Heidi Li's Potpourri

Inaugaral addresses worth revisiting: another occasional series

We shall see whether Mr. Favreau can write Mr. Obama an inaugural address worthy of those delivered at other times of great concern for our country. Meanwhile, below are selections, with some emphases added, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's First Inaugural Address:

President Hoover, Mr. Chief Justice, my friends. This is a day of national consecration.

And I am certain that on this day my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency, I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today.  ... So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days. In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunk to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; and the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

And yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered, because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily, this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True, they have tried. But their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

...

These dark days, my friends, will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves, to our fellow men. Recognition of that falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, and on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

Barack Obama Martin Luther King Jr.; and the rest of us

I was asked today if I did not think I should be happy about President-elect Obama's election because he will be our first black president. My questioner was somebody who clearly is happy about President-elect Obama's presidency for precisely this reason. According to him Martin Luther King, Jr. would be similarly pleased.

Furthermore, according to my questioner, it is insulting to Dr. King's memory that I regard Dr. King as a teacher in my own quest to resist peer pressure, mobocracy, and authoritarianism in my own small, nascent efforts to seriously fight for the full civic and social standing of women in America and elsewhere.

In my conversation, I explained that I am extremely happy for those people of color, particularly black Americans, who feel more fully validated as Americans by living in a country led by a black person. (This post - just like the conversation - does not present an occasion to debate who counts as black or a person of color; such distinctions were out of order in the conversation. They would have been insulting to my questioner, who is black and would rightly point out that in most of this country most people have no problem saying who counts as such, despite the complex ways that individuals come to be seen as black or brown or white or whatever. I mean that: please do not use this post as an occasion to debate what it means to be black.) I then explained that beyond this very great happiness, the color of Mr. Obama's skin has nothing to do with whether the prospect of his presidency pleases me or dismays me. That was all that time permitted in this brief interlude of discussion during the day. But I have thought further on the matter.

With regard to Martin Luther King, Jr. I would not presume to surmise how he would have reacted to Mr. Obama. Dr. King was sometimes critical of other black leaders and nothing in his writings suggests that all black people are superior to all white people. Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed of a type of equality, a society in which the color of one's skin was neither cause for shame or pride and where people, including his own children, were judged by the content of their character. As Dr. King so famously noted this dream is an American dream, not a black dream or a white dream.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring." And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

To the extent that Barack Obama's election represents the realization of Dr. King's dream, his election is an awesome, mighty event.

Yet Dr. King was, as we all are, a person of his time. So in this speech, given in 1963, he does not single out women as group separate from men who need to be included in the new age of equality that he envisioned. He refers over and over to men, not to people, but that again was the language of his time. Confusing language, but the language of the time. King knew of hatred between black men and white men, between Jews and Gentiles, and between Protestants and Catholics, knew all too well how this hatred was so often used to justify inegalitarian treatment by one group toward the other. King rejected the hatred that drove such inegalitarianism.

I share with King a delight in the idea of a day when people will be judged by the content of their characters. I dream of a day that may come as more people come to realize that nobody has championed the cause of full civic and social standing for women in the face of hatred against them, a day when people are judged by the content of their character rather than the kind of genitalia they possess.

In 2008, I saw a man stand idly by en route to his winning the White House while his supporters called women who ran against him or on a ticket against him, "ho" and "c*nt". He stood idly by while members of the press intimated that the adult daughter of one his opponents was prostituting herself by campaigning for her mother. That he stood by so idly had nothing to with the color of his skin. Plenty of white men in positions of political power or prestige also stood idly by while this went on. Some women of all colors stood idly by as well.

