Piece of Cultural History Hilarity of the Day

Wow, we’re really capitalizing on this “of the day” meme, aren’t we?

From the blog of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library:

This is the binding on a recently acquired copy the Scholar’s Arithmetic, or, Federal Accountant, a textbook published in 1814 at Keene, N.H. by John Prentiss “proprietor of the copy right.”… The book is still in its original binding as issued. In this case the decorative paper is marbled paper, whose color and pattern results from laying the paper over oil pigments floating on water. Again, wear and age allow us to see what was once hidden by blue pigment. There are blocks of print separated by wide margins, signaling this sheet to be several pages of text imposed for book printing. There are 31 lines per page with a page number centered in brackets over the middle of line one. Layout is the same on both front and back covers.

What is this text? Closely reading one portion reveals a surprise.

[18]

[service] under these good people; and after
[supper] being showed to bed, Miss Phoebe,
[who ob]served a kind of reluctance in me to
[strip and go] to bed, in my shift before her, now
[the maid] was withdrawn, came up to me, and
[beginnin]g with unpinning my handkerchief
[and gow]n, soon encouraged me to go on with
[undressi]ng myself; and, still blushing at now see
[ing mys]elf naked to my shift, I hurried to get
[under th]e bed-cloaths out of sight. Phoebe
[laugh’d] and was not long before she placed

Racy stuff, indeed. One library describes books with comparable decorative papers as “Bound in boards covered with a marbled sheet from a suppressed edition of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. [Boston?, ca. 1810]”

I checked a text of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (more popularly known as Fanny Hill), and yep, that selection is from the same hilariously tacky 1749 pornographic novel. It was involved in a huge obscenity to-do at the time of its publication and an unexpurgated version wasn’t published until after the 1960 Lady Chatterley trial, which overturned British obscenity law. It was first published in the US in 1821 (though not unexpurgated until a 1963 landmark Supreme Court case), so I’d be really interested to know the story of the paper used to bind the textbook the library blog is talking about. How did an underground edition come to be produced, I wonder?

If you don’t read any of the various blogs maintained by the Princeton University Library, I highly recommend you check them out. The librarians aren’t always the most adept at writing in a snappy blog style, but they put up great pictures and facts about items in the collection. I’ve met a few of the librarians in Rare Books and Graphic Arts, and they’re wonderful people—I’m so glad that they’re reaching out to the wider community with their blogs.

Self-Promotion Never Got This Shameless

But it’s for a good reason: I’ve cracked the mainstream media! Yeah, I know, it’s only the website of the New York Times‘ “Ed Life” summer supplement, but my photo of the oven on Firestone Library’s B floor was one of the finalists in a competition they held for essays and photos about kids’ college experiences:

I love finding instances of surrealism in my daily life, and what could be weirder than an oven hanging out in Princeton’s collection of law-related books?
——————–
Emily Rutherford, Princeton University, class of 2012, history major

Ladies and gentlemen and non-gender-identified individuals, it is very gratifying indeed to see your name in print at nytimes.com.

Princeton and LGBT Community

Last Thursday night, I was talking with another Princeton student whom I’d recently met. We were agreeing that we didn’t really fit into the institutional/established Princeton LGBT community (Pride Alliance, LGBT Center, and all the events and discussion groups that surround them). We were coming, I think, from quite different places personally and in terms of our relationships to labels of queer identity, but nonetheless neither of us felt like those groups are really the right social place for us. This is hardly the first time I’d had that conversation: a couple weeks ago, I had it with a person who isn’t out, and so their relationship to the institutional LGBT structure is necessarily complicated. Frequently, I have it with friends who are out, and whose relationship to queer identity is, I suspect, as overtly uncomplicated and yet internally complicated as my own. And so I sit down to dinner at a dining-hall table made up entirely of queer folks, none of whom are involved with the institutionalized community; I organize protests with networks of straight allies who don’t participate in LGBT campus life; I know far too many students who even in college, in New Jersey, in 2009 are in the closet. And I would very much like to do something to change this, to create a more cohesive community for all these people—and myself. But I’m not sure what should be done.

