Everything You Wanted to Know About What’s Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask

CARTOGRAPHICAL IMPERIALISM AND BINARIES

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Some things could be other than they are. And if they were, well, then I guess things would be different, wouldn’t they? That’s not very interesting. What we find interesting is that decisions could have been made other than they were. It’s that kind of counterfacutalizing that makes possible our forensic judgments. If you hadn’t run the light that child would still be alive. If you hadn’t jumped in to rescue her that woman would have drowned.

But I have something much more specific in mind.

What I have in mind are not decisions we took because we thought they mattered, like whether to go to war, or – less dramatically but as importantly -whether to put a sales tax on milk. Rather I’m thinking about decisions we took to do things this way rather than that because we thought it didn’t matter which, so long as it was one or the other. I’m thinking of things like which side of the road we’ll all drive on, or from which line of longitude we’ll measure time zones.

There’s always a history to why we chose this way rather than that; for why, for example, in North America and Europe we drive on the right whereas in England and the Antipodes they drive on the left. Or why it’s the time in Greenwich rather than Calcutta from which we all set our watches. These things are interesting, I suppose, but still not very.

What’s much more interesting, however, is why, on a map, north is up and south is down?

We’re told – and I have no reason to naysay whomever of my betters researched it – that it had something to do with an unreflective Eurocentrism. And then, because of European imperialism, that perspective took canonical root. But it’s

precisely because of this history that there’s a political movement afoot to have us turn our globes and our maps upside-down.

Or better put, downside-up. For notice the negative associations that attach to the phrase ‘upside-down’. To say that something’s upside-down is to suggest there’s something wrong with it. And that’s exactly how most of us feel when we see a globe ‘standing on its head’, or, more commonly, a road map that my ‘navigator’ has to rotate before she can read it and tell me which way to turn.

Curmudgeons like me complain when the neighbors haven’t mowed their lawn in almost a week. Sometimes, to get into character, I have an imaginary cane I shake. But back in the 80’s I came to accept using ‘she’ instead of ‘he’ in my academic writing. I’m gradually learning not to presuppose the sexual orientation of my students when coming up with an example of something in class. So unlike Scrooge, I’m not “too old to change.” Like the members of Red Green’s Possum Lodge, “I can change, if I must.” So if, like Black Lives Matter and Idle No More, upending my globe combats white supremacy, I’m totally on board.

But just a few thoughts before we push off.

As things stand, Italy is a boot, with the toe kicking a – I don’t know, a misshapen meatball? – to the left. Now do the flip. Unless you’re going to ask me to stand on my head – and please don’t – Italy is now an arm with a hand either catching or tossing – hard to tell which – a misshapen meatball to the right! I can learn to live with that. The mind is infinitely plastic. Old similes will give way to new ones. In fact it could be kinda fun to have to reinvent them. .

But my worry is this. What happens if the Eastern hemisphere – which has been as denigrated by the West as has the South by the North – gets the same idea?

I’ll give you a minute to try to picture this proposal. If it helps, look at your globe through a mirror.

Now we’ve got navigational problems that could cross a rabbi’s eyes. I used to have to turn right when driving from Naples down to Reggio Calabria. Now I have to turn left. With a little retooling I can adjust. But will El Nino and La Nina be able to keep all this straight?

What this suggests is this admittedly unconscionable cartographical imperialism might have less to do with European muskets versus African spears and more to do with gravity and human morphology. To explain:

We’re land animals. We evolved to see the world in terms of up and down and forward and back. What was left to us to work out for ourselves was that third dimension, without which we couldn’t negotiate a three-dimensional world, Which hand will be left and which right? And how would we remember? Robinson Crusoe tied a ribbon around one wrist and called it his ribbonside. But when his man Friday came along, Crusoe being white and Friday being black, he pinned it with a staple gun to his servant’s ear.

In any event, north, south, east, and west, are parasitic on our having not two but three two-valued dimensions, because we need to be able to imagine how things would look from over there. We now know that the world is reversed in the eye and then reversed again in our brains. But save for experiencing the world through yet another reversing lens, there’s no reversing our visual field. Whether we’re facing this way or that in the Americas, Asia will always be over in that direction, and that direction we’ve decided to call east. We can represent it on a globe as being over in this direction rather than that one, but we can’t experience it that way when looking down on the two continents from space. And a globe just is as if we’re looking down at the Earth from space.

We can rotate the globe any way we like, just as, in our minds, we can rotate ourselves in space any way we like. We can watch the Earth rotate on its axis, or we can, along with the rest of the cosmos, revolve ourselves around it. There’s no fact of the matter as to which of the two is really happening, any more than there’s a fact of the matter as to whether north is up or down on a map. If the latter is a political decision, so is the former.

So I’ve made a political decision. If I’m going to be asked to flip my globe downside-up in solidarity with (what Frantz Fanon called) the Wretched of the Earth – which I think would be only fair – then surely it’s equally fair for me to ask others, in solidarity with our much-maligned pre-Copernican brothers and sisters, to join me in my geocentricity.

Okay, that was a bit tongue in cheek. But this next bit isn’t.

