Keeping occupied

Cartoon shamelessly stolen from Alison at Creekside, who got it from LeDevoir.

It appears the Occupy Wall Street movement is starting to crumble a bit around the edges. Some of the reasons are the external ones you might expect - like the Oakland police launching tear gas into an unarmed, nonviolent crowd or the steady drip of arrests and trouble sparked by police agent provocateurs and the constant efforts in the press to insists the protesters don't know what they want or understand what they are protesting about (which is, not to put too fine a point on it, utter bullshit).
Then there are the more practical reasons. The weather is turning colder and the resources that make the protest possible are running low. Simply put, most people cannot afford to spend week after week camping out in Zucotti Park or wherever else is being occupied.
Unlike the Teabaggers -- who just rolled up on their mobility scooters or arrived on Koch-sponsored bus tours, got shouty about keeping the gummint out of their medicare and waved badly spelled signs for an hour or two and then went home to watch FOX News, clean their guns and wait for their next social security cheque--the Wall Street occupiers are mostly people of working age who would rather be working. Some of so-called professional protestors or full-time activists, some are  college students, some are returned vets, some are just regular people with nothing left to lose, but most of them would much rather be working a paying job than freezing their butts off and getting threatened with a macing in the park.
No, the main threat to the occupy movement at this point seems to be the movement itself. You can only live in the parks and public squares for so long without bathrooms. The democratic nature of the movement can only be hijacked so many times by malcontents, purity trolls, single-issue hostage-takers and anarchists before the organization starts to pull itself apart. And don't lets get started on the drummers. As in any bottom-up movement, the center cannot hold indefinitely and as in any liberal movement where everyone's opinion is given equal time and consideration from the moderate to the most radical, cohesion has limited lifespan before groups start to splinter.
I think the movement is making their point, but would be better off to push hard while they still have momentum in the short term for some kind of concession in Washington that would let them declare victory and go home before attrition and cold weather whittle down their numbers or the powers that be decide that the short term PR problems a violent sweep by riot cops would bring is a lesser evil than the PR nightmare of Occupy Wall Street carrying on through Christmas.
One possible move the occupiers around the country should consider is a collective march on Washington or Wall Street in the style of the Bonus Army. You think the 1% are worried now, wait and see the panic when a million or so people from around the country converge on a single power center in numbers that would overwhelm any possible police response
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Making our own nightmares come true

It occurs to me, as I'm sure it must have to many people, that if the Western democracies would walk the walk instead of just talking the talk and really supported efforts at democracy in North Africa and the Middle East instead of bankrolling dictators because they provide "stability" we would have a lot less to fear from a democratic North Africa and Middle East. Given that virtually every gun, club, tear gas bomb and armored car being deployed against the huddled masses yearning to breath free in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the region comes from the "arsenal of democracy" and given that we have been helping thugs like Mubarak maintain his stranglehold on power, is it any wonder that when the chickens come home to roost, our governments are terrified of the results? What cause to love the West have we given the people of Egypt or Tunisia or Jordan or Syria? Why shouldn't they hate us?
When Castro was still hiding in the hills of Cuba and people were still robbing banks to fund the revolution, Castro approached the United States for help. The U.S. decided to keep propping up the dictator there for the good of the fruit, sugar, rum and organized crime lobbies and so Castro turned to the Russians for help. We know how that one turned out.
The Sandinistas in Nicaragua reached out to the Ford and Carter Administrations for help getting rid of the Somoza dictatorship. Both refused, citing the Roosevelt/Truman doctrine of "He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard." Central America spends 30 years plagued by right wing death squads
 trained at the School of the Americas and proxy wars between "leftists" and military-backed plutocrats.
We backed the Shah's bloody kleptocracy, until Iranians finally got fed up and took to the streets and invited the Ayatollah back just to provide some leadership to the angry mob.
Then, to fight the Ayatollah, the west decided to cultivate a rival power - a military strongman just next door, who did just what we wanted as long as we kept giving him arms and didn't ask too many questions about what he was doing to his own people. Of course, once Saddam Hussien slipped the leash, things got ugly for him fast. 
Now, the realpolitik braintrust in Foggy Bottom and by extention, Whitehall and Ottawa, is worried that if Mubarak falls, the wrong people might end up running Eygpt and that might be bad for Israel and U.S. interests in the region. Maybe they should have thought of that 20 or 30 years ago.
Mubarak and the other despots of the Middle East and North Africa may be "our bastards" instead of "their bastards," but the bottom line is that they are bastards and we are helping them stay in power and teaching their oppressed people to hate us.
The longer we prop up dictators to keep the Islamic world in line, the bigger the potential shitrain we are going to face when those dictators inevitably fall to popular uprisings we've helped them try to suppress.