I have gone on to see the man who won the White House include in his inauguration another man, one who preaches hatred of gay people, the doctrine of wifely submission, and the comparison of the exercise of a woman's Constitutional right to an abortion to an act of Nazism. I have seen him refuse to disassociate himself from a speechwriter who, however stupidly, evidently had a great time pretending to cop a feel of the future Secretary of State - something he would not have done, I suspect, were she a man whose cardboard cutout just happened to be at the party he was attending. Both the preacher and the speechwriter are men, white men, so skin color does not come into the hatred and disrespect of women indicated by either man's words or gestures.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was, as we all are, a person of his time. So I do not presume to know what he would make of a man who stood idly by while women who ran against him or his ticket were exposed to hate speech; or what he would make of the inclusion of a woman-bashing preacher in a Presidential inauguration; or the retention of a sophomorically sexist speechwriter on a President's staff. But I find nothing in King's life or writing that suggests I as a woman am in any way disrespecting him when I take him as a model of a person who staunchly refused to accept arbitrary inegalitarianism and saw it as an obstacle to liberty, particularly liberty as understood in the American tradition. So far, I have not seen from Barack Obama a commitment to the elimination of the arbitrary inegalitarianism in the way men and women, boys and girls, are treated in America or indeed the world today. Unlike Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama has not made the cornerstone of his life or his political career the elimination of arbitrary inegalitarianism of the sort that makes the legitimate pursuit of liberty impossible. So Barack Obama does not provide me with a model for how to fight the fights I think need fighting: the overcoming of hatred of women, the effort to have people see women as people deserving of their full and rightful place in American society and around the world.

Martin Luther King, Jr. does.

Good ideas, no clout

Here is a list that includes some fine ideas. Since the list comes from Now and the Feminist Majority, two major organizations that endorsed Mr. Obama for the Presidency, the list may reach the transition team or even perhaps somebody significant in the new administration.  I would be very pleased indeed if the Obama-Biden administration decided to act upon the best ideas on the list or even really any of them.

I would also be flat out astonished.

The problem is that NOW and the Feminist Majority have no clout with this administration. They gave it away with their endorsement of the President-elect without getting any commitments from him on any women's issue. In endorsing Mr. Obama, they excused his silence on the sexism and misogyny directed against Senator Clinton in the primaries and Governor Palin in the general election. (Regardless of whether one supported either of these women on the merits, it should have been unacceptable to refer to either as a "ho'" or a "c*nt", and Mr. Obama should have been among the first to condemn this conduct.)

NOW and the Feminist Majority and all the other major established women's organizations I know about refused to withhold their endorsements even though Mr. Obama withheld his commitment to specific measures to enable women to achieve full civil, political, and social standing in America. The time when one has bargaining power with somebody one is hiring is before one supports him or her for the job. Mr. Obama took establishment women's groups for granted, and I can't see any reason why he won't safely be able to in 2012. For now he's too busy currying favor with people who did not endorse him but could help him raise even more buckets of money for that race - Rick Warren and his ilk.

Women qua women will be the outsiders looking in at this administration.

Women and men who genuinely care about women as persons, who truly appreciate that women's rights are human rights, are going to have help ourselves. That's fine, we do what we must. Just as Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohandis K. Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela realized that they could not depend upon their governments to aid them in the quest to dignify and improve the lot of their communities, so too must we,the community of people dedicated to women gaining their rightful place in our society, abandon that expectation, at least from an Obama-Biden administration.

See 51 Percent for information about one such gathering place for this community.

The only thing that surprises me is the blatancy of the indifference

I just received another communication from the Obama-Biden transition team. If you click the message image below you will be taken to the "Open for For Questions" part of the transition site.

Interestingly, if you look for questions with the words "homophobia", "racism", or even "bigotry" questions come up. If, however you search for questions with the words "misogyny" or "sexism", no questions come up. I know this is not because no questions were asked about the Obama administration's plans to combat misogyny and sexism; I, along with hundreds of others, asked such questions, with seriousness and good faith. Apparently though, the transition team cannot bring itself to publish questions on these topics.

I am appalled.

What can one infer from the fact that the transition team is not even interested in including QUESTIONS about these topics? Something far scarier than indifference to them. Rather, there is hostility toward and fear of the topic and those who even raise it.

Despite the fact that 51% of the population consists of women, our incoming President's transition team is unwilling to even post questions about misogyny and sexism. Is it any wonder that so many women and men who genuinely care about women as persons are realizing that we will have to, as we always have to, help ourselves? That's fine, we do what we must. Just as Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohandis K. Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela realized that they could not depend upon their governments to aid them in the quest to dignify and improve the lot of their communities, so too must we abandon that expectation at least from an Obama-Biden administration.

If the Obama-Biden transition team is not interested in including even questions on the subjects of misogyny and sexism, there is precious little hope the Obama-Biden administration plans to tackle them head on. Join with others who will, whether it be through 51 Percent or through other organizations you believe have that mission.