Speaking of political decisions, look! There are no natural kinds. We carve up the world according to what carvings are useful to us. It’s useful to us to categorize ourselves first and foremost as animals, because if we start thinking of ourselves as spiritual beings, we’re going to forget to eat and then we’ll starve to death.

The next paragraph is in voce. I have a friend – for whom, I hasten to add, I have no respect – who’d say what he’s about to, though I certainly wouldn’t.

“Now then,” says he, “I’m an animal. So when someone’s coming down the hallway in my direction, the first cut I make, even before friend or foe, is fuck-able or not. If the answer is yes, that doesn’t mean I want to, and certainly not that I can. There are seventeen further gates that have to flip open rather than shut after that first one. But I happen to be out-of-the-closet exclusively heterosexual, for whom every female is prima facie fuck-able and every male absolutely not. So the binary of male and female is indispensable to me.”

So – and now I’m back to my own voice – I grant that there are all kinds of uses for which this binary is utterly inadequate and/or misleading. My point is simply that the binary is embedded in a fact not about human biology – I’m hip enough to concede that – but in human behavior, more particularly my friend’s. So given his uses for carving up the world, he’s as entitled to his binary categories of male and female as any of the people he’s so categorized are entitled to the multivalent categories they find useful. You don’t want him to think of you as prima facie fuck-able? Well, live with it, just as he has to live with you refusing to think of him as an electric toaster.

That said, I have to add that I find it odd that people think I should take such a keen interest in the sexual proclivities of complete strangers. To be honest – and I’m really sorry about this – I just don’t give a damn about the play list that makes up your sexual repertoire. I know you’re trying to shock me, but trust me when I say nothing could. I know someone who’s a formicophile! (Yes, we’re talkin’ ants..) So that you identify yourself as a Klingon who wants to be a Clydesdale nag with a speech impediment having auditory canal sex with a manatee, just doesn’t impress me. I’d much rather know what you think about the war in Syria, or the rise of fascism in America, or cartographical imperialism.

I’m sorry if that makes you feel unaffirmed as a whatever-you’ve-decided-you-are. But if you really feel the need to share, and for some reason it has to be with me, I’ll try to look interested. I really will try.

THE NEXT FOURTEEN YEARS

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In the words of Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony, “The evil that men do live after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.”

Fortunately it’s the opposite with political prognostications. No one remembers if you get it wrong. But if you get it right, you’re forever cited for being incredibly astute. So yes, it’s a cheat. But it’s only cheating if you can get caught. And as just argued, even if you can be, you won’t be. So here’s my risk-free prognostication for the next fourteen years.

Left and right, anti-Trump and pro-, are orthogonal cuts, though clearly there are orders of magnitude more people in the left-anti and right-pro quadrants than in the other two. The doctrinaire libertarians and anti-Trump Republicans, who make up the right-anti, don’t know where to cast their votes. And the doctrinaire socialists and pro-Trump Democrats, occupying the left-pro, find themselves similarly stymied. So both of these constituencies are out of the picture. This leaves the 2020 presidential to hang on three key contingencies:

1) who the Democrats put up against Trump,

2) who wins the media war between right wing pro-Trump Fox News on the one

side, and left wing MSNBC and anti-Trump CNN on the other, and

3) whether Trump will be evil enough, but also savvy enough, to start a winnable

but not-yet-won war.

The Democrats will need a candidate free of the kind of cement footware that sunk Hilary Clinton. Well let’s see. Joe Biden would clearly make the best President, but he’s probably too sensible to make the best candidate in this era of political infotainment. Bernie Sanders is too old, too pontifical, and too Jewish. Elizabeth Warren lacks the presence to command the enthusiasm needed for a Presidential campaign. Even the most misogynist racist can’t help but love Michele, but she’d be rightly seen as just a front for another eight years for her husband. Oprah would have to answer for every line in every book she ever recommended. And progressives would have to hold their noses for California Junior Senator Kamala Harris, whose tenure as Attorney General for that state did not speak well for her civil libertarian credentials.

That leaves Obama-clone Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Kennedy-spawn Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts. I’d put my money on Booker for the nomination, because Kennedy will want to hold back until ‘24. But in the actual election I’d only bet the family farm on Kennedy. Whites won’t come out for Booker, but blacks will for Kennedy.

By holding Trump’s feet to the fire, CNN has only been doing its job. Unfortunately by doing its job in this age of all-news-is-partisan-news, it’s forfeited its former role as the non-partisan voice in America. So it would come down to CNN versus Fox if there was anyone who tunes into both. But there isn’t. Either you watch Fox because you’re with Trump, or you watch CNN because you’re agin’ him. There’s plenty of room for apathy in America, but none at all for fence-sitting.

But it does come down to which of the two can get out the vote by selling the importance of the outcome. Unless, that is, Americans can be offered, quite independently of policy, some one to get excited about. And that’s where a Jack or Robert Kennedy come back from the grave could be the king-maker.

Trump’s trump card, however, would be the same one played by George W. Just start a winnable but not-yet-won war. It wouldn’t have to be North Korea or Iran. There are plenty of provocable easy pickings out there. But I suspect Trump thinks he can win re-election as a shit-disturber, not as a commander-in-chief. Besides, a bomber jacket just isn’t his style.

