.

As for trade, let me be blunt. I should like to see more goods saying “Made in America” for sale in Russia…and in America. I would also like to see more goods saying, “Made in Russia,” available in America and Russia. I would especially like to see substantial amounts of American manufacturing moved to Russia from other foreign lands, whence they have been “outsourced.”

And perhaps we would do well to consider reinvigorating our respective space programs, which are already linked. In many ways, the space race of the Cold War brought out the best in all of us. Let it be so again. And let it be so in developing the technologies and procedures necessary to safeguard our planet and tend to its health. We have a name for our space shuttle projects that study our planet: Mission to Planet Earth. It is a mission we should share.

Finally, we need to see more of each other as people. This means tourism, educational and other exchanges, visits from our respective cultural institutions: museums, symphonies, ballet, and yes, an occasional swapping of rock poets.

We are not enemies. And so it benefits neither of us, not my country nor yours, nor our world, to allow those who want us hostile, for reasons of their own, to set our agendas. Nor does it benefit either of us to be impoverished because we have squandered the work and intelligence and talents of our peoples.

There has been much talk of “resetting” the American and Russian relationship. The obvious question: reset to what? There is really nothing to go back to. But there is much to look forward to. In their famous “Kitchen Debate” of 1958 (?) then Vice President Richard Nixon and Premier Nikita Khrushchev argued over whether communism or capitalism, the Soviet Union or America, was the true wave of the future. We know now that, in differing ways, neither is. Neither the failed communism of the Soviet era nor the present perverted capitalism of our present. We can do better than that. We should. We must. We will.

Thank you.

I finished my novel on 30 June 2009:  stopped making changes, diddling, froze the text.  I had wanted a complete draft by 30 June; instead, I had a completed book.  So my husband and I then went into town:  some bourbon for him, some rosé for me, some meat and veggies and fruit, including two pounds of fresh figs.  I am surprised I have not yet eaten all of them.

I ended up wandering around Costco looking at all the drugged people.  Now, I was pretty much non-compos mentis, but I had an excuse.  I had completed a 230,000 word book in a year and a half, along with 42,000 words of nonfiction essays, not to speak of expanded commentary.  I’m not sure I had an active brain cell. 

What shocked and horrified and disturbed me was that most of the people there, certainly the 50+ crowd, were clearly drugged, mostly on psychoactive drugs of all sorts, but also heart drugs that cause dizziness.  And many people were fat, and by that, I do not mean a little overweight.  I mean fat to the point of making it hard to move, thus hard to circulate oxygen to the brain, which helps with all kinds of cognitive issues.

One of the things that comes with writing a novel set in Russia is that I find myself making some disturbing comparisons, and I am not someone who believes in moral equivalence.  The more so since this book was fundamentally written from the perspective of siloviki, a Russian word meaning “people of force,” derived from silovye struktury, or “structures of force,” which is to say politicians with a background from the uniformed services, such as the Army, the KGB/FSB, and related agencies, not dissidents. 

Wandering around Costco, looking at all the fat and drugged people, all my fellow Americans, I thought, we didn’t need a KGB to forcibly medicate us.  We’ve done it to ourselves in order to avoid facing what is happening to our nation.  And then we eat to console ourselves, far past the point of satiation, to the point where the excess weight overeating generates damages our bodies and our minds.  And we don’t need a KGB to tell editors what to print, we’ve dumbed ourselves down, too.

I’ve been following, at a distance, the “debates” on torture.  Since I’m in a race against time to finish a novel, I’ve pretty much punched out of current events.  My husband, the writer Philip Gold, sends me articles he thinks I should read, such as this one on Russian death squads in Chechnya.  Those who have read previous posts here know that I do not subscribe to the belief that Chechnya can be allowed to go its own way, any more than the American South could be.  I have no way to evaluate this article:  it could be entirely true (it is certainly entirely plausible), parts of it could be true, or it could be entirely made up by men who are very disturbed by “normal” combat operations.  Certainly, many of the atrocity stories from Vietnam fall into the latter category.

