So, Um, Back to Blogging

Okay.

So you might be wondering, "why Raj, what exactly is it that makes you return to your blog after three odd months of complete literary silence, that you no doubt have several, even if not good, excuses for?"

The answer is because I have to yell at someone as publicly as I can. McCain campaign, you will almost certainly never see any part of this post and will not care a whole lot if you do. But the repeated insinuations you've been making that anybody within a two-state radius of the Atlantic or Pacific shores is NOT a real American is something that I simply have to respond to in some way, shape or form. My response is going to be a little bit detailed, so for the sake of brevity, lemme summarize my point as follows:

Fuck. You.

I started out relatively willing to vote for McCain and was actually torn between him and Obama despite the hellish clusterfuck of irresponsibility that the past administration has been. As far as Republicans go, McCain was the last person I would have expected to kowtow to his constituency as thoroughly as he has, which was why I even considered voting for him. I've been decided on voting Obama for quite a while now, but the sort of lowest-common-denominator trash-compacted garbage the right has been hurling down the throats of the American public is what is about to clinch it.

And I'll be honest, that's not a good reason to vote Obama. If McCain ends up being a good administrator, not dying and not kissing various body parts including but not limited to the feet of the Right, then I could care less that he ran a Machiavellian campaign to get into office. But the fact that I'm as thoroughly decided as I am makes me feel okay about being as stung by the right's appeals to "small town America" and their more bold and insulting and blatantly false assertions that anything that isn't "small town America" is not part of the REAL America. This is a nice position for the McCain campaign to put themselves in, because it ingratiates them with the parts of the country where they actually have a shot, the parts where you won't find much resembling an urban metropolis on the scale of the East or West coasts. In other words, the red states.

Now, there are a lot of practical reasons to be worried about McCain and especially Palin appealing to the red states as much as he has, and spitting in the face of the blue states as much as he also has. Politicians in office shape their policies according to the wishes of the people who put them there. What that means is that if the power of the small-town schpiel is enough to override McCain's month-long sabbatical and Obama's overwhelming charisma, the urban areas of the northeast are going to be filled with a lot more impoverished and understandably angry black and brown people whose neighborhoods aren't getting the attention from the federal government that said federal government owes them, and that they need in order to lift themselves up from the current state of the economy. If McCain finds out he doesn't need the blue states to get himself a second term, the blue states are going to suffer for it.

But on a broader level, the right getting away with selling their small-town rhetoric is going to send the message to politicians across the board that vague, pseudo-moralistic, non-commital stances like "being in favor of small town values" are enough to get elected. If we let people get elected into offices based on rhetoric alone without making them commit to stances on specific social and political issues, we're going to be setting a precedent that's going to affect the next election, and the one after, and the one after. And given the direction No Child Left Behind is taking our collective critical thinking skills, I don't know if our country can ever recover.

But now on to the personal reasons the Republican campaign's pro small-town rhetoric pisses me off. From a completely stereotype-focused point of view, I am the opposite of everything the right claims is the moral foundation of our country.

I'm from the northeast and have spent the vast majority of my life in the northeast. I spent most of my life in cities, and a good chunk of it in honest-to-bob metropoli on the scale of Boston and Philly and New York. I feel most at home in the most urban areas you can find- I love being in crowded areas, being able to look in any direction and see an interesting face. I love being able to find food made with recipes from halfway across the globe made by people from just as far away. I love knowing that I can be strange, as I need to be by nature, and can get away with it without having too many people staring in my general direction. I love having gross wealth and gross poverty both shoved right in my face instead of swept comfortably but uninterestingly under the rug. Hell, I love being able to walk by people without smiling at them. You shouldn't have to smile at people you don't know, it's unnatural. I mean, love your fellow being, look out for them, treat their welfare as no more or less important than your own, but you shouldn't have to smile at them when you don't mean it.

And let me tell you something. People in small towns are not better people. The only reason they're nice to each other (and there's a difference between being nice and being good) is because the population is sparse enough that people can hold each other accountable just by knowing each other. You wanna know how to find a good person? Find them in a city, where they're good and kind even though they can get away with being otherwise.