So here’s my prediction. It’ll be Trump again in 2020 unless a) Kennedy can be inveigled to run four years ahead of schedule, and b) Trump makes the mistake of thinking he can emerge victorious without first having to start a war.

That said, 2024 looks like a shoe-in for the Democrats. This is because Mike Pence has about as much charisma as your tax accountant, and no new Republican face can emerge while Trump remains the face of the party. So it’s precisely as the Republican establishment worried it would be. A Trump presidency would render the party irrelevant while his presidency lasted, and then doom it for eight years thereafter. That’s both the beauty and the beast of American presidential electoral politics. Image matters. Policy? Not so much.

So if I were an American – which thankfully I’m not! – I’d pray for a) a Joe Kennedy challenge in 2020, and if Trump does realize he needs a winnable but not-yet-won war, that b) some saboteur on his staff recommends Denmark.

Anyhow, remember folks: if I’m right – which I probably won’t be – you heard it here first.

THE HAIDT HYPOTHESIS

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Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued, quite convincingly, that a university can dedicate itself to the search for truth, or to the promotion of social justice, but not both.

Truth and justice are seldom about the same thing. But when they are, what’s true may not be just, and what’s just may not be true. Suppose it was true that the rest of us would be much better off if we could just rid ourselves of those damn _____, you fill in the blank. But I take it we’re all of a mind that genocide is just not on.

It’s also widely believed, at least in Turkey, that there’s no injustice in criminalizing the historicizing of the Armenian genocide, notwithstanding most Turks know full well what happened. Jesus taught that ‘the truth will set you free.” But often enough it’ll just bury you!

But there’s a more straightforward philosophical argument that can be appended to Haidt’s case, and it’s this:

There’s a fact-of-the-matter as to whether nineteen (mostly) Saudi young men did or did not hijack and pilot those planes on September 11, 2001. And that fact is, in theory at least, empirically discoverable. But there’s no such fact-of-the-matter as to whether a woman does or does not have the right to control her own reproductivity. That’s a political decision.

So it’s not that a truth-seeking university couldn’t or shouldn’t host a lively debate between 9/11 Truthers and the official story about what happened that morning. That’s what historians do. Nor is it that a justice-seeking university couldn’t or shouldn’t host a lively debate about whether the Start-by-Believing and #MeToo campaigns will or will not accrue to the empowerment of women. That’s what seekers after justice try to work out. But the two debates involve very different kinds of questions.

The historian – the good ones at least – will be looking at the evidence for and against some historical hypothesis, and let the chips fall where they may. The social justice seeker will be looking at the impact of some policy or program on those on whose behalf she’s looking. In short, he has his work, she hers. God is in His heaven, and all’s well with the world. Except that …

Except that the social justice seeker will also be looking at the impact on her political agenda of the historian’s or scientist’s pronouncements on these facts-of-the-matter. And therein lies the problem. At a social justice university, a pronouncement that undermines some political agenda will be rightly disallowed. For that matter, even a question the asking of which undermines that political agenda will be rightly disallowed. Thus, for example, at a social justice university questioning the Holocaust is Holocaust-denial, Holocaust-denial is anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitism is grounds for immediate dismissal.

Here’s a less dramatic case in point. Shortly after it opened, the Women’s Centre at my university launched an awareness campaign about violence against women, in the service of which it distributed a poster pointing out that 60% of the victims of domestic violence are women and children. But hang on. Doesn’t that mean that fully 40% of the victims of domestic violence are adult men? And since more than 20% of victims of this violence must surely be the children in the home, that means that the targets of domestic violence are more apt to be men than women. So whoever thought these posters would raise awareness of violence against women was either too stupid to draw this simple inference, or else she hoped others would be too stupid to draw it.

But now suppose that this stupidity had been brought to her attention. Would she have gone ahead with the posters and let the chips fall where they may? Certainly not. She would have suppressed the information, and been damn quick about it! That’s just the nature of advocacy. It’s not about what’s true. It’s about what works. And that’s just as it should be.

What she could have done, I suppose, is point out that because of the physical and political asymmetry between men and women, the subordinating effect of a man beating a women is orders of magnitude greater than that of a woman slapping a man. But though obviously true, and even more obviously relevant, that would be far too subtle for an eye-catching poster. So even though her point is a sound one, she either has to make it stupidly or not make it at all.

Haidt doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with a university dedicating itself to social justice, just as long as it’s upfront about it. He just thinks that if it is upfront, it won’t have very many takers. This is because employers aren’t usually looking for people who know what’s politically correct. They’re looking for people who have a better than random chance of knowing what’s true.

People trained at social justice universities like Yale get jobs at other social justice universities. People trained at the truth-seeking universities like the University of Chicago get jobs at other truth-seeking universities. Neither MSNBC nor Fox News recruits out of the University of Chicago. MSNBC recruits out of Yale, and it shows. Fox News recruits out of Ronald Reagan Elementary, and it shows.

The social network is currently engaged in what appears to be a winner-take-all culture war. It’s over bathrooms and pronouns, immigration and health care, gun control and abortion counseling … On the one side are the Alt-Right, who are, for now at least, united behind their new Fuhrer. On the other are the LGBTQQIP2SAAISA+, who are currently fighting amongst themselves about the politically correct ordering of these letters. Taking cover – because what else can they do? – are the Jonathan Haidts and Steven Pinkers, who can only wish a pox on both their houses.