Relevant to the larger issue of torture, two things caught my eye.  One of the sources, “Andrei”, described becoming extremely angry and losing control with a prisoner.  Stories like this, when true, are common to all units that use torture, or “enhanced interrogation techniques. ”  One of the best reasons to treat prisoners humanely is that otherwise disciplined troops who are permitted, encouraged, or ordered to treat prisoners inhumanely will become undisciplined, and discipline is key to a successful military unit, i.e., not an organized group of criminals.  The second source, “Vladimir,” said, “Only a very small circle of my men took part in this work [torture]. Some of those we abducted were tougher than others but eventually everyone talks when you give them the right treatment. … It’s dirty and difficult work. You would not be human if you enjoyed it but it was the only way to get this filth to talk… Those who carried it out always volunteered. It would not be right to order one of your men to torture someone. It can be morally and psychologically very tough.’” Leaving aside the apparent internal inconsistency that ”Vladimir” says he formed a death squad but that only a very few of his men took part in the torture of captives, “Vladimir” is also saying he knows he has made some of his men into monsters.

The use of torture is not only the attempted destruction of the human being under torture, it is the certain destruction of the torturer as well.  Some have very serious problems controlling their anger at what they have become; others like it.

Missing from all the hysteria and handwringing about the American use of torture (and, far more commonly, abuse and harsh treatment, because given some of the things I know can be done, I have a hard time seeing waterboarding as torture) is a serious understanding of what it does to the torturers and interrogators.

Back in December, I wrote, Gay Marriage is a Human Right, Not a Religious Issue and rooted my argument in the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution and then to a lesser extend, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its provision that marriage and procreation are fundamental human rights. 

In sum, I argued that 1. marriage is a fundamental human right  (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written and adopted to define the fundamental freedoms and human rights mentioned in the United Nation’s Charter, which is binding upon all member states, of which the  United States is a founding member, and through the person of Eleanor Roosevelt had substantial input into and influence upon the Universal Declaration) and 2. American gay and lesbian people are citizens of the United States who therefore have the same rights to marry their freely chosen and freely chosen partners that straight people do. 

I was roundly lambasted for treating as the intellectual rubbish they are “whatabouts” such as cousin marriage, polygamy, and bestiality.  One was unaware that marriage is not reproduction.  He also thought marriage was closely regulated by the state.  In fact, no crime impinging upon either marriage or reproduction is so cruel that it abrogates a person’s right to marry someone of the opposite sex and have children:  not even rape, or wife-beating or wife-murder or marital rape, not impoverishing your husband or wife, not failure to provide, not incest, including with step-children, not child abuse or pedophilia, not the most reckless or willful failure to be responsible for your fertility.  Another correspondent asserted that gay and lesbian people could marry, just people of the opposite sex, which is of course like saying to my husband and me, of course you can marry so  long as it’s to people of your own sex.  (Thanks, no.)  This correspondent also asserted that he didn’t want gay people to marry because he couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to grow up with two parents of the same sex, and asserted that anyone who disagreed with him was an idiot.   One of these people was a lawyer who used his business email to leave me an anonymous note (if you read the about page, you will know I generally do not have  much respect for people who do not sign their real names, as I do) and he got very upset when I sent him a private reply chiding him on his refusal to address the issues I raised in favor of raising issues of which he showed clear ignorance. 

In short, none of them had the intellectual integrity or moral courage to say, marriage is not a fundamental human right, at least for gay people, and even if it is a fundamental human right, the Constitution does not apply to gay people.

Now the Iowa State Supreme Court has voided the ban on legal recognition of marriages between couples of the same sex finding it unconstitutional on grounds that it denied to gay people equal protection of the laws. 

What is interesting about this opinion is that the reasoning is not only constitutionally correct but the tone of this opinion.  I haven’t contacted the Iowa Supreme Court, but the tenor of the opinion indicates disgust with the cowardice, moral and intellectual, people bring to the issue of same-sex marriages and an  intention for their decision to be a model for future litigation.  The impeccable, civilized legal language cannot disguise this attitude towards all those who think the marriages of same-sex couples should be denied equal protection of the law:  still moving?  Shoot them again.