Next, I am not an all-American in the stereotypical sense when it comes to culture, by any stretch of the imagination. I don't play baseball or watch sports. I've tasted apple pie twice in my life. For all intents and purposes other than the legal, I'm an immigrant. I was born in the U.S. but spent most of my childhood until age 10 in India, so I find myself turning every corner wondering whether or not my behavior seems alien to others, whether or not I truly think like the people I meet even though I know how to sound and look like them. I can't enjoy food without an intense flavor or at least two spices or herbs in it, even if I know it's good. (Mashed potatoes? eh.) I haven't touched McDonalds more than two or three times if that in the past six years, for ethical reasons. I'm vegetarian (barring shellfish) also for ethical reasons. I'm an atheist. I listen to indie music. I eat hippie food. I'm shooting for a PhD. Even if I weren't atheist, I'd still be non-Christian, and more shockingly, I'd be non-Judeo-Christian. And last but certainly not least, I'm brown.

But do NOT tell me that I am not an American. Don't. If you think I'm not an American, than you can go fuck yourself with the largest pipe and/or pipe cleaner you can find. I am an American. I know that because I can say to myself the words "I am an American" and know them to be true with the sort of intuitive certainty you have when you say "I love you" to your lover, child, sibling, friend, when you really and honestly do. You feel it in your soul. You feel the truth of your words, feel it in your throat as the words find their way out. You can't tell yourself it's a lie because it's not.

So fuck you and your small towns. Here's a little secret: the only thing that matters is whether or not you're a good person. That's it. Nothing else. Small town, big city, male, female, red state, blue state, gay, straight, bisexual, transsexual, working class, middle class, upper class, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, tall, short, pretty, ugly, quiet, loud, whatever. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter at all.

Just be good. That's it. Be good.

That's it.

War is Heck.

This worries me.

Not just because of the fact that Iraq veterans are being fucked over by the bucketful, which is troubling enough as it is. Not just because of the economic burden that today's students are going to have to bear once we sober up and start having to pay into our parents' social security.

What I'm worried about is that being so detached from Iraq now is going to make war more palatable to the already war prone country that we are. And let's face facts, folks- we are war prone. Even if you think most of the wars we've fought have been good ones, you still have to admit we've fought a hell of a lot of them in our scant two-and-a-half-odd centuries as a nation. A generation from now, our children are going to look at the crippled economy we threw up into their waiting hands and they're not going to know what to do with it. Hopefully, they'll deal with it by amping up funding for science in schools and universities and use it to start developing and exporting consumer goods.

Or they might look at America's unbelievable military might and ask themselves, "how can we turn this into grocery money?" And since they've been raised by a generation that won't be able to teach them what it's like to be personally impacted by war, it's entirely possible that they'll answer that question the same way the Mongols did. When that happens, I sincerely hope they blame the state of the economy on their parents and not on foreigners.

"Baby Mama"? Really, Fox?

"Michelle Obama Looks for a New Introduction"

First off, I'd like to extend a hearty congratulations to Fox for being the 21st century's answer to J. Edgar Hoover, sans the laudable crime-fighting record.

That said, it absolutely pisses me off (though it doesn't particularly surprise me) that Michelle Obama has become the target of such disgustingly cliched attacks. It amazes me that the same predictably prejudiced cards have been played over and over again for more than two centuries, and that the sort of people who play them still haven't stopped trying. You almost have to admire their audacity.

For one thing, if Michelle Obama were in fact an "Angry Black Woman", I'd say it's her motherfucking prerogative. I mean, granted, she had the luxury of spending only four years of her life in under Jim Crow, but I'm pretty sure it took more than a few weeks for that shit to wear off. Seriously, she's a black woman who grew up in Chicago's south side back then, and managed to pull off Harvard Law regardless. Think about how much she could have accomplished if she didn't have to deal with the burdens of her race, gender and social class. If reparations happened, they'd pretty much have to give her Disneyland.