UPDATE: DECEMBER 30, 8:15. Since posting this piece originally approximately six questions mentioning misogyny or sexism have gone up on the transition team website. Whether they will stay up depends upon whether the webmasters allow "flaggers" to override the questions. At the transition team's site, you can flag a question as inappropriate. Once a question is flagged enough times, it is it seems, automatically removed. Hence, the removal of all the questions I saw posted on the first round that referred to sexism and misogyny. Apparently, many more who visit the Obama-Biden transition team website find any references to sexism and misogyny "inappropriate" than do visitors who endorse such questions. One example of a question that would seem to be in danger of being eliminated is the following:

"What will you do to encourage schools to fully integrate education about misogyny and sexism into their curricula, at every level and across all subjects?"

51 Percent website development update

With some extremely hard work from dedicated professionals volunteering their time, the website for 51 Percent is coming along quickly. For a young educational organization, the launch of the website will be a critical step, because many of the materials 51 Percent will disseminate can be made available through the website. We are working to launch the website as early in January as possible. For those interested in heeding the Obama-Biden transition team's call to treat January 19 as a day of service, we will be registering 51 Percent as an organization to be part of that effort as soon as the transition team accepts registrations, which they have said they will be doing shortly after New Year's Day. We will announce specific ways to help 51 Percent on the 19th specifically.

Financial assistance now has been crucial. Thank you to those who have been donating to 51 Percent: you are helping to cover costs ranging from website hosting to paying professional fees. At this stage every dollar donated is extra precious. We know times are tough, another reason for our deepest appreciation for any contribution - these days, even $5.10 is a sacrifice for many. If you care to donate, you can do so below.

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For further information about the content of the planned website go here.

51 Percent has raised about $6000; as founder I have donated an additional $5000. If we can raise an additional $4000, 51 Percent would, for now, be comfortable; if we can raise $9000, 51 Percent will have funds to begin raising its profile.

Between contributions and the founder's donation, 51 Percent has raised eleven thousand dollars. Ambitious target: twenty thousand dollars ($9000 needed). Interim target: fifteen thousand dollars ($4000 needed).

Mr. Obama, why not change your mind? It is your party, disinvite Rick Warren.

Frank Rich, an entrenched New York Times columnist, finally decided to publish a wee bit of criticism directed a President Elect Obama just today, December 28. Just a tad of critique because, according to Rich, "for the first time a faint tinge of Bush crept into my Obama reveries this month." As one  who has not been laboring under Obama reveries and who began trying to figure out whether he reminded me more of Richard Nixon or George W. Bush as far back as the fall of 2007, the this late faint awakening from a journalist of many year's experience seems peculiar, to say the least. I know that coming out of a pleasant reverie must be difficult, but Rich is barely awake and certainly not likable enough given the narrow basis for his creeping concerns about Mr. Obama. Rich's main beef is that Mr. Obama has displayed "his own brand of hubris and arrogance" by expending an amount of "political capital" that Rich considers "small change" because, according to Rich, most Americans who know about  Rick Warren like him.

Indeed, Rich himself kind of likes Rick Warren because: "His good deeds are plentiful on issues like human suffering in Africa, poverty and climate change." Sure, Warren "is opposed to same-sex marriage, but so is almost every top-tier national politician, including Obama." (Note to Mr Rich: there is some scary circularity in the logic here.  It is no sign of acceptability of any kind that "almost every top-tier national politician" and Rich Warren are on the same side of any given issue.) With regard to Warren's hatred of gays, Rich cannot even be bothered by anything other than Warren's "defamation" of gays. So he apparently is not bothered by Warren's comparison of women who exercise their right to abortion to Nazis or his assertion of the propriety of wifely submission.

(What is it with these men who comment on Warren? They object to his treatment of group that includes men (gays) but they cannot even note Warren's misogynistic worldview, one in which all wives are second-class to all husbands and women exercising their constitutional rights to bodily self-determination are put on the same moral plane as Nazis. (If you are bothered by this consistent blindspot, you may be interested in 51 Percent.)

Rich confidently writes of Obama "he’s not about to rescind the invitation." I assume that Rich is confident of that because he does note Obama's "cockiness" - which Rich ultimately excuses, writing "By the historical standards of presidential hubris, Obama’s disingenuous defense of his tone-deaf invitation to Warren is nonetheless a relatively tiny infraction. It’s no Bay of Pigs. But it does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black president. It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history."