Left and right, liberal and conservative, and cross-overs that boggle the mind of any non-aligned observer … Has it always been thus? I’m not old enough to say with any confidence. But I do remember the Sixties. We liberals won that one. That was two-steps-forward. So even if the Alt-Right takes us back a step, we’re still one ahead. So yes, God is in His heaven, and all’s well with the world. Except that …

Except that the university at which I work is currently poised between Haidt’s two models. Since it’s relatively small, its students predominantly rural, and not yet very racially diverse, the pressure for political correctness is much weaker than it is in larger universities in more cosmopolitan centers. But the fields surrounding it don’t entirely set it apart from the world beyond those fields. So a decision has to be made. And it has to be made clear.

But because, like at most universities, our Administration is made up of ex-academics turned bean-counters, and because members of faculty who should know better don’t, what we’re getting, and what our students are getting, is a hodgepodge of mixed signals. It would appear – and who can blame them? – that all the stakeholders want to have it both ways, notwithstanding Haidt’s admonition that they can’t. Neither mandate is being well served. As a result it’s just not a very good university.

I’m in the twilight of my career, and I’m not a believer in leaving a legacy. Que sera sera. But the future is ours to see.

ISRAEL’S NEW NATION STATE LAW

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Eighty-three years after the National Socialist government of Germany passed the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935, the Zionist government of Israel has decided to follow suit.

It wasn’t inevitable, but perhaps predictable. Eighty-three years is a long time to hope history wouldn’t repeat itself, even with some of the same players. And besides, whatever’s happening today with Israel’s treatment of its 1.8 million Palestinian citizens bears no resemblance to what happened back then with Germany’s treatment of its Jewish citizens; though of course they weren’t citizens after 1935, so perhaps the comparison isn’t apt.

The Nation State law in Israel merely privileges Jews, which can’t possibly amount to second-class-ifying Palestinians. And any resemblance between the wall surrounding the Warsaw Ghetto and the fence surrounding Gaza – and the shelling of those imprisoned within it – is purely coincidental. Just because two things look the same doesn’t mean they are. The identity of indiscernibles is an anti-Zionist trope. And anti-Zionism is just another word for anti-Semitism.

Hmm …

Critics of the new law concede that it doesn’t change anything. It merely reiterates what was unequivocally promulgated seventy years earlier in 1948.

True, but not entirely. It puts the world on notice that more sinister things are on their way. Those 1.8 million Palestinians – and their 3.5 million brothers and sisters in the Occupied Territories – are costing seven million Jewish Israeli taxpayers considerably. One way or the other they have to be got rid of. A two-state solution provides relief from both the economic and human costs of occupation, but it also provides a place to which Palestinians must ‘return’, as distinct from the may return cited in the Israeli Law of the Return.

And why not? Most Jews were no more native to Palestine than most Palestinians will be to the West Bank and Gaza. What’s important is having one’s own country. What’s less important is where.

The Palestinians know this is what a two-state solution is all about. And it’s that awareness that accounts for their being less than entirely sanguine about an ‘independent’ Palestinian state. The two-state solution is just the Israeli euphemism for what, prior to the fall of Apartheid in 1989, the South Africans euphemistically called the ‘Homelands’.

And the Israelis, for their part, want guarantees of security from any sovereign ‘homeland’, a guarantee they can never have without that second state being governed, as is the West Bank today, by a Quizling regime.

So some of us Jews – and by the way, in much the way only blacks can call each other nigger, we call ourselves self-loathing – are still holding out hope against all hope for a one-state solution, in which Jews and Arabs alike will share all of what was once Palestine, with a Law of the Return applying to Jews, certainly, but equally to Palestinians displaced by the wars of ’48 and ’67.

The ratio of Palestinians absorbed by the world outside of Palestine is not orders of magnitude off that of Jews still in Diaspora. Both run at about twice the number living in-country. That’s also on par with Italians living outside Italy, Greeks outside Greece, Portuguese outside Portugal, and so on. But to refer to them as in diaspora would be a bit of a stretch.

Not so with Jews and Palestinians. Why not? Because Jews and Palestinians living abroad identify in a way that Italians and others do not. That identification is unlikely to dissipate soon, in part because of the Shoah and the Nakba, but also because there are those in-country who depend on those out-country to so identify.

In this Israel/Palestine is not entirely unique. For many years Irish-Americans considered themselves Irish first and Americans second. One of the vectors that brought the Troubles in Northern Ireland to an end was that Irish-Americans began to perceive the silliness of the Catholic/Protestant divide.

And so one source of hope is that Jewish and Palestinians in diaspora will begin to feel a similar embarrassment, and start sitting around each other’s tables. For one thing Palestinians can cook and Jews can’t. For another Jews are funny and Palestinians aren’t. Ultimately these are the things that matter. Walls that wail and domes that rock are the things of children’s songs.