Upon consideration, having reread the full opinion, which can be found here, in order to extract only what I thought were the juiciest bits (and I never thought the day would come when I would use language  like that to describe a legal opinion), this is more along the lines of deliberately reloading with hollow-point before administering those insurance shots.  As near as I can tell, the only way this opinion can be overturned in a way that withstands scrutiny is to amend the Iowa Constitution to eliminate the equal protection clause.  But then, ignoring the equal protection clause of the US Constitution is the only way the Defense of Marriage Act was passed and gay people continue to be discharged from the military, along with a few other things I can think of. 

Some passages follow.

On majority rule: 

It is also well established that courts must, under all circumstances, protect the supremacy of the constitution as a means of protecting our republican form of government and our freedoms. As was observed by Justice Robert H. Jackson decades ago in reference to the United States Constitution, the very purpose of limiting the power of the elected branches of government by constitutional provisions like the Equal Protection Clause is “to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts.” W. Va. State Bd. of, 319 U.S. 624, 638, 63 S. Ct. 1178, 1185, 87 L. Ed. 1628, Educ. v. Barnette 1638 (1943).

On defining equal protection: 

The process of defining equal protection, as shown by our history as captured and told in court decisions, begins by classifying people into groups. A classification persists until a new understanding of equal protection is achieved. The point in time when the standard of equal protection finally takes a new form is a product of the conviction of one, or many, individuals that a particular grouping results in inequality and the ability of the judicial system to perform its constitutional role free from the influences that tend to make society’s understanding of equal protection resistant to change. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes poignantly said, “It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past.”

On being similarly situated with heterosexual couples: 

Therefore, with respect to the subject and purposes of Iowa’s marriage laws, we find that the plaintiffs are similarly situated compared to heterosexual persons. Plaintiffs are in committed and loving relationships, many raising families, just like heterosexual couples. Moreover, official recognition of their status provides an institutional basis for defining their fundamental relational rights and responsibilities, just as it does for heterosexual couples. Society benefits, for example, from providing same-sex couples a stable framework within which to raise their children and the power to make health care and end-of-life decisions for loved ones, just as it does when that framework is provided for opposite-sex couples. In short, for purposes of Iowa’s marriage laws, which are designed to bring a sense of order to the legal relationships of committed couples and their families in myriad ways, plaintiffs are similarly situated in every important respect, but for their sexual orientation.

On laws prohibiting marriage between two people on of the same sex  on the basis of their sex, not their sexual orientation: 

It is true the marriage statute does not expressly prohibit gay and lesbian persons from marrying; it does, however, require that if they marry, it must be to someone of the opposite sex. Viewed in the complete context of marriage, including intimacy, civil marriage with a person of the opposite sex is as unappealing to a gay or lesbian person as civil marriage with a person of the same sex is to a heterosexual. Thus, the right of a gay or lesbian person under the marriage statute to enter into a civil marriage only with a person of the opposite sex is no right at all. Under such a law, gay or lesbian individuals cannot simultaneously fulfill their deeply felt need for a committed personal relationship, as influenced by their sexual orientation, and gain the civil status and attendant benefits granted by the statute.In re Marriage Cases, 183 P.3d at 441. The benefit denied by the marriage statute—the status of civil marriage for same-sex couples—is so “closely correlated with being homosexual” as to make it apparent the law is targeted at gay and lesbian people as a class. See Lawrence, 539 U.S. at 583, 123 S. Ct. at 2486, 156 L. Ed. 2d at 529 (O’Connor, J., concurring) (reviewing criminalization of homosexual sodomy and concluding that “[w]hile it is true that the law applies only to conduct, the conduct targeted by this law is conduct that is closely correlated with being homosexual. Under such circumstances, [the] sodomy law is targeted at more than conduct. It is instead directed toward gay persons as a class.”). The Court’s decision in Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620, 116 S. Ct. 1620, 134 L. Ed. 2d 855 (1996), supports this conclusion. Romer can be read to imply that sexual orientation is a trait that defines an individual and is not merely a means to associate a group with a type of behavior. See Romer , 517 U.S. at 632, 116 S. Ct. at 1627, 134 L. Ed. 2d at 865–66 (holding an amendment to a state constitution pertaining to “homosexual . . . orientation” expresses “animus toward the class that it affects”).

