Father, what does lying mean?

The title of the post that ended the series on Jill Lepore's book was this: Lying is as American as apple pie.

Of course, there is nothing exceptional about lying in America.  Everybody lies.  It is universal.  In the modern world, businesses are experts at lying.  How many years has it been since the Bhopal tragedy, for instance, and how truthful has the criminal business been?  Or, how truthful has the Indian government been?

Businesses routinely lie. Which is why we often joke, because there is nothing else that we can really do, that "business ethics" is an oxymoron!  A short piece at Harvard Business Review begins like this:

Many of the corporate scandals in the past several years — think Volkswagen or Wells Fargo — have been cases of wide-scale dishonesty. It’s hard to fathom how lying and deceit permeated these organizations.

Wait a second, aren't lying and deceit important and fundamental values in money-making?!

At least these businesses do not pretend to be moral compasses that point to people the direction to heaven and hell.  Lying, as we have always known, is very much a part of the culture of institutionalized religions too.  As if the Roman Catholic church has not messed up with people's lives enough and then lying about every crime that they have been involved with, the latest--as shocking as it is--continues along the path of lying and deceit that the institution has always done:

[The] Vatican has confirmed, apparently for the first time, that its department overseeing the world’s priests has general guidelines for what to do when clerics break celibacy vows and father children.
“I can confirm that these guidelines exist,” the Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti wrote in response to a query from The New York Times. “It is an internal document.”

Think about this: The Vatican has developed procedures on what to do, what to say, whenever one of its priests end up fathering children.  And these procedures are to ensure that the word does not get out.  Systematic lying and deceit are fundamental values in religion too!

The Vatican even has a specific phrase to refer to the children of priests: "children of the ordained."  And, of course, there is no "official" estimate of the numbers of "children of the ordained."

The children are sometimes the result of affairs involving priests and laywomen or nuns — others of abuse or rape. There are some, exceedingly rare, high-profile cases, but the overwhelming majority remain out of the public eye.

Just awful! 

Keep this, too, in mind when the Pope or any of his underlings chastize the business world for not working for the greater good.  Nor should you ever be fooled by any business that pretends that it never does anything evil.  And, don't get me started about politicians and governments.

Bloody liars they mostly are!

The disgustingly unique American economic activity in the world: college sports

Most of my leftist colleagues, some who even proudly call themselves as "socialists," are ardent fans of college sports.  It is hilarious to me when I hear them in the hallways using "we" when talking about their favorite teams, usually the university where they earned their doctorates.  However, in all these years, I have never heard them loudly discussing and condeming sexual violence and college sports. And, boy, have there have been some cases!  Maybe they discuss them only the days I am not on campus (yeah, right!)

The latest violence?  In the very town where I live.

The university associated with the massive sports corporation called The Ducks is all over the news now after it was reported that three of its basketball players had been investigated over rape charges but are not being prosecuted because "the crimes cannot be proved beyond a reasonable doubt."

The female victim told police that on the night of March 8 she went to basket­ball player Johnathan Loyd’s house, where Dotson and Austin allegedly took her into a bathroom and forced her to have sex with them, according to a Eugene police report released Monday night. Artis stayed in a hallway outside the bathroom, the report said.
The victim alleged that the three players then took her to an apartment and continued to take turns forcing her to engage in unwanted sexual activity, the report said. The players allegedly stopped only when the victim began to cry.

What the hell is wrong with these student-athletes?  

The three have been kicked off the team, even though the criminal justice system will not pursue the case.  One of them apparently has a past record as well:

Austin originally signed with Providence last year but was suspended for the season and transferred to Oregon in January. He was not eligible to play last season. It was announced in March that Austin is being investigated in a sexual assault in Rhode Island.

Really?
Nobody bothered to ever find out why the player was suspended by a university?
Really?
What the hell is wrong with the coaches?

Sports in colleges as a big time economic activity, which is disgustingly a uniquely American thing, has taken over higher education.

On Facebook, I do not see status updates from users who usually otherwise post a great number about "their Ducks."  Fanatical sports fans yet strangely super-silent now.