I’ve been learning a lot, recently, about the struggles in the ’70s to firmly establish a Gay Alliance of Princeton, and the vandalism and harsh words and hostile atmosphere met by the students who bravely did so. An oft-consulted source of mine who was at Princeton in the ’70s and ’80s has been telling me stories about what she knew of the place of GAP on campus, and I learned that there are three boxes on GAP and its successor organizations in the University Archives—it’s interesting stuff, and I’m thinking of doing some aspect of my independent work about it. But what confuses me, I think, is how we got from a small and much-fought-against organization struggling to be a place for gay students on campus in the days of gay liberation to an unquestioned LGBT Center, administration support for LGBT students, a freshman orientation program that emphasizes diversity and acceptance, and finally the first inklings of progress on gender-neutral housing—and yet still leave so many students out. The fact of closeted Princeton is a powerful reminder, I think, that we still have so far to come, farther perhaps than many other universities do. When a university finally has an LGBT Center, I shouldn’t hear its students telling me that they are afraid their friends will see them going into it.

On the other hand, what bothers me sometimes about the institutional community is that it doesn’t agitate enough. It’s not “out there” enough. I understand that an organ of the university administration such as the LGBT Center can’t do any political advocacy or anything like that; that’s totally fine. So maybe what we lack is a group that is less institutionalized, which can be an alternative to the institutionalized community while still supporting the good work that it does. Like good sociopolitical movements everywhere (she says with tongue in cheek), maybe we just need to factionalize.

I am at Princeton in part because my pre-frosh host took me to a lunchtime event at the LGBT Center and I saw that there was an LGBT Center, and I felt like there was a place for me at Princeton, when everything I’d heard about the place was to the contrary. But I want to make it possible for every student to encounter queer Princeton without going to the second floor of Frist, or enrolling in queer theory or history or politics or theater, or showing up to an event, or even having a gay friend (yes, some kids don’t, or don’t know that they do). The person I was talking to on Thursday disagreed with me about the need for everyone to come out, the need to be confrontational; this person said that was a device that worked for Harvey Milk, but that it’s no longer 1978. To which I say that, yes, it’s been a long time since students vandalized the room of the president of the Gay Alliance of Princeton, but I’m not sure that the current state of affairs is truly helping to build a university community where everyone may be at peace with and confident about themselves.

And so I was thinking about what I can do, about what it takes to come out, and about what those of us who are out can do to help and support our classmates and friends and students and neighbors and fellow Princetonians. I’m turning over the idea of an LGBT-oriented student publication, which as far as I know (correct me if I’m wrong) would be a first for Princeton. If there’s anything I can do to help it is to write and to edit and to organize the doing of it. These blog posts are imported into Facebook, where I am quite sure this particular one will cause a shitstorm from all sides—which is great and wonderful and dialogue is awesome. But if you comment on this post, I would dearly like to hear your opinion about this particular question. Would an LGBT-oriented student publication (all able-bodied contributors, LGBT or not, welcome of course) help matters? Is it worth doing? Would you contribute, or be on the staff, or otherwise help out? And, of course, what form would such a publication take; what sort of content would it include?

I applaud the good work that has been done to change Princeton, from the founding of GAP to the present. But I also want to emphasize that it still isn’t enough, and so all of us have to do our part. It is quite possible that I have been reading way too many essays published in liberation days recently, but as far as I’m concerned, until so many people are out that the need to come out is erased for everyone (and that includes trans and genderqueer and gender-nonconforming folks, by the way), we’re not finished and we can’t be complacent and we all have to do our parts, even in our tiny university community.