But more important is the fact that she's being portrayed not just as a passionate firebrand but as an "Angry Black Woman". It was unscrupulous and underhanded for the right to go after Bill Clinton because of his failings as a husband that didn't really have anything to do with his administrative ability, but setting aside the harm it did him personally, it was mostly just petty. Cashing in on racial prejudice for political reasons, on the other hand, is just scummy and repulsive. It's a time honored tradition among bigots to deny black Americans their due on the grounds that they'll be some kind of threat if given power. Apparently, it's a tradition that the conservative columnists who've attacked Michelle Obama are proud to uphold. I suppose it's some kind of a consolation that they're trying to drag Obama down more because he's liberal than because he's black. But frankly, it's not very much of one.

All's Fair? Part 2

Setting that topic aside, let me get to the reason I started this post in the first place. Yes, part 1 was just a big, unintentional digression. You might have noticed that the title of this post- "All's Fair?"- has little or nothing to do with the content of part 1, and the reason for that is because it was going to be a musing about love and sexual morality. It's been something I've been thinking about a lot lately, and that article about hymen restoration seemed like a perfect illustration of something that doesn't often seem to occur to the people who long for a distant, idyllic past where good-old-fashioned sitcom values ruled. It seems like a lot of people, left and right, tend to make the innocuous mistake of looking at the significantly lower divorce rates in the past and in formerly colonized countries and thinking, "what the hell is it that they did right that we're doing wrong, with our ridiculous divorce rates?"

So we look to our old friend, inductive argument. We infer to the best explanation, and the obvious answer to the problem seems to be that the pseudo-Victorian sexual morality held by so many of the former colonies (and that we held ourselves until the sixties happened) is the answer, and that the degradation of old fashioned sexual values is why marriage is dying. To be perfectly honest, if I was confronted with a convincing enough sociological study that said that homosexuality, sodomy and premarital sex were actually the reason so many marriages fail and that getting rid of them would bring happiness and stability to the marriages that were left, I'd be tempted. But I submit to you that what Indian culture is doing right is- drumroll please- nothing.

Social sanctions and sexual taboos can force you stay in a marriage or make you cling desperately to your virginity, but they're not going to do anything else. Social pressure doesn't bring love into marriages that lack it (though, to be fair, time and shared experiences occasionally do). They don't make people psychologically or socially healthy who weren't before. If a study says that Indian couples get divorced less often, I think it probably means just that and nothing else. And it always amazes me that, despite that commonsensical explanation being immediately available, people are willing to go as far as they do to make social sanctions against sexuality as strong as they so often are. It stuns me that there are people out there who can understand that gay couples can be in bona fide heavens-to-betsy grade A love with a capital l-o-v-e and still say no to gay marriage. It boggles the mind that someone can understand that there are people out there who have had the experience of seeing new things in old things the way one does when in love, and had that experience because of someone of the same sex, and still say that they shouldn't have the right to a legally and socially sanctioned union because it seems icky. And the dark side of the effort to cling to our old sexual morals goes so much farther than just bans on gay marriage and surgically restored hymens. (See Saudi Arabia and its rampant, violent misogyny).

I wonder how much all the folks out there who want a return to old fashioned values really know what they're wishing for. Literature's a great treasure trove of evidence for this point; women are basically slaves and property in the Iliad (and the Old Testament for that matter), and the Tale of Genji has the title character adopting a 12-year old girl to raise as a fragile, stunted ideal wife.

To be fair, that’s an oversimplification. It's not like people who want "old fashioned values" (whatever that means) want to annul suffrage and bring back the legal model of women as chattel. What the advocates of old sexual morality want is not so much a regression but a revision, to which I say, sounds awesome. Technically speaking, modifying our old sexual ethics until they match an ideal set of mores pretty much amounts to the same thing as building that ideal set from scratch.

And therein, dear readers, lies the rub. Here's the million dollar question. Which of our old sexual mores is the baby and which the bathwater?

Most (though not all) ethical philosophers make a distinction between what they call the right and the good: There are good things that you can do that you have a right not to do (like giving to charity) and other things that you have a right to do but are bad (like being racist). When it comes to sex, a lot of ethical philosophers are concerned with the right instead of the good when it comes to sexual ethics; what exactly constitutes consent, when is sex so unconscionably harmful that we have to criminalize it, etc.