 

 

A MODEST WORRY AND A MODEST PROPOSAL

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Living next to the American juggernaut puts Canadians in an ambiguous position. It’s not that we’re worried that the current American drift towards fascism is going to spill over the border. Not all, but I think enough Canadians find the level of political maturity south of the 49th so risible that we’d be too embarrassed to imitate it. But not unlike the Poles in the summer of 1939, we do worry – perhaps too much, perhaps too little – that his base will find our ridicule of their Fuhrer too “curbing of their enthusiasm,” and they’ll feel a need to do something about it. North Korea and Iran could and would fight back, as did England and Russia. But we’d be little Denmark.

It wouldn’t last. Fascism never does. But putting up with it while it does would be, at the very least, an inconvenience.

The signs of this approaching courtship with fascism are multiplying daily. Economic, military, and moral brinkmanship are always the three dead giveaways. But so are the signs of seeing the signs. Already many Canadians are avoiding flights that touch down in the U.S. en route to or back from Europe or the Far East. There are just too many horror stories. Why court that kind of anxiety?

I live abroad a third of the year. Republicans don’t travel. And certainly not abroad. So when I encounter an American I never get other than a shaking of the head and deep embarrassment. This time it’s not the Jews who are thinking twice about returning home. This time it’s everybody else.

There’s a culture war taking place in America. It’s about who can use what bathroom and who must use what pronouns. And, well, maybe a few other things. Americans caught in the middle aren’t going to go to the wall over bathrooms and pronouns, so they go to ground instead, leaving everything above ground to the alt-right. Who knew the alt-right was even there?! And now it’s everywhere.

Fascism can’t grow and survive without an enemy. And the forces of bathroom and pronoun silliness are providing it with one. It’s the makings of a perfect storm.

I’m an anti-awfulizer. I’m guessing it’s all going to just blow over. But I think there are a few things the rest of the world can do to ensure it does.

Start by insisting that every international scientific, academic, and professional association moves its convention to a venue outside the U.S., and do it on the grounds that Moslem would-be attendees can no longer be confident they’ll be allowed into the country. That threatens to turn America into a hewer of wood and fetcher of water, which earns precious little foreign currency compared to software programs and MRI’s. In very short order the best minds in the country will have left it, and the best students, both foreign and domestic, will have followed them out.

In short, shun and isolate where it hurts the most. Where it hurts the most is not in Iowa. Where it hurts the most is in Silicon Valley and Seattle. That’s what “makes America great”. Soybeans don’t.

But it wouldn’t need to come to any of this. No need to threaten. Just do. The talking heads will figure it out soon enough. Soon enough that it needn’t come to any of this.

But, of course, this is a collective action problem. And as Garrett Harding pointed out, all too often the result is a tragedy of the commons. This tragedy – the tragedy of a bout of fascism in America – won’t destroy the world, but it would be, at the very least, an inconvenience.

 

 

CAN UNSOLICITED POETRY BE SEXUAL ASSAULT?

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I have no problem with your sexual orientation provided you stop calling it that.

You say you’re not attracted to women. Well, I’m not attracted to most of them either. And of the ones I am attracted to, the last thing I want is to have sex with them. Kissing, fondling, cuddling, oral, anal … sure. But what do any of these have to do with sex? I was taught that sex is about how certain organisms reproduce, namely that amoeba duplicate themselves by cell division whereas we do it by combining reproductive cells. But unless the birds-and-the-bees talk I was given when I was ten was all tongue in cheek, nothing from the list above is going to eventuate in offspring.

It’s true that some things on that list arouse in us the same feelings we have when aroused sexually. But so does having to sneeze. It’s true that the release we feel when we ejaculate into a hand or an anus or a mouth is indistinguishable from the release we feel when we ejaculate into a vagina. But that doesn’t make them the same thing.

I’m not saying that it’s the intention that marks the distinction, because more often than not what we’re intending when we ejaculate into a vagina is the same thing we’re intending when we ejaculate into a mouth. Rather I must be drawing a strict liability distinction. If but only if you ejaculate into a vagina are you, knowingly or not, incurring the possibility of offspring. And that’s why it’s called having sex.

But hang on. I had a vasectomy when I was thirty, after which I wasn’t incurring the possibility of offspring, and so on my account I haven’t had sex in thirty-eight years. Moreover, what if I have vaginal intercourse but fail to ejaculate? I might say I had unsatisfying sex, but would I say I hadn’t had sex at all?

So clearly I have to modify my account. The problem is that any such modification is going to invoke an endless series of embedded counterfactuals. But what will constrain my counterfactualizing? If I say something about how it would incur the possibility of reproduction if I hadn’t had a vasectomy, why can’t my critic point out that anal sex would too if the anus was also a vagina? I suspect the more I try to repair my position the worse it’s going to get for me.

So all I have to offer is a tu quoque. Your definition of sex is too broad. If I read you a poem without asking if you’d like to hear it, I could be guilty of a sexual assault. Oh the fun I could have if you try to define what you mean by sex!

There is, of course, the fallback we-know-it-when-we-see-it position. But that’s precisely the protocol that’s been getting us into so much jurisprudential trouble. Someone feels she’s being sexualized, and so she must have been. It’s the way he shook my hand.