Instead, a gay or lesbian person can only gain the same rights under the statute as a heterosexual person by negating the very trait that defines gay and lesbian people as a class—their sexual orientation.

By purposefully placing civil marriage outside the realistic reach of gay and lesbian individuals, the ban on same-sex civil marriages differentiates implicitly on the basis of sexual orientation.

On whether or not sexual orientation is what is known in legal language as a suspect category, like race, sex, religion, or national origin, which is to say any differentiation along those lines is typically driven by outmoded prejudices, if not outright animus, and thus inherently suspect: 

The first consideration is whether gay and lesbian people have suffered a history of purposeful unequal treatment because of their sexual orientation. The County does not, and could not in good faith, dispute the historical reality that gay and lesbian people as a group have long been the victim of purposeful and invidious discrimination because of their sexual orientation.

On supporting traditional marriages:

 The governmental objective identified by the County—to maintain the traditional understanding of marriage—is simply another way of saying the governmental objective is to limit civil marriage to opposite-sex couples. Opposite-sex marriage, however, is the classification made under the statute, and this classification must comply with our principles of equal protection. Thus, the use of traditional marriage as both the governmental objective and the classification of the statute transforms the equal protection analysis into the question of whether restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples accomplishes the governmental objective of maintaining opposite-sex marriage.

This approach is, of course, an empty analysis.

On promoting an optimal environment for raising children:

The civil marriage statute is under-inclusive because it does not exclude from marriage other groups of parents—such as child abusers, sexual predators, parents neglecting to provide child support, and violent felons—that are undeniably less than optimal parents. …

If the statute was truly about the best interest of children, some benefit to children derived from the ban on same-sex civil marriages would be observable. Yet, the germane analysis does not show how the best interests of children of gay and lesbian parents, who are denied an environment supported by the benefits of marriage under the statute, are served by the ban. Likewise, the exclusion of gays and lesbians from marriage does not benefit the interests of those children of heterosexual parents, who are able to enjoy the environment supported by marriage with or without the inclusion of same-sex couples.

  On promoting procreation:

 Gay and lesbian persons are capable of procreation. Thus, the sole conceivable avenue by which exclusion of gay and lesbian people from civil marriage could promote more procreation is if the unavailability of civil marriage for same-sex partners caused homosexual individuals to “become” heterosexual in order to procreate within the present traditional institution of civil marriage. The briefs, the record, our research, and common sense do not suggest such an outcome. Even if possibly true, the link between exclusion of gay and lesbian people from marriage and increased procreation is far too tenuous to withstand heightened scrutiny. Specifically, the statute is significantly under-inclusive with respect to the objective of increasing procreation because it does not include a variety of groups that do not procreate for reasons such as age, physical disability, or choice. In other words, the classification is not substantially related to the asserted legislative purpose.

On promoting the stability of cross-sex relationships:

While the institution of civil marriage likely encourages stability in opposite-sex relationships, we must evaluate whether excluding gay and lesbian people from civil marriage encourages stability in opposite sex relationships. The County offers no reasons that it does, and we can find none. The stability of opposite-sex relationships is an important governmental interest, but the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage is not substantially related to that objective.

On conserving state resources:

 The argument is based on a simple premise: couples who are married enjoy numerous governmental benefits, so the state’s fiscal burden associated with civil marriage is reduced if less people are allowed to marry. In the common sense of the word, then, it is “rational” for the legislature to seek to conserve state resources by limiting the number of couples allowed to form civil marriages. By way of example, the County hypothesizes that, due to our laws granting tax benefits to married couples, the State of Iowa would reap less tax revenue if individual taxpaying gay and lesbian people were allowed to obtain a civil marriage. Certainly, Iowa’s marriage statute causes numerous government benefits, including tax benefits, to be withheld from plaintiffs. Thus, the ban on same-sex marriages may conserve some state resources. Excluding any group from civil marriage—African-Americans, illegitimates, aliens, even red-haired individuals—would conserve state resources in an equally “rational” way. Yet, such classifications so obviously offend our society’s collective sense of equality that courts have not hesitated to provide added protections against such inequalities. 