Nature, Vacations, and a Sense of Place

I found myself with a sudden deep longing for nature, for woods and wild animals and deep, blue-green ocean. This summer is my first experience living in a city for a decent period of time, and it’s claustrophobic-making after a life of suburbs and small towns and—of course—the experience every so often of rural nature. I’ve come to a love of a natural, rural environment relatively late in life; it took the perspective and life experience of leaving home and seeing some of the world to realize that I do not need an internet connection every second of the day and I need time to read and to go on long walks and to listen to the ocean. It took the self-assurance to realize that my friends will not cease to exist if I drop off the face of the earth for three weeks. And it took the basic calm and slowing-down-ness that a little maturity and outgrowing of adolescence brings to realize that home is a wonderful thing when it looks like this:

Changing my voter registration to Mercer County, NJ, as I did a couple weeks ago, represented the divorce of my North American regional identity from suburban southern California. I’m lucky that I get something of a choice in these matters, and that I do have family roots in British Columbia, Canada. I’m doubly lucky that I’ll actually be there in just under a month.

Aesthetic of the Week; or, In Which I Go All Cultural Critic on Your Ass

(Photo: Sandro Michahelles for The New York Times)

If we can have quotes of the day (a habit I’ve somewhat fallen out of, but something I enjoy all the same), why not aesthetics of the week? I present you with the most engrossing article I’ve read this week, from the New York Times, about a theater program at an Italian prison:

As a sound-system blasted a cha-cha-cha, the men began to dance. Wearing outlandish costumes with oversize hats and wigs, and boots with 15-centimeter heels from a Milanese store that caters to drag queens, they strutted and pranced.

But this was no ordinary cast of actors. The performers were convicted criminals serving anywhere from five years to life in a maximum-security prison for crimes as varied as armed robbery and murder.

“Theater is surreal, it’s all fiction,” one inmate, Dorjan Cenka, originally from Albania, later mused. Dressed completely in white with heart-shaped red lips, Mr. Cenka was trying on his costume for the latest show by the Compagnia della Fortezza, the theater company named after the Medici-era fortress that houses the Volterra jail where the convicts are imprisoned. It would be his first time on stage and he confessed to being a little nervous. “I’m shy, I don’t like to speak in public,” he said. With a sway of his hips, he swished his Marie Antoinette-era skirt, the powdered wig on his head tottering. “I’m doing this to get over my resistance.”

The current show — “Alice in Wonderland, a Theatrical Essay on the End of a Civilization” — is loosely based on Lewis Carroll’s masterwork, but the text weaves in soliloquies from other authors, in this case Shakespeare (predominantly Hamlet) but also Genet, Pinter, Chekhov and Heiner Müller.

The article goes on to describe the production in question, which reminds me more than anything of a certain show that was all the rage in the mid-60s, rather cumbersomely entitled The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Marat/Sade is a play-within-a-play, wherein the pathetic spectacle of the asylum inmates who lumber through a stylized narrative about the French Revolution is of course a metaphor for the oppressed masses everywhere; wherein the paragraphs of nihilistic hedonistic rhetoric that the Marquis de Sade stops the inmates’ performance to intone are rendered absurd by virtue of the fact that he, too, is behind bars, and it is only the indulgence of the asylum’s director that permits him to have written a play in which the raving and neglected actors shout, “We want our rights, and we don’t care how/We want our revolution now!”

Punzo’s production is a really cool thing, I think; at the risk of sounding patronizing, I think it’s wonderful, and a pleasant change from the American prison system, that inmates should be exposed to experimental theater and that Punzo’s workshop setup has gotten the prisoners involved in the dramatic process and inspired many to become actors when they’re released. But the beautiful and yet seemingly haphazard drag, the postmodern attitude weirdly like something of a different decade, and indeed the appearance of Punzo himself in costume (looking for all the world like Patrick Magee’s de Sade in the excellent Marat/Sade film adaptation), are all reminders of the pathos overriding the whole affair. Perhaps that was Punzo’s intention—it’s pretty natural for a production inspired by Hamlet, Genet, and the others—but it’s weird to think that the locked-in-the-asylum metaphor of Marat/Sade is, in the Italian prison’s case, entirely literal—it’s just that the deliberate madness of the former has been replaced with the nature of the latter’s theatrical style. If themes of madness don’t exist in Alice in Wonderland and Hamlet, I certainly don’t know where they do—and although I’ve only read about five pages of Our Lady of the Flowers (and, when I was in high school, sat in on an upper-division seminar about it at Berkeley, but that’s a story for another day), the circumstances of the queering and dramatizing of a strange version of prison life seem positively Genet-esque as well. What, then, is the role of actual prisoners—men who have been convicted of real-world crimes, such that they have been removed from the real world—in all of this? What does Punzo’s program say about the role of prison, and what does it say about the inmates-turned-cast-members who are no doubt far less inclined to shoot their mouths off about mid-20th-century experimental theater than this 19-year-old American know-it-all?