So all I’m saying here is that the term sex, and those innumerable words in its locution-set, are carrying too much baggage to be of any use save in their original and so paradigmatic heterosexual coital sense. So all I’m suggesting here is that we coin another term for the kind of physical and/or verbal contact we’re concerned about, and then add adjectives like ‘consensual’ or ‘uninvited’ or ‘sensitive’ or ‘exploitative’, or whatever positive or negative spin we want to put on it.

Some jurisdictions have already done this, re-describing rape as simply a species of assault. Others never did distinguish between the two. So to what purpose do we feel a need to distinguish assault and sexual assault? To the same purpose, I suppose, we feel a need to distinguish a crime and a hate crime. The latter is an aggravating element, which we’d like to see decided by the jury in its verdict rather than the judge in her sentencing. All other things being equal, being beaten is one thing. Being stripped and then beaten is something worse.

But since, on the account I’m flogging here, neither being beaten nor being stripped and then beaten bear any more relation to sex than does being read a poem, I’m proposing we re-describe the stripping as having something to do with involuntary bodily exposure, or at least something like that, and penetration as having something to do with the violation of one’s bodily boundaries, or something like that.

Why? What’s wrong with the current grab bag of these being sexual aggravations? Nothing, except that, as things stand, for aught I know your sexual orientation refers to your taste in poetry. Call me a recalcitrant bigot if you like, but dammit I want to be free to mock your love of Emily Dickinson without being accused of being whatever-you-are-phobic!

THINGS YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW

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We all have things we’re better off not knowing. I don’t want to know how my meat gets from field to supermarket. Others don’t want to know just how fair Fair Trade coffee really isn’t. And I’m betting you don’t want to know what I’m about to tell you. So stop reading. Now!

No? Okay, you asked for it.

For thirty-six years, from 1975 until 2011, I worked – albeit pro bono dammit! – with a private charity that funded the lion’s share of all the orphanages in whatever territories had been, as of the filing for its charter in 1903, under the protection of the French Republic. This included Indochina until the fall of Saigon in 1975. But to this day it covers what was, until the mid-60’s, all of French West Africa. So when I say what I’m about to, I know at least somewhat whereof I speak.

As I’ve said, my foundation was a private one. It was founded by the French rubber tycoons of the turn of the century and then the nascent pharmaceutical industry of the interbellum. It neither needs nor desires to raise money. But most charitable foundations do. So this is really only about them.

Borderline poverty is quaint. But real poverty is just ugly. Ugly doesn’t sell. Pathos combined with cute does. So the poverty industry – and that’s what it is – hires photographers who pick the kids with the roundest faces and the biggest eyes, and then they smear sugar water around the eyes and nose and mouth to attract the flies. Flies are big sellers. Emaciated bodies too. There’s a science to this. It’s all been focus grouped.

As has the better destinations for poverty tourism. The hotel has to have a minimum of three stars. And when your church – it’s usually fundamentalist, but occasionally mainstream – sends certifiably devout Steve and Cindy and their six young children to help dig a well – because Africans have yet to learn how to operate a shovel – their home has to have a swimming pool. And, if I may be forgiven the word, hell hath no fury like sweet Cindy when the power goes out and there’s been no air conditioning for well over an hour.

Some organizations – not mine, thank God! – maintain show orphanages, not all that dissimilar to Theresienstadt, where children are schooled in how to hug the white visitor. You’ve seen the pictures. The gratitude could only be genuine, and it’s truly heart-warming.

On average over sixty percent of the orphans my foundation funded were not. Nor were they abandoned by their parents. They were sent to us because we could feed them, which their parents couldn’t. And because we could provide them a rudimentary education, which their parent’s couldn’t. But these not-their-parents parents took unstinting pains to visit whenever they could, which is why we were always reluctant to move these facilities out of range of Boko Haram, or their north-of-Nigeria affiliates, who’d otherwise treat them as their private supermarket for child soldiers. In fact that’s why, in 2012, we pressured Nicolas Sarkozy to send French soldiers to Mali. To his everlasting credit when he meets his Maker, he did.

It’s impossible to garner the percentage rake-off – more charitably known as overhead – for public foundations, because each invents its own creative bookkeeping. The lion’s share goes to raising the money. Your $100 a plate dinner is mostly about you and your spouse being seen at it by other couples who are there to be seen at it by you. A goodly part of the rest is siphoned off by all those hundreds of outstretched hands between the scraps from that dinner and anyone’s mouth.

But lest you think there’s ground for outrage here, don’t. People who need to curry your favor will parrot your language just as they do your dress code. But not unlike democracy, corruption is your concept, not theirs. People in your world can afford to decline free money. People in theirs can’t. That’s one of the things that make the Third World third, and that keep it that way.

I once managed to manage a transfer from foundation to stomach with less than a 97% rake-off, and prided myself for it, because very early on in my involvement with this stuff I came to realize that it’s not about the 97, it’s about the 3. $3 was a lot of money on the streets of Saigon in 1975 to the children of mostly black American soldiers and ethnic Chinese prostitutes. The soldiers had returned to the States, and the prostitutes – the ones who weren’t just shot outright – were sent to re-education camps. Tabs were hard to keep in those circumstances, but few if any of them ever returned to reclaim their children.

Wars eventually end. The detritus takes a bit longer.