Meanwhile, the real purpose of higher education--you know, education--gets maligned, and is thrown whatever crumbs are left after the party is over.  The people in all their wisdom enthusiastically support college sports, professional sports, and anything that is sheer entertainment, and are eager to pay for all that even with taxpayer money. Especially with taxpayer money.  But, ask them to spare a dollar from that for education, and it is murder.

The richest nation in the history of the world subsidizes all sorts of luxuries and inefficiencies. Football stadiums, bridges to nowhere, bases and planes that even the military does not want, churches, temples, cathedrals, and vacation homes. Yet in the present consensus on the future of our higher learning, the notion that perhaps we can afford a reasonable level of public investment in the inefficient institutions that gave us the Green Revolution and Google is deemed unrealistic. The public debate is locked on measurable outputs. But the opportunity costs of failing to reinvest never come up. What is the public expense, for instance, if we continue to gouge funding for research on communicable diseases or climate change? How do we measure the cost of failing to inspire and guide the student who might write the next great work of political thought that can guide us safely through the challenges of this century? Why can’t the richest country in the world afford to adequately support passionate potential scholars in the pursuit of their calling? We make explicit value choices in this republic. We have chosen tax breaks over history, poetry, and science. Nothing is inevitable. We can choose otherwise.

I suppose in condemning this supposedly market behavior, I will side with those "socialists."

Oh well, this local rape story will go away.  The college football season will begin. "My team" people will only care about the wins, and not care a shit about education, and not care a shit about violence--physical and sexual.  As long as "we" win!  "Just win, baby!"

I hurriedly clicked this guy wearing a "I love my Ducks" ...  when waiting for the crosswalk green light ...
in Tampa, Florida! Diagonally across the continent!

Keep calm and die: Hurricane Sandy is god's plan to kill people

Hurricane Sandy is bound to bring a lot of misery. (Yes, I am intentionally channeling this!)  Along with it, within hours, we will read about, and watch, stories of survivors who will refer to how god saved them, or their homes, or their dogs, or all of the above.

Even as we commiserate with them and take in all the destruction of life and property, the rationalists and atheists amongst us will wonder at the contradiction: if they were saved by god, couldn't that god not have caused all the tragedy in the first place?  And what about the dead and injured who were not saved by god?  Were they not in god's plans?  Were they the infidels?  Satan worshippers?

The religious conveniently backtrack from these troubling questions.  "It is all in god's plans" will be their bottom-line.  A hurricane or a rape is god's way of testing the strength of those who believe in him.  Or, as I remember the line from one of the English essays we read in the early high school years, "god's will hath no why."

To which I have only one response: bullshit.

It is bullshit that we saw in the recent controversial remark about rape and pregnancy.  The Indiana Senate candidate said “if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” (I use the uppercase G because that is how the politician would have used it.)

To true believers, this consistent with their beliefs.  If good things happen courtesy of god, then bad things also happen courtesy of god.  A rape is, therefore, in god's plans.  A pregnancy that results is also in god's plans.

As Heather Mac Donald wrote in noting the politician's consistent theology, it is all thanks to god because:

I mean, if he can perform such Iron Age miracles as ventriloquizing through a burning bush , he can sure as heck prevent a rape if he chose to do so.  His will has no option but to be done

The Indiana politician (the name matters to me less--they are all the same!) was being brutally frank about his hardcore religious faith, unlike most of the rest who are a lot more capable at hiding their true beliefs while mouthing some bromide in the public.

This latest thorny religious issue is not new; it has been one hell of a long theological struggle defending and explaining god amidst all the misery and injustice that envelops us.