I’ve actually been watching the Marat/Sade film in bits and pieces over the past week, so I was particularly struck by its resonance when I first read this article a few days ago. One of the most prevalent tropes in Marat/Sade is that de Sade’s dialogue or songs or stage directions will cross a line of permissibility, or one of the inmates-turned-cast-members will lapse in self-control, and the director of the asylum, who is de Sade’s primary audience, will leap up in anger and urge that de Sade be less controversial—which, since this is the Marquis de Sade as dramatic character we’re talking about, doesn’t usually work out too well. But it makes me wonder about this production in the literal, non-metaphorical world, and the article the NYT has written about it. Where is this struggle between artistic authority and institutional authority in a world where the institution applauds the artist? What does it say about the transgressive nature of art? And does it mean that the position of the inmates has changed—or are they still pawns in the hands of institution and artist, live bodies to be manipulated in advance of some sort of goal?

HRC, fact-check your action alerts please. Thanks.

When the hell did I turn into a political blogger?

I just got an HRC email expressing unqualified joy:

Dear Emily,

I have great news to share: the Senate has passed the Matthew Shepard Act!

The bill will soon be on its way to President Obama’s desk, where he’ll get a chance to make good on his promise to sign it.

This vote came on the heels of tremendous pressure from radical right-wing groups that used every trick in the book.

They called the bill the “Pedophile Protection Act,” among other outrageous claims. They dismissed the barbaric hate crime that took Matthew Shepard’s life as a “hoax.” They flooded the Senate with hundreds of thousands of letters and calls.

But your calls, emails, and financial support for our work helped make sure the truth prevailed in the end. Without you, this victory for equal rights would not have been possible.

And then it goes on to ask me to call my senators and thank them. Which is fine, but there are a lot of problems with this email that misrepresent the current state of hate crimes in the Senate. First of all, the Matthew Shepard Act did not pass as a standalone bill, as this message indicates; it’s an amendment attached to the FY2010 defense authorization bill, which, because the Democrats cut a deal with the GOP to get the amendment passed, also features amendments introduced by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) that do some good things and some bad things but overall make the hate crimes legislation much less clean-cut. And this, according to the Washington Blade, is what Sessions had to say about the legislation, which has now been substantially impacted by him:

Prior to the vote on the amendments, Sessions spoke out on the floor Monday against the measure, which he called a “substantial overreach by Congress.”

“The bottom line is there’s nowhere near the evidence needed to justify this legislation,” he said.

Sessions said the measure provides protections for classes that “don’t have clear meanings,” and identified gender identity as such an unclear category.

“I’m not sure this is good legislation,” he said. “I think legislation ought to be crisp and clear.”

Sessions said existing hate crimes statues providing protections for race and other categories were enacted because of a substantial body of evidence showing that black people were being denied civil rights. He said LGBT Americans aren’t facing problems in a similar way.

“Gays and lesbians have not been denied access to basic things like health, schooling or the ballot box,” Sessions said, adding that gay people “have no difficulty in approaching government officials.”

Sessions also quoted a May 13 posting by gay blogger Andrew Sullivan, who called the concept of hate crimes “a hard-left critique of conventional liberal justice and the emergence of special interest groups which need boutique legislation to raise funds for their large staffs and luxurious buildings.”

“This is a gay man expressing his opinion,” Sessions said. “No doubt he takes these issues very seriously.”

Oh, well then. Because we all know that Andrew Sullivan speaks for the entire LGBT community.