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the eye (or ear) of the beholder

Via Montreal Simon    -- who both you and I ought to read more often -- we are lead to this review/commentary from the Guardian

It wasn't singer Susan Boyle who was ugly on Britain's Got Talent so much as our reaction to her
Is Susan Boyle ugly? Or are we?
On Saturday night she stood on the stage in Britain's Got Talent; small and rather chubby, with a squashed face, unruly teeth and unkempt hair. She wore a gold lace dress, which made her look like a piece of pork sitting on a doily. Interviewed by Ant and Dec beforehand, she told them that she is unemployed, single, lives with a cat called Pebbles and has never been kissed. Susan then walked out to chatter, giggling, and a long and unpleasant wolf whistle.
Why are we so shocked when "ugly" women can do things, rather than sitting at home weeping and wishing they were somebody else? Men are allowed to be ugly and talented.

Susan Boyle doesn't really sing my kind of music, but you'd have to be tone deaf not to realize she is a talented vocalist. And contrary to the prevailing opinion she isn't ugly. A little on the plain side, sure. A bit plump, yeah. So what? She's there to sing, not model bikinis. It isn't like she has some kinda massive facial scar or a third eye or anything. She's just sort of ordinary looking. Ever get a good look at Aretha Franklin? How about Ella Fitzgerald? Not exactly beauty queens - until they start to sing.  How about Joe Cocker or Bob Dylan or Elvis Costello? Not exactly matinee idols either. But, pretty boy idols aside,  men who sing are not rated on their looks while women  very much are. Which is pretty stupid.

While there have been female singers and actresses who have become popular based on their talent and perhaps in spite of their looks, appearance seems much more important in the way we judge women than in the way we judge men. See if you can think of ten relatively unattractive female performers who have made a career. Off the top of my head I'm not sure I can: Cass Elliot, Kathy Bates, kd Lang, Minnie Pearl, Lily Tomlin, Olympia Dukakis, Margaret Dumont, Rosanne Barr, Margaret Hamilton, um...that old lady from "Throw Momma From the Train", and uh....Mary Walsh?....okay I'm sure there are plenty more , but several on that list that I spent all of two minutes compiling are hardly major stars and at least three of them based their careers on the fact that they were unattractive or became famous late in life - and kd Lang was kinda cute when she was young and Olympia Dukakis probably was too -- and Cass and Rosanne aren't really ugly, just overweight and Mary Walsh is brilliantly funny, which counts for a lot in my books. Try the same experiment with male performers and you'll have a long list in seconds. And they won't all be character actors.

By the same measure, until recently we were, as a rule, far more tolerant of pretty girls who had little or no talent than we were of handsome men who couldn't act or sing  - teen idols being the exception - as long as they stayed young and pretty that is (see the film Searching for Debra Winger sometime to further expand on this notion) How many movies have you seen lately where the lead character is played by an actress over 45 that isn't Meryl Streep?

I don't mean to say we've become less accepting of less talented pretty women - far from it - its just that we have become more accepting of less talented handsome men in recent years.

Another good example - musicians. There are a lot of famous male musicians who are butt ugly, but respected and popular for their musical talent. Popular, highly successful female musicians are almost always singers first and foremost - some accompany their own vocals and write their own material - but the star female instrumentalist is the exception, not the rule and those who do make a name for themselves as instrumentalists - Candy Dulfur and Bonnie Raitt spring to mind - are usually attractive.
Consider this: If John Coltrane, Frank Zappa, BB King or Jerry Garcia (to name only a few) had been born female, we'd probably never have heard of them.
I'm not saying this situation is the way it ought to be, just that it the unfortunate and unfairand flat out stupid situation that we face in the world.