I wholeheartedly agree that the decision to have Rick Warren bless his inauguration is no Bay of Pigs. But Frank Rich just can't quite pull himself out of his reverie if he calls the Warren invitation and Warren's role in the event an "asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black President." Having a bigoted, homophophic, misogynistic cleric headline your inaugural is likely to render the event anything but joyous for millions of Americans. What Rich regards as an asterisk, they recognize as the sharp elbow to the ribs.

Why doesn't Mr. Obama simply rescind the invitation? It was a bad idea to extend it and the incoming President of the United States does not have to stick with bad ideas, just like he does not have to retain staff members who engage in boorish bigoted conduct (vide Jon Favreau). Mr Rich urges "humility and equanimity everywhere in America, starting at the top." Mr. Obama has a wonderful opportunity to display both qualities immediately. Instead of hiding from the press in Hawaii, he could set up a microphone and say:

"I made a poor decision when I invited Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation.  It is difficult to withdraw the invitation now without embarrassing Mr. Warren, but I must take full responsibility for my own mistake in extending the invitation in the first place. I apologize wholeheartedly for having created this awkward situation which does, I realize embarrass Mr. Warren. But Mr. Warren's pride is not most important thing at stake here. My own insensitivity to the concerns of gays and women led me to make a poor decision, one that is ruining the inauguration for many people who voted for me in the first place. I want to be the first to show that I can, calmly and with equanimity, change my mind when I know I have made a poor choice."

In the alternative, if Mr. Obama cannot bear to embarrass Rick Warren by disinviting him, he can have invite a second cleric or other leader with rather different views than Mr. Warren's regarding gays and women to stand right beside Mr. Warren and give a co-invocation.

Precisely because this is no Bay of Pigs, Mr. Obama can do something about the situation before he goes through with a bad choice. The inauguration has not happened yet. Nobody's life depends on Mr. Obama sticking with a plan that once made might be risky to change. But a lot of people's opinion of Mr. Obama rides on what he does about the current situation; could be that much more than "small change" is at stake. Finally, setting aside political calculus, it might be nice to have the incoming President distinguish himself from the outgoing one by demonstrating that he has the guts to recognize his own mistakes and to ameliorate or correct them for himself when he has the opportunity.

What are we going to do about 2012?

Whatever you thought during the election or the primaries, what matters is what you think now. If you believe that President-Elect Obama is unwilling or unable to be anything more than an empty suit, you better start organizing around an alternative for 2012 right now. Because President-elect Obama has been organizing his run for 2012 since at least June of 2008, and probably earlier, assuming he has planned on being twice nominated by the Democratic Party.

If you have tended to prefer Democrats, you must accept the extreme unlikelihood of Senator Clinton challenging Senator Obama for the nomination. So, you need to identify somebody who would be willing and possibly able to challenge President-elect Obama for the nomination. It will be hard to find a person willing to do this. The last time a Democrat launched a serious primary run against an incumbent was when Senator Edward Kennedy unsuccessfully challenged Jimmy Carter; of course, the only opportunities since then have been to challenge President Bill Clinton who was, at the end of his first term, so successful a President that he was renominated by acclimation.

If you are looking ahead to the general election in 2012 and are an Independent, a Republican, or a Democrat willing to vote Republican, you have to accept that, as far as I know, there is no potential Republican contender with a commitment to gay rights or reproductive rights who could also garner the support of the Republican Party base.

You also need to face the fact that third party candidates do not win.

There is some possibility that Barack Obama may turn out to be this century's Martin Van Buren.  Van Buren faced an economy riddled with unsolvable problems, and that set up the Whigs for victory despite Van Buren's popularity. It is possible that President-elect Obama will face a similar problem.

Just to remind people of some basic history, with the fall of Van Buren, the country entered a period of rather underwhelming Presidencies:

• William Harrison
• John Tyler
• James Polk
• Zachary Taylor
• Millard Fillmore
• Franklin Pierce
• James Buchanan

Abraham Lincoln then came to power at a time of crisis for the Union - but not crises or problems of the sort confronting Barack Obama today.  We do not face the prospect of Civil War. Lincoln's ability to offer moral leadership in the face of that prospect in his time was well established prior to his election to the presidency, going back at least to one of his first major public speeches, The Lyceum Address, given in 1838, a speech that shows his awareness of the potential for tyranny to creep up upon a democratic republic whose citizens fail to commit themselves to the rules of law and the democratic institutions it rests upon. From that speech, entitled The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions:

It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them. The question then, is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would inspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle. What! think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? — Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. — It sees no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.