Furthermore, there’s this whole matter of funding for F-22 fighter jets. The defense authorization bill currently contains funding for these planes that are apparently a waste of money; the President has said he’ll veto the bill if it retains the F-22s. The Senate scheduled to vote on an amendment stripping the funding today, and that Blade article I quoted from above said, “two sources familiar with Capitol Hill have told the Blade that a Democratic Congress wouldn’t send to a Democratic president a defense bill that he would veto,” but neither of these things is exactly a done deal. There’s a very real chance that the President could veto the bill, and then we won’t have hate crimes at all.

So, HRC, why don’t you make an effort to get in touch with reality and feed your email list information that paints the situation more accurately. As far as I can tell, the best thing to do for hate crimes is to see that the Senate gets rid of the F-22 funding, whether through this amendment or somewhere before the bill gets to Obama. And while I’m not an expert in national security or anything, getting rid of the F-22s is probably a good thing for the defense budget in general as well.

UPDATE: Kerry Eleveld, whom I trust on all matters LGBT Washingtonian, says things look good for the Levin-McCain amendment, which would strip the F-22 funding. That’s very encouraging, but it would still be unwise to count any chickens.

I don’t think that word means what you think it means…

Despite working with political bloggers, and being friends with political bloggers, and once having been a political blogger, and following a lot of political bloggers on Twitter, I don’t usually do these political-blogger-style posts where I take apart something someone wrote on some other political blog and explain why I find it really problematic. Well. Let’s just say that this time Courtney Martin’s latest article at the Prospect drove me to it. So, because I just can’t do these things in a mature fashion, get ready for a rant.

Martin’s article is titled “Lessons for Feminists from Sarah Palin,” and as soon as I figured out that’s not a sarcastic title, I knew I was going to get irritated by it. My fears were confirmed when Martin begins thus:

When Palin parachuted onto the national scene, she landed smack dab on the fault lines of gender and politics, shaking contemporary feminism to the core. Now that the dust has settled from her oh-so-sudden resignation, it’s time for feminists (the alive kind, of course) to pick our jaws up off the floor, take a deep breath and really think through what we’ve learned from her year or so in the spotlight.

Um no. That actually didn’t happen. She set feminism back decades because the GOP paraded her as a forward-looking, anti-sexist candidate, while simultaneously marketing her as a Mom, with a capital M, a provincial woman who—oh yeah—just so happens to be governor of Alaska. Not threatening at all, right? Nope, nor was the way they made her into a sex object, doing nothing to reject the cartoons of Sarah Palin naked but for animal-skin draperies, the Sarah Palin calendars and action figures, even the Sarah Palin-inspired porno that made the rounds of the internet during the election season. And Palin herself, with her strong pro-life stance, is no more in the feminist tradition than Phyllis Schlafly, another woman who took an active political role to support a platform that was decidedly anti-feminist.

So, now that we disagree on that premise, Ms. Martin, what have we so-called “feminists” learned from the soon-to-be-ex-Governor of Alaska? Oh, right, apparently that buying into a commercially-marketed notion of “femininity” or “what a woman should look like” is… feminist? This was the part of Martin’s article that I had the most problems with:

Sarah Palin appeals to a broad need among contemporary American women who want to be leaders and demonstrate their intellectual strength, but also maintain their allegiance to traditional notions of femininity. Both her RNC address and her resignation speech were filled with this subtle duality and bold permission for women everywhere to flex their muscles while painting their fingernails.

Feminism has never been about limiting anyone’s gender identity or expression — quite the opposite — but unfortunately the media have been largely successful in spinning it that way. There are women all over the country who believe feminists are anti-femininity, that women who value piety or sell Mary Kay or give their daughters Barbies are automatically disallowed from the “F club.” Sarah Palin’s feminist flip-flop during campaign season — first telling Katie Couric that she was a feminist, then telling Brian Williams that she wasn’t — certainly didn’t clear things up.

Feminists need to get better at explaining that, in fact, feminism is opposed to anything that narrows human beings’ choices around gender identity and expression. Whether you are Sarah Palin and you want to wear a perky ponytail while standing by your “dude,” or you’re Rachel Maddow and want to wear thick black glasses while standing by your partner, we defend your right to do so. Femininity is not feminism’s enemy. What we’re against is blinding following traditional gender roles. What we’re for is self- and societal analysis that leads to conscious choices about self-expression — male or female, conservative or progressive, hockey mom or butch dyke. We simply must get better at saying that aloud, in public, and getting women across America to hear us.