One day I met a soldier from the Darfur who assured me, “We’re not stealing their food drops. The people give it to us. They want to make us strong so we can defend them against the rebels who’ve been stealing their food drops.” Between a rock and a hard place. That’s where civil war places most of the people involved who’d rather not be.

But it’s also where civil war places would-be decent people like you and me. Organizations like B’nai Brith tell us that our contributions are earmarked for humanitarian purposes only. But this is obfuscation. Money is fungible. Whatever Hamas or Hezbollah doesn’t have to spend on schools it can spend on resistance to the Occupation. Whatever the Israeli government doesn’t have to spend on hospitals it can spend on gunships. So designating one organization but not the other as terrorist, and then criminalizing the funding of one but not the other, is a political act, one that either turns the non-partisan philanthropist into a partisan one or puts the kibosh on his philanthropy altogether.

These are not great options, especially if you and your spouse want to be seen at that $100 a plate dinner next week. But be fair. I did warn you. Still, one saving grace of human cognition is that with a little effort we can and do learn to forget the things we don’t want to know. Were this not so I’m not sure we could function in the world.

TRUMP, VOLTAIRE, AND EDMUND BURKE

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In real estate it all comes down to location, location, location. In comedy it’s all about timing. Put the two together and that’s all that can be said about one’s own take on the world. From the here and now, from within this moment in history, it looks to me like fill-in-the-blank.

Well then, from the here and now, and from within this moment in history, it looks to me like we’re in for a bout of fascism. How deeply in depends on where I’m standing and on what day. But there’s certainly something going on, don’t you think? And if it looks like a pig, sounds like a pig, and smells like a pig … well, chances are it just is an oncoming bout of fascism.

To be fair, when two things look alike, there’s no guarantee they are. So that the fence surrounding Gaza, and the shelling of those imprisoned within it, looks an awful lot like the Warsaw Ghetto, could be mere coincidence. The devil is always in the details. On the other hand, “Ah, but that’s different!” is precisely the devil’s stock refrain.

Of course this seeing the mark of Satan behind every Trumpish smirk could all just be awfulizing. Maybe, as that schlocky poem we all have on the fridge assures us, the universe is unfolding as it should. Maybe, as Voltaire counsels, we just need to tend our garden.

But if a bout of fascism is upon us, how long it will last is anyone’s guess. Mussolini held it together for twenty-one years. The Thousand Year Reich lasted twelve. Trump has at most another six and a half to go. Will I live to see it crest and then recede? Probably. But in the interim I needn’t worry too much, because I have a garden.

But a goodly number of the other seven and a half billion people in the world don’t. The gardens they once had are scorched by drought. Or civil war. Or just too many hands pulling at too few stalks from the same vegetable patch.

I’m not a political scientist. I’m not qualified to opine on what’s caused the current drift towards fascism in Europe and America. I know it’s not everywhere, any more than it was everywhere in the 30’s. The worry is not that it’ll spill over to where it’s yet to take hold. The worry is that it will consider itself threatened by where it hasn’t, and that it will take measures to ensure that threat is eliminated. Thus as a Canadian I’m beginning to feel the same vulnerability that must have been experienced by the Poles in 1938 living next door to the National Socialist juggernaut. Hitler was as risible then as Trump is now. But a year later no one was laughing.

So I’m caught between the poem on my fridge and Voltaire on the one side, and my knee-jerk post-Shoah paranoia on the other. My problem is there seems to be no way to calculate the probabilities and bet accordingly. In this it’s exactly parallel to the global warming debate. If I join the Chicken Littles and it turns out Trump and Salvini were just comedic interludes in the otherwise perfectly normal story of human folly and redemption, I’m going to squander a lot of intellectual energy. And what’s worse, I’m going to look silly. But if I heed the poem and Voltaire, and it turns out Edmund Burke was right that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” then I’m going to have been no less complicit than was Pius XII in the evil about to be unleashed on the world.

So in the face of this damned-if-I-do and damned-if-I-don’t, here’s my provisional policy:

The walls of our City have many gates and many towers, each of which has to be manned twenty-four seven. Let the gatekeepers beware of Greeks bearing gifts. My own watch, from nine to five Mondays through Fridays, is on one of the towers. What happens on her watch from her tower falls to her, and on his watch from his tower to him. But what happens on my watch from my tower falls to me.

Her watch looks out onto the Libyan Coast Guard vessel turning away from rather than rescuing the dinghy that’s just capsized. His looks out onto the purging from our public institutions those who would speak truth to power. And mine looks out onto Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

For all our vigilance, at the end of the day the City may fall nonetheless. There’s a distinct possibility Trump will be re-elected, that players who take a knee will be banned from the NFL that the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians will be condemned by the Pope, but not too strongly, since he’ll reason as did Pius XII that he doesn’t have the cura for non-Catholics. And so on. In short it’ll be the Nuremberg Laws light. Maybe some of these things are unlikely, but none is impossible.

Fortunately noxious memes replicate until they kill off their hosts. It’s only a matter of time. I realize that’s small consolation for those who don’t have time. God works through history. Injustice doesn’t. It’s very particular, and very personal. I suspect that’s what Voltaire was trying to tell us. Tend to your garden, because that’s where a Jew may be hiding from the Gestapo, or a Salvadorian from ICE,

THINGS THAT DON’T BEAR THINKING ABOUT

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There are certain thought experiments that ought not to be performed. Here’s one:

Does the visceral reaction we all have about the Shoah – and by ‘all’ I mean we Jews and you Gentiles alike – have a best-before date? I’m thinking it does. And I don’t think it will be any later for Jews than for Gentiles.