Lincoln's address invite "his audience to into a discussion of the principles, tendencies, and sustenance of self-government. He concentrates on its vulnerabilities and the burdens they place upon self-governing citizens." (source: John Channing Briggs, Lincoln's Speeches Reconsidered, p. 55).

As we have learned, much to our cost, the pace of our current electoral politics means a president who takes office - however he or she wins it (e.g. consider Bush's 2000 victory) stands a high chance of being renominated by her or his party (again, consider Bush in 2004) and retaining the presidency even after doing dreadful things (Bush). I may be wrong about President-elect Obama's chances of being a good leader or being able to resolve problems that may well be beyond his control. Perhaps, come 2012 I will feel he has earned my vote. For me, that would take a lot, because I do not believe in rewarding people who take advantage of corrupted procedures to gain office in the first place (which is what happened in Denver in 2008). But people can learn, and perhaps President-elect Obama will.

Regardless of that the nature of contemporary presevidential politics seems to demand that President-elect Obama start his current term as if he is already running for his next one. Therefore, those of us who await an election where we do not feel there is no major party candidate for whom we can vote or an election where we are not choosing the lesser of two of evils, need to begin seeking and supporting an alternative now.

Serious ideas and suggestions welcome.

It is hard for an empty suit to take a stand - or perhaps even to understand what it means to take a stand

Richard Cohen's sister is canceling her inauguration party because of President-elect Obama's choice of Rick Warren to bless Mr. Obama's taking the office of the Presidency of the United State. According to her brother's column in the Washington Post, what made her do this is the way in which Mr. Obama's choice to pick this pastor for this occasion serves as a special sort of condoning of Mr. Warren's views about gays and lesbians. I agree with Richard Cohen, and apparently his sister, that these views should be regarded as totally unacceptable by anybody who has any sense of the importance of civil rights and indeed of human rights. I also agree with Richard Cohen's view that as a somebody running for the office of President and who was at the time a U.S. Senator, Mr. Obama had a particular responsibility for denouncing his then-pastor's church, Trinity United Church of Christ, for giving the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan a special award during the primary season. I find it troubling that neither Mr. Cohen nor apparently his sister have not been, as far as I can tell, overly concerned by President-Elect Obama's equally eloquent silence and inaction regarding the sexism and misogyny directed at Senator Clinton and her supporters, particularly the sophomoric expression of these attitudes by Jon Favreau, the man writing President-elect Obama's inaugural address. (I shudder to think what the reaction of the Cohen family would have been if Favreau had been found on YouTube horsing around calling somebody a "homo" - maybe then Richard Cohen's sister would join us in our demand that the President-Elect fire this sophomoric bigot as his chief speech-writer. Whether a bigot is slick (Warren) or juvenile (Favreau), he is still a bigot.)

It is tempting to forget in this sort of dynamic who the real problem is. As is clear from what I have written so far, I wish Richard Cohen and his sister would be, respectively, writing about and canceling inauguration parties as much over Mr. Obama's inaction in the face of sexism and misogyny as they are in the face of anti-Semitism and gay-bashing. And yes, I wish that Richard Cohen's sister had paid attention to and given greater weight to the fact that she had the option to work to elect somebody who, both as a Senator and as a Presidential candidate, repeatedly marched in Pride parades and met with editors of gay newspapers across the country rather than working for somebody who would not even have his photograph taken with Gavin Newsome.

But I am not falling into the trap that lies that way. Just because people got it wrong before does not mean they cannot help matters now. People can learn. So despite the bit of complaining above, I am not going to point a finger at Richard Cohen's sister (or, for that matter, at Katha Pollitt for decrying the misogyny involved in the Warren choice when Pollitt, like Richard Cohen's sister, opted to support Mr. Obama for the presidency when it was already obvious that he was complacent, to say the least, about sexism and misogyny). I am just pleased that they are starting to pay attention now and apparently coming to understand better who they voted for. To quote Richard Cohen: "The real problem has nothing to do with ministers and everything to do with Obama's inability or unwillingness to be a moral leader. Sooner or later, he just might have to stand for something."