Um, wow. Wow. And I’m not just speechless with outrage because I have a huge crush on Rachel Maddow. Way to use loaded language that makes it seem as if the Rachel Maddows, the butch dykes, the women with “partners” instead of “dudes,” the women who aren’t into Barbies or nail polish, are the ones who are somehow limiting feminism. And oh, Ms. Martin, way to skirt around the word “lesbian.” I know you think that our butch ways are ruining everyone else’s freedom of expression, but first of all, don’t stereotype the dykes and lump gender identity in with gender expression in with sexual orientation; second of all, it’s a little more challenging to subvert gender and sexuality paradigms on a daily basis than it is to put on some makeup or be a hockey mom. I don’t think Sarah Palin’s right to be in a women’s restroom has ever been challenged; moreover, I think it’s important to remember that Palin doesn’t support same-sex marriage or other forms of LGBT equality. She doesn’t want feminism or whatever it is she stands for to allow women a full range of choice and expression. Why, Ms. Martin, should we interpret her time in the public sphere in that way?

But I think the central issue that troubles me about these grafs is that stereotypical straight suburban soccer moms and butch dykes (and please, Ms. Martin, leave it to the butch dykes to decide whether they want to be called “butch dykes”; that’s kind of a loaded term) are somehow opposite sides of some sort of Spectrum of Feminism. It’s the conflation of sexuality and gender and presentation and assuming that they somehow equal a political identity—when that is far from the case.

And then we come to Martin’s conclusion:

It may have made feminists squirm to see that the movement’s fight produced a moment ripe for a soldier like Sarah Palin, but from another vantage point, her candidacy (and more importantly, Hillary Clinton’s) prove we’ve won certain battles. Women are taken seriously as political candidates. Plain and simple.

[…]

Despite all that, I feel thankful that she inadvertently pushed feminists out of complacency. We were obliged to clarify where we’ve won and where we’re falling behind, who we’ve brought into the fold and who continues to see feminism as an elitist, anti-man, femininity-rejecting posse of miscreants (thanks, mainstream media).

I really don’t think anyone took Sarah Palin’s candidacy seriously. I didn’t take her seriously. The mainstream media didn’t take her seriously. The blogs didn’t take her seriously. The GOP base, who fetishized her wild Alaskan exoticism, didn’t take her seriously. The folks who made that porno certainly didn’t take her seriously. Any idea that women are taken seriously in political races as candidates and not as woman candidates is a total joke. Hillary Clinton’s campaign demonstrates that, as do the Sotomayor hearings. Palin was ridiculed and sidelined in a different way from Clinton or Sotomayor, but she was ridiculed and sidelined nonetheless. And speaking as a feminist, if Sarah Palin “pushed” me “out of complacency,” it was to realize that we can’t let retrograde family-values conservatism define what women’s role in society is. I think we probably had forgotten that in the wake of the Schlafly/ERA debacle; it’s a lesson that’s probably new to feminists of my generation who became aware of the world during the Clinton years. I don’t think the past six months have been successful for feminism at all. We’ve seen Michelle Obama, a strong and independent career woman who also managed to raise a family, become the World’s Most Famous Mom. And while motherhood is awesome, it sucks that all she can do is support her husband in his full-time job. The media’s treatment of Hillary Clinton has been appalling, as has the media’s and the Senate Judiciary Committee’s treatment of Sotomayor. It’s hard to be a woman in politics. It’s hard to be a woman in journalism. It’s hard to be a woman in academia. And I really don’t think Sarah Palin’s candidacy changed that, or that reaching out more to family-values conservatives will continue to change that.

Martin ends her article by saying, “No matter who [Palin] claims to be, we need to keep pushing ourselves to clarify who we are.” Well, I don’t think this is nearly as difficult as Martin is making it out to be. Feminism is about choice and independence and acceptance of all kinds of woman, and it has nothing to do with implicitly lumping women into categories as either suburban (straight, femme) moms or The Great Lesbian Menace. It has nothing to do with defining categories, and it certainly has nothing to do with political candidates who make their daughters’ teenage pregnancies a publicity bid for the pro-life movement; who oppose what, as far as I can see, are most of the platform planks of the mainstream liberal feminist movement.