On organized religion, the reader of this blog noting that these statements apply virtually verbatim to the US Constitution and  Supreme Court as well:

We have a constitutional duty to ensure equal protection of the law. Faithfulness to that duty requires us to hold Iowa’s marriage statute, Iowa Code section 595.2, violates the Iowa Constitution. To decide otherwise would be an abdication of our constitutional duty. If gay and lesbian people must submit to different treatment without an exceedingly persuasive justification, they are deprived of the benefits of the principle of equal protection upon which the rule of law is founded. Iowa Code section 595.2 denies gay and lesbian people the equal protection of the law promised by the Iowa Constitution.

Now that we have addressed and rejected each specific interest advanced by the County to justify the classification drawn under the statute, we consider the reason for the exclusion of gay and lesbian couples from civil marriage left unspoken by the County: religious opposition to same-sex marriage. The County’s silence reflects, we believe, its understanding this reason cannot, under our Iowa Constitution, be used to justify a ban on same-sex marriage. …

Thus, in pursuing our task in this case, we proceed as civil judges, far removed from the theological debate of religious clerics, and focus only on the concept of civil marriage and the state licensing system that identifies a limited class of persons entitled to secular rights and benefits associated with civil marriage.

This contrast of [religious] opinions in our society largely explains the absence of any religion-based rationale to test the constitutionality of Iowa’s same-sex marriage ban. Our constitution does not permit any branch of government to resolve these types of religious debates and entrusts to courts the task of ensuring government avoids them. …

 

We, of course, have a constitutional mandate to protect the free exercise of religion in Iowa, which includes the freedom of a religious organization to define marriages it solemnizes as unions between a man and a woman.  See Iowa Const. art. I, § 3 (“The general assembly shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise [of religion] . . . .”). This mission to protect religious freedom is consistent with our task to prevent government  from endorsing any religious view. State government can have no religious views, either directly or indirectly, expressed through its legislation. Knowlton v. Baumhover, 182 Iowa 691, 710, 166 N.W. 202, 208 (1918). This proposition is the essence of the separation of church and state. As a result, civil marriage must be judged under our constitutional standards of equal protection and not under religious doctrines or the religious views of individuals. This approach does not disrespect or denigrate the religious views of many Iowans who may strongly believe in marriage as a dual-gender union, but considers, as we must, only the constitutional rights of all people, as expressed by the promise of equal protection for all. We are not permitted to do less and would damage our constitution immeasurably by trying to do more.

On equality before the law, noting again that this applies virtually verbatim to the US Constitution and Supreme Court as well: 

We have a constitutional duty to ensure equal protection of the law. Faithfulness to that duty requires us to hold Iowa’s marriage statute, Iowa Code section 595.2, violates the Iowa Constitution. To decide otherwise would be an abdication of our constitutional duty. If gay and lesbian people must submit to different treatment without an exceedingly persuasive justification, they are deprived of the benefits of the principle of equal protection upon which the rule of law is founded. Iowa Code section 595.2 denies gay and lesbian people the equal protection of the law promised by the Iowa Constitution. 

On separate but equal not being equal at all:

 A new distinction based on sexual orientation would be equally suspect and difficult to square with the fundamental principles of equal protection embodied in our constitution. This record, our independent research, and the appropriate equal protection analysis do not suggest the existence of a justification for such a legislative classification that substantially furthers any governmental objective. Consequently, the language in Iowa Code section 595.2 limiting civil marriage to a man and a woman must be stricken from the statute, and the remaining statutory language must be interpreted and applied in a manner allowing gay and lesbian people full access to the institution of civil marriage.

No more need be said.  This is an elegant opinion, leaving no rational response.