Personally, though, it seems like the more pressing and difficult question lies with the good instead of the right. It's hard to imagine that many people, left or right, are willing to advocate the criminalization of sexual acts performed consensually and conscionably in the privacy of one's own home, but the subtler, trickier and possibly more important issue lies with what exactly constitutes "good" and "bad" sex (that is, ethically). As important as it is to worry about what sex should be legally sanctioned, it seems like there's more immediate importance to the question of what sex should be socially sanctioned. And no matter how much it seems from what I've written so far that I'm your stereotypical northeast-coast hyper-progressive denizen of a brave new world, I honestly find it hard not to suspect that the gradual relaxation of sexual taboos since suffrage has, once it crossed a certain threshold, led to women being objectified more rather than less. And then of course, there are plenty of ways we're still stuck in the fifties and are way worse off for it. (Understatements ftw!)

So what’s the optimal set of sexual morals for society to have?

To be continued.

All's Fair? Part 1

So, I look through the Times website last night and I find this article on the page- a small, out of the way link that was glaring at me like a neon light- and I'm not sure what to think. My first and predictable reaction was to shake my head in dismay. Now, don't get me wrong. This is not to pass judgment on the women who have this procedure performed, and the head-shaking isn't at them. It's at the fact that this kind of thing needs to happen at all.

I have enough faith in my friends to leave out all the relevant disclaimers about Islam being a profound and moral religion, but let's face facts- there's a reason you'll find the Quran on the Eastern Religions shelf at Barnes & Nobles despite the fact that Moses is mentioned in it more than Muhammad is. It may be part of the Judeo-Christian corpus, but most predominantly Muslim countries are former colonies and fall under the loosely defined category we call the "third world". Most of these countries have skipped over the industrial revolution altogether and are trying to find a place in the digital one with varying degrees success, but whether you're the more fortunate Turkey or UAE or mired in the there-but-for-the-grace-of-Allah hardships of Somalia or Afghanistan, you're going to deal with the fact that you just skipped over a period of your historical evolution that Europe and the Americas got to enjoy four whole centuries of. One of the nice parts of that package is that you have a sense of your culture, history and community in a way that's hard to find in the former colonial powers; I (and even Muslim Indians) grew up immersed in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and I have a relationship with them that not many people in the west have with the Iliad or the Poetic Edda or even the Bible. My relationship with the old epics is in no small part responsible for my love affairs with both philosophy and literature. But one of the dark sides of that connectedness with history is that the archaic elements of your past cling to you as tightly as the civilized ones, and a puritanical sexual morality is no small part of that. It can tear families apart.

So it's honestly hard to be judgmental of the women who get this procedure. It's hard to even think of them as being stodgy or conservative, coming from the culture that I'm from. Indian culture, and especially my generation of Indian-Americans is pretty often caught in that thorny briar patch between the old world and the new. We take half of our moral instincts from Nehru, Tagore and other progressive revolutionaries of the independence struggle, and another half from rural village ethics that give us a sense of conscience and community at their best but at their worst are willing to compromise human rights for family honor (See: Sati and the caste system). And this is despite the fact that the first world has been good to my family. Culture shock to us involves pain, fear, struggle and disorientation, but it usually lacks the bitter edge it often has for African, Middle Eastern and Latin American immigrants.

So we have a sense of what it's like to feel like your culture and your morality is in periodic conflict with the western world, but not every third-world culture is as fortunate as ours has been. Most third-world countries have had a Nehru, Atatürk, Locke or Jefferson to bridge the gap between the ancient and the modern, but not all of them have. I can only imagine what it's like to be an immigrant from one of those cultures, and I don't think I'd have the courage to take a stand if I was a second-generation immigrant woman from one of those cultures. A white lie, a surgical procedure and a minor compromise of your integrity seem like a small price to pay to not be alienated from your family and community (though a well-deserved kudos and god bless to the women who do stand up).