I have no idea how Sarah Palin identifies herself, but I have a hard time believing that her party would express its support for the feminist movement. I’m all set to embrace Palin, but until she and her party embrace me, my absolute non-femininity, and my understanding of what it means to be a feminist, there is no fucking way I’m celebrating the Governor of Alaska’s contribution to The Movement.

In Which I Defend Canada

I’m sitting right now in my local coffeeshop, which has its TV permanently tuned to CNN (though they will occasionally change to ESPN if there’s a big sporting event on, but that’s somewhat besides the point). On CNN just now, there was a commercial expressing opposition to federal health care reform, suggesting—and you’ve heard all this before, I know—that if Congress and the White House so much as lay a finger on the status quo of American health care, we’ll all be forced into a system where we’re forced to wait for months for awful-quality care and we won’t have access to specialized surgical procedures or anything like that. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the specter of SOCIALISM—and we know, because this is “Canadian-style healthcare,” and no one likes Canada. Right?

Now, I’m a firm supporter of health care reform that includes a public option, and I just so happen to have some pretty socialist tendencies myself. But reasonable people of goodwill, etc., and our democracy means people are free to pay to have their commercials that disagree with me aired on CNN. I don’t even know who the group was who sponsored this commercial, and I don’t really care. What angers me is the implication that “Canadian-style healthcare” is automatically a bad thing, and that a shot of the Canadian flag waving would be enough for red-blooded Americans to call up their Congressmen and -women and urge them to oppose health care reform. I strongly doubt that anyone who would be persuaded by a commercial like this has lived in Canada, been through the Canadian health care system, or has any basis on which to suppose that the Canadian health care system is bad—other than that, well, it’s Canada, so it must be.

Americans often take this dismissive attitude to other countries, too—we’ve seen it with regard to France, of course, and anywhere else that you can diss socialism, like Scandinavia or the Netherlands or Germany (the UK is exempt because of World War II). But it particularly bothers me when Americans regard Canada as inferior just for the sake of it being Canada, because I’m a citizen of both countries. I’ve spoken here before about why I’m a proud American, but I’m a proud Canadian too. I love my second country for its multiculturalism, its laid-back attitude, its breathtaking Great North scenery, its cities where the legacy of British and French colonialism meet 21st-century high-tech North American development. I have spent maybe four or six weeks out of every year in Canada since I was born. When I go through customs at the Vancouver airport and present the guard with my American passport and the card that certifies I’m a Canadian citizen too, I’m reminded that being American does not mean a forced acknowledgment that every other country is inferior to the United States, that there are things to love about wherever you call home, and that there’s no reason why there needs to be an either/or.

I wish Americans who will be persuaded by a commercial that says health care reform is bad because it is Canadian would take the time to visit Canada. I wish they’d be won over, as I have, by all the cultural institutions of a country that is sometimes more similar to western Europe than it is to the rest of North America, but that is no less wonderful. And I wish that Americans who will be persuaded by such a commercial would realize that world hegemony and an aggressive foreign policy are not an acceptable replacement for a higher standard of living, a dedication to human rights and civil rights, and a respect for all the country’s citizens when it comes to deciding which countries are great and which are to be ridiculed.

hilzoy

This is going to seem impossibly myopic with regard to the political blogosphere, but today is hilzoy’s last day blogging—at the Washington Monthly, at Obsidian Wings, and period. I’m a fairly recent hilzoy convert, but ever since my mother (who is a far better politico than I am) pointed out her smart takes on news and politics, I’ve been a devoted fan. A philosophy professor in real life, she brings a sense of the academic to her posts, which are measured when they need to be measured and passionate when they need to be passionate. Her colleague at the Washington Monthly, Steve Benen, pays better tribute to her blogging career than I can:

Hilzoy isn’t just one my favorite bloggers, she’s one of those bloggers who, on a nearly-daily basis, makes me think, “Damn, I wish I’d written that.”

Every blogger brings certain talents to the process, but Hilzoy offers a rare combination of skills — she’s clever, knowledgeable, and almost preternaturally insightful. She’s brought an unrivaled compassion, wisdom, and care to her work. Perhaps most important, Hilzoy is a genuine class act, whose blogging has made a real difference.

I will miss hilzoy’s voice on the web because she reminds me that an academic in the humanities has every right to comment on current events, and can sometimes bring a valuable diversity of perspective to the conversation. She reminds me, too, that a woman may infiltrate the boys’ club that is the political blogosphere, and earn its respect. And she helps me to remember something I learned back when I was a dorky 14-year-old outcast writing and editing at h2g2: on the internet under a pseudonym, people will listen to a voice that is intelligent and reasonable and engaging, no matter who you are, where you’re from, what you look like, how old you are, or anything else. Hilzoy has been an academic first and a blogger second, and she doesn’t take a position to get more clicks or to get picked up by a paper or magazine or website with a better name. She maintains her integrity and says what she thinks like all the best denizens of ivory towers.

I’ll miss hilzoy dearly as a role model, but I’ll remain reassured that there’s a place for woman humanists in political discussion.

Princeton Theses

The awesome thing about Princeton requiring a senior thesis of all its students is not just that I’m really, really excited about the opportunity to write one. What’s even cooler, in a way, is that there’s a database hosted by the Mudd Manuscript Library (the library that houses Princeton’s archives) where you can look up the thesis of any Princeton alum. My colleague and I wasted some time today looking up some of the interesting ones, and here are some theses we discovered, many of which are quite entertaining:

Samuel Alito ’72: “An Introduction to the Italian Constitutional Court”
Hilary Bok ’81: “Action and Moral Courage”
Joshua Bolten ’76: “Judicial Selection in Virginia”
Ethan Coen ’79: “Two Views of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”
Jonathan Safran Foer ’99: “Before Reading The Book of Anticedents: Intention, Literary Interpretation, and the Hypothesized Author”
Sally Frank ’80: “Strategies and Tactics Used by the Women’s Movement to Create Radical and Reformist Change”
Peter Hessler ’92: “Dead Man’s Shoes and Other Stories”
Katrina vanden Heuvel ’81: “American Victims: A Study of the Anti-Communist Crusade”
Elena Kagan ’81: “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933”
Josh Marshall ’91: “Virginia during the Nullification Crisis”
John McPhee ’53: “Skimmer Burns”
Ralph Nader ’55: “Lebanese Agriculture”
Jared Polis ’96: “Paradigm Shift: Politics in the Information Age”
David Remnick ’81: “The Sympathetic Thread: ‘Leaves of Grass’ 1855-1865”
Anthony Romero ’87: “Colombian Migration and Political Participation in the United States”
Donald Rumsfled ’54: “The Steel Seizure Case of 1952 and Its Effects on Presidential Powers”
Eric Schlosser ’81: “Academic Freedom during the McCarthy Era: Anti-Communism, Conformity and Princeton”
Brooke Shields ’87: “The Initiation: From Innocence to Experience: The Pre-Adolescent/Adolescent Journey in the Films of Louis Malle, ‘Pretty Baby’ and ‘Lacombe Lucien'”
Eliot Spitzer ’81: “Revolutions in Post-Stalin Eastern Europe: A Study of Soviet Reactions”
Paul Volcker ’49: “The Problems of Federal Reserve Policy since World War II”
Meg Whitman ’77: “The Marketing of American Consumer Products in Western Europe”

My personal favorite? Nader. What on earth inspired him to write on Lebanese agriculture?

I do think it’s interesting, though, that many of these people stuck with their thesis topic for their entire careers. I wonder whether the same will happen to me—though that certainly makes picking a topic all that much more stressful.

(UPDATE: Now that my parents, my high school teachers, and a world-famous blogger have all reminded me of Nader’s Lebanese heritage, I feel obliged to concede that his interest in Lebanese agriculture was entirely rational and justified.)