Sure enough, this kind of thing has made theologians and annotators very anxious: we have two thousand years of awkward and justifying commentary, in both the Judaic and Christian traditions. The Protestant and Catholic churches struggled for centuries with the implications of God’s foreknowledge of sin and suffering. You can try to wriggle out of these implications by arguing that we humans must have freedom to do good and evil or we would just be automata, remotely controlled by God. But this returns us to Mourdock’s dilemma. Because if God knows in advance what we will do, he knows that we will misuse our freedom, as he surely knew that Adam and Eve would. As Pierre Bayle, the seventeenth-century skeptic, sardonically puts it in his “Historical and Critical Dictionary,” divine foreknowledge of this kind is a bit like a mother who lets her daughter go to a ball, knowing in advance that she will be violated. What mother would do that? Why would God, Bayle says, bestow a gift that he knows in advance will be abused?

The Judaic and Christian traditions are not alone--it was pretty much the story in the Hindu tradition in which I was raised. 

[Religiously] speaking, there are only three possible responses: you can continue to believe in a God who knows in advance the number of our days; you can sharply limit your conception of God’s power, by positing a deity who does not know in advance what we will do, or who cannot control what we will do; or you can scrap the whole idea of divinity. The problem with the first position is that most believers, as Richard Mourdock did not do, run away from the dread implications of their own beliefs; and the problem with the second position is that it is not clear why such a limited deity would be worth worshipping. So cut Richard Mourdock some slack. He’s more honest than most of his evangelical peers; and his naïve honesty at least helpfully illuminates a horrid abyss.

I like that usage: "naïve honesty."

I would rather that more and more people scrapped the whole idea of divinity. 

Oh, how I miss Christopher Hitchens in this context!  I suppose killing Hitchens with cancer was god's plan too, eh!

Rapists go free in Pakistan: the awful treatment of Mukhtran Bibi

One of those times when I feel the urge to yell at the world a big Fuck You.

It is a crazy world in which we live, where we are often spectators to all kinds of terrible injustices.  And Pakistan's court setting free the rapists who gang-raped Mukhtar Mai is one of those for which we owe her big time.  A sorry ain't enough :(

Lest we forget the reason why she had to approach the court in the first place--it goes back to the year 2002.  In condemning this "disappointing verdict," The Hindu notes in its editorial:

Since the day in 2002 when she decided to seek punishment for the men who had gang-raped her, Mukhtaran Mai has been a symbol of Pakistani women's struggle against a feudal and patriarchal society in which brutal crimes against women are condoned in the name of honour and custom. In Mukhtaran's case, a panchayat in her village abetted the rape as “punishment” for her 12-year-old brother's alleged illicit relations with a girl of a higher caste. It was expected that, after the treatment meted out to her, Mukhtaran, in keeping with tradition, would conveniently commit suicide, and no liability would fall on any man. But this extraordinarily brave woman, unlettered at the time of the monstrous crime, decided to defy societal taboos to take her attackers to court.

Yes, she was expected to commit suicide after having been gang-raped :(

The reality is also that Mukhtaran's case is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Most atrocious abuses, of women and children in particular, don't get aired.  Which is all the more the reason that Mukhtaran herself waged this legal battle--to ensure that it will set a precedent, in addition to punishment for the rapists.  Now the supreme court has set a precedent all right, but not the one that Mukhtaran sought to establish.  These innocent become "victims of law and apathy"

And this takes us to Meerwala Jatoi, a village in Muzaffargarh district in southern Punjab, where the influential men of the Mastoi tribe, Mai’s tormentors, rule the roost. They are otherwise small fry on the political landscape of southern Punjab, which is home to landlords with large holdings and all the trappings of a mediaeval feudal system in action. It is no secret that the abuse of landless, working men and women, and their children, is rampant here; some landowners even have their own private prisons.
Here, village councils, or panchayats comprising mostly uneducated men whose minds are steeped deep in the dark recesses of tribal, feudal rules and laws of their own making, run a parallel justice system aimed at further victimising the already marginalised in the land, especially those who dare to defy unjust social norms.
Amidst all this operate the rural police whose unwritten rules of duty stipulate that they assist the local landlords in their jurisdiction to maintain peace and order in their respective fiefdoms. This in turn makes the task of policing a cakewalk. They see no evil, they hear of none committed or alleged, and are hand in glove with the influential clans. For the underprivileged, it is literally a dog-eat-dog world.
This cruel social system continues to prevail because of a certain mindset that too is rampant, not only in rural areas but across the board. That’s why an entire neighbourhood can be roused to punish an alleged blasphemer, but there is little social outrage seen when girl children are ‘sold’ in marriages to older men; when women are traded off in forced marriages to settle tribal feuds; and yet others are killed, even buried or burnt alive in the name of so-called honour.