It seems to me there are two elements to the Shoah that have been doing all the heavy lifting. These are its pathos and its injustice. With respect to the former, the Anne Frank diary is designed to remind us that these were all people like you and me.

But hold on. So were the victims of Mount Vesuvius.

Ah, but that was almost two thousand years ago.

And almost two thousand years hence won’t the Shoah be almost two thousand years ago? Masada was almost two thousand years ago. We might think it tells us something different than does Jonestown. But do any of us feel its pathos?

Then how ‘bout the Shoah’s injustice? These were all the victims of an injustice beyond human comprehension.

But hold on. So were the Amalekites. Moreover, if systematicity adds to the horror of an injustice, wasn’t the Amalekite genocide just as systematic?

So once again it would appear that time heals all wounds, be they inflicted on the ancestors of others or on our own.

When people die they need to be buried. But on a finite planet from time to time cemeteries have to be emptied and turned over to the more recently departed. And it’s likewise with memorials, regardless of what they memorialize. Shoah memorials sit atop some pretty pricey real estate. I give the ones in Berlin and Washington another fifty years tops. I give Yad Vashem even less. Why? Because when we run out of Palestinian land to expropriate to our own uses – and that day is rapidly approaching – we’ll have to reassign our own land to something more productive than commemorating our grievances.

There is no Italian who can trace her roots back to the Colloseum, nor can any modern day Greek lay claim to the Parthenon. Picture a grammar school field trip to the Alamo a thousand years from now. How many of these kids will identify with a bunch of white men who died fighting to ensure Texas would remain a slave state?

In many jurisdictions it’s a criminal offense to question the historicity of the Shoah. 1500 years after the fact it still made sense to Torquemada to burn at the stake anyone who questioned the historicity of the Empty Tomb. So maybe a hundred years hence revisionism will still be in the German Criminal Code. But I doubt it. Not unlike asserting the Armenian Genocide in Turkey, the criminalization of historical revisionism is a political gesture, and politics is never static.

As I say, these are the kinds of things that don’t bear thinking about. Not only are we cheapened by what we end up thinking about them; we’re cheapened by our thinking about them at all. This didn’t bear thinking about. So let’s not.

IT WAS ALL FAKE!

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I knew it was bound to happen, but I was floored by the speed with which it did. Even before the last of the boys and their coach emerged safely from the cave – indeed even before the rescue operation got underway – there were already posts about the whole thing being, not unlike Sandy Hook, a complete sham.

What had happened – and as with the moon landing I’m sure the bloggers had incontrovertible proof of this – was that some Hollywood producer thought a story about some kids and a couple of adults having to be rescued mission-impossible-like in a race against time because of the water rising in a no-way-out cave, would be a surefire box office hit. But what would seal the deal would be if it could purport to be “based on a true story.” So a pre-production team, let’s call it, was put together and set to task staging the true story, while the ironically labeled real production team went to work on the movie about it.

This explains two things. First, it explains why the story had such a happy ending. Another true story, A Perfect Storm, but in which everyone dies, was a complete disaster at the box office. And second, it explains why at least one person had to die – and one did – so there’d be the requisite pathos linked to his requisite heroism.

What it doesn’t explain is why 1) Thailand instead of Kentucky, why 2) they-all-look-alike-to-us Thai kids instead of blond blue-eyed American teenagers, each with his own endearing trademark quirks, and why 3) all boys instead of a few girls so there could be some sexual tension as they considered what to do with their final hours of life. The beads of sweat from the humidity in the cave would have provided a perfect visual for this.

Perhaps there could have been some additional sexual tension between one of the teenagers – I think this should be her first role, so as not to undermine her virginity – and her much older coach. Either of George Clooney or Brad Pitt would do. If they had sex, do either of them now regret it? And if they didn’t, I think he should be relieved and she not.

So why none of this? Because first you’d have to entice a dozen or so guileless American teenagers – all of whom have real-world helicopter parents, remember – plus a couple of unsuspecting chaperones, into a one-way-out cave, then flood that one way out, and then hope like hell that nothing in the plan your mission-impossible scriptwriters and technicians have concocted goes amiss. Plus you’d have to sacrifice an American Navy Seal instead of that much more expendable Thai one. And you’d have to insure the whole operation to the hilt.

So the project had to be either scrapped entirely or, as turned out to be the case, downgraded to the one we were following for those seventeen days.

Okay so that’s one scenario making its rounds of the blogosphere. But the more plausible one that’s also been circulating is that it was the Thai government itself, or perhaps just the local authorities, who decided they needed something to attract foreign tourists away from the more popular coast up to the less attractive north of the country. And, though I’ve yet to hear it from him, I’m sure Tony Hall will put the entire affair on either Mossad, American neocons, or more likely something involving both.

But what’s certain is this. Whatever it may be, the truth is out there. And the truth is never what it appears. How dull would it be if it were?!