Aye, there's the rub. During the primary season and the general election a friend of mine who spent some considerable amount of time listening to me lament the Democratic Party's poor judgment in making then-Senator Obama their poster-child, kept saying to me that the real problem with Mr. Obama is that he is an "empty suit".

That term seemed to me too tepid back then. But I have come to see it as the essential problem behind the problem of Mr. Obama's inability or unwillingness to be a moral leader, and possibly any kind of leader. To be a moral leader, to stand for something means that you have to fill out your suit, your office, your position. To be an "empty suit" is to be a person who cannot draw a line in the sand, precisely because you do not have an arm and hand within that suit to use to reach out and draw that line. To be an "empty suit" is to be devoid of the weightiness that real leadership requires, including the gravitas to admit to a mistake and change one's position (drop the bigoted minister and lose the bigoted speechwriter; say you have been wrong to dig in your heels rather than listen to the concerns of so many of the people who worked so hard to elect you). To be an "empty suit" is to be a moral vacuum.

I refused to vote for John McCain for a number of reasons but among them was the fact that while I knew he had the capacity for moral leadership, I did not care for the directions toward which his moral commitments would lead my country. I refused to vote for Barack Obama because I knew he came up empty on the capacity for moral leadership.

In some ways, moral emptiness, especially in a President, is worse than moral wrong-headedness. The morally wrong-headed leader takes a stand, e.g. George W. Bush's legitimization of torture, and one can rally people against the stand she or he takes. The morally empty leader takes no stand. Under these circumstances, her or his silences often allow people to forget that the blank that exists in lieu of a leader is the appropriate target of criticism. After all, it seems easier to go after people who actually do take stands (Rick Warren, for example) rather than the person who silently enables wrong-headed person to gain in stature. But this is sleight of hand. The real problem is the enabler, the person who allows the sophomoric sexist to put words in his mouth, the person who lets bigoted clerics and their churches affiliate with him.

So, to Richard Cohen's sister and to Katha Pollitt, I say welcome to my party - the one that got lost in 2008, the one that expected moral leadership of a certain kind from a Democratic president. Now that you are here, I hope you can help me figure out what we are going to do with the empty suit about to occupy the Oval Office. If that empty suit thinks he can pick up sufficient evangelical money and votes in 2012, he is not going to listen to bloggers and op-ed columnists whose votes and followers he thinks he can replace with the support of the evangelicals, regardless of the detestable content of many of their views and some of their conduct. Personally, I do not think we can give the empty suit the backbone necessary to resist the lure of that support. If we cannot give this empty suit some backbone, we need, as I have written before, to start figuring out how we can have a better candidate on offer in 2012. So to the people who are canceling their celebrations, may I suggest that they use the time and effort saved to start solving that problem. We need to coalesce now around somebody who can fight for a nomination by a major Party - probably the the Party formerly recognizable as the Democratic one - who is what Obama's supporters hoped he would be and what I fear he is not.

Pure love

Introducing the official logo of 51 Percent:           

That I can do this now, before we see the back side of 2008, is a result of pure love. The logo's timely creation comes from the generosity of readers of this blog who have helped with ideas and feedback, the generosity of two people who volunteered their professional skills in the midst of the holiday season, and the generosity of those who have been contributing funds. This generosity of spirit is pure love.

51 Percent is an organization devoted to educating people about the meaning and efficacy of proportional representation of women throughout civic life, both as an end in itself and as a remedy to misogny, a social ill that 51 Percent will also teach about. You can learn more about 51 Percent on this page, which will serve as an interim informational space until the launch of the organization's own website, scheduled for January 15, 2009. (You can donate to the launch on the interim page). Every $5.10 helps and is appreciated as a sign of pure love.

Pure Love is also the title of beautiful song by Colin Hay (h/t Riverdaughter). You will need to download to hear it, a worthwhile investment, in my view. But I can at least share the lyrics with the readers of this blog, my own gesture in the spirit of the song.

Pure Love - by Colin Hay

The people allow this last great congregation
I tip my hat to the ones who went before
My secret voice has the inside information
To let the freedom bell ring once and for all

They were singing:
I got to fill my heart with pure love
(Pure love)
I got to fill my heart with pure love

Around here it's the same old situation
Fire and wind and the river's running red
Can't wash away the pain of a thousand generations
Or the angel child awakened from