Not only does Mukhtaran Mai have to deal with this awful verdict, she now has to worry about the increased threat to her life:

'I'm disappointed. Why was I made to wait for five years if this decision was to be given?' said a sobbing Mai in a telephone interview from her village in the eastern province of Punjab shortly after the court announced the decision.'The accused can kill me and my family when they return home,' she added.
'I have lost faith in the courts, and now I am leaving my case to the court of God. I am sure God will punish those who molested me.'

Terrible!

Haiti: the only good news is about frogs?

It is a year since the devastating earthquake.  Last night PBS' Frontline was about Haiti.  Dutifully I turned in, and shut it off when I could not handle the horrible stories of rape.  For now, denial is working for me.

National Geographic Reports:

Scientists searching for long-lost frogs in Haiti’s forests came face to face with the critically endangered La Hotte glanded frog, which sees the world through unusual, sapphire-colored eyes.

The frog is among half a dozen newly rediscovered Haitian species, which had not been seen for nearly two decades and occur nowhere else in the world, found by researchers from Conservation International (CI) and IUCN’s Amphibian Specialist Group

“All we hear from Haiti is bad news and we wanted to highlight something unique that Haiti has and really should be proud of,” said Conservation International’s Robin Moore, an amphibian conservation specialist and co-leader of the expedition.

Image and story of the day: elderly women and rape in Africa

What is special about this photo of two elderly African women?  They are at a martial arts class.  for defending themselves, as this photo essay at Foreign Policy explains:


Two elderly women wait for their martial arts class to begin in a slum in Nairobi, Kenya, in January. By some counts, one in five adult rape victims in Kenya is older than 60 -- one survivor is 105. Intercourse with the elderly is believed by many would-be attackers to bring good luck, purify one's sins, and even cure AIDS. Starting in 2007, a program called I'm Worth Defending has empowered women to fight back by teaching self-defense classes in Nairobi slums.

I followed up on one of those hyperlinks where it reads:

The Nairobi Women's Hospital, home to the country's largest gender violence recovery centre, treats about 230 cases of sexual violence every month - the oldest survivor was 105 years old.
"When it comes to rape, I am my only defender," said Veronica Njeri, 65, another member of the class. "Here in the slums, people act like there is no law."

Yet another piece of evidence that we live in one screwed up world.  Though, I suppose it was not any better in the past--perhaps even worse!

Horror story of the day: rape of Afghan women

Anna Badhken writes in Foreign Policy:

Eight years ago, four Pashtun women told me of their assailants, three fighters from Dostum's militia, Junbish-e-Milli-e-Islami who took turn raping them all night. Technically, only one of them, Nazu, was a woman; her daughters were 10, 12, and 14. The youngest, Bibi Amina, was playing with the fringe of the giant red scarf that covered her head and smiling. It seemed to me that she had not understood what had been done to her.

One of the many incidents of rape as a weapon .... this is after the fall of the Taliban government!!!
And, apparently all those crimes will go unpunished; Badhken concludes:

Last month, the Afghan government confirmed that it had signed into force the National Stability and Reconciliation Law -- and what a tragic misnomer that is. The law effectively amnesties all warlords and fighters responsible for large-scale human rights abuses in the preceding decades. "Their view," says Farid Mutaqi, a human rights worker in Mazar-e-Sharif, "is that justice should be the victim of peace."
You know what this means, daughters of Balkh: This means your rapes will never be punished. Perhaps, in some future iteration of war that has been rolling back and forth through these green wheat fields almost incessantly for millennia, they will be avenged -- through some other rapes, of some other women.