I have a daughter who is six years old. In my admittedly biased opinion, she is very pretty and will likely grow up to be an absolute knockout in the looks department. Which is both good and bad. Good, in that good looks, especially for women, open a lot of doors and get you a lot of attention. Bad, in that, despite the fact that she is plenty smart, because she is attractive, she will probably not be taken seriously for her intellect or ability until she is in her 40s, barring some kind of major societal change. 

If she learns to play guitar like Django Reinhardt, she'll still end up being the "hot girl that is a pretty good guitar player" with a career that ended at 35, while my son could have two noses and if he could play like Django, he would be worshipped like a god and make records until he died at 95. I think that sucks.

Furthermore - and perhaps this tendency is more pronounced in Japan than North America these days - she is already getting the message from friends, television and even teachers that it is more important to be cute than clever. That as long as she can bat her big brown eyes and smile, she can get away with anything - a tendency I am doing my best to discourage.  But at this point it appears to be Dad vs the Disney machine and thousands of years of patriarchy.

A lot of what makes a person attractive in real life is attitude and personality. I've met models -  they look great in photos, but a lot of them have nothing to say and in a conversation in a dimly-lit bar, they aren't any more attractive than the next woman, considerably less so if the next woman isn't obsessed with her appearence and happens to have a sense of humor and some brains and hasn't been convinced that because she isn't six feet tall, 90 pounds, and blonde with cheekbones you could cut your finger on, that she's ugly.  Nothing is as sexy as confidence. After the first five minutes, it really isn't the package anyone with any brains is interested in, its the contents. Cases in point: Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday, Minnie Driver, Terri Garr, Meryl Streep, Barbara Streisand, and Ingrid Bergman -- all of whom can be breathtakingly, stunningly beautiful when they turn on the inner light, but none of whom you'd pick out of a line up if you hauled them in out of the rain. Well...okay...Ingrid Bergman in her 20s would probably stop traffic no matter what as far as I can see, but she'd never be a pin up today. Physical beauty may be objectively judged by the standards of the day I suppose, but attractiveness is always largely subjective.

Let's think of a few major stars on the other side of the gender gap and consider them in terms of pure physical beauty: Humphrey Bogart, Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen, Jack Black, Mark Knopfler, Phil Collins - I already mentioned Bob Dylan and I bet you don't even know what Charlie Parker or Django Reinhardt look like. Not a matinee idol among them - sure Bogart was cool, but he was no Cary Grant - but they have seen pretty high levels of popularity at one time or another, despite their looks and don't seem to have too much trouble attracting the opposite sex. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that pretty is nice, but but brains, talent, attitude and character are more important in the long run - and even in the short run. And that despite the advances of feminism over the years, as a society we continue to judge women on looks far more than we do men, and that is just plain stupid.

So more power to Susan Boyle and the hell with the pretty people. Smart, funny, talented people are sexier anyways.

Which side is he on?
Dear Ralph Nader,
Haven't you done enough damage already?
Please, just shut up and stay home this year. Please.
And spare us the justifications about how no one should have to vote for the lesser of two evils. Electoral politics is and has always been about choosing the least bad candidate and the higher the office, the truer this becomes. Voltaire was right when he said "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien" - If it hadn't been for the electoral temper tantrum you led in 2000, the United States would have had four-- probably eight--years of the less-than-perfect Al Gore, who I think we can agree would, for all his shortcomings, have been far better for the USA and the rest of the world than the unspeakable disaster that is George W. Bush.
Ralph, your suggestion that the only reason anyone is voting for Barack Obama is white guilt is both offensive and incorrect. And frankly, irrelevant. I don't care whether Barrack Obama get elected by using white guilt, negative ads, witchcraft or frickin' satellite-based mind-control laser beams. I don't think he's the messiah, I just think he will do a lot less damage than John McCain. Could the United States and the Democratic Party do better? Maybe, maybe not. But it's not like your shit doesn't stink, Ralph, so spare us the Jiminy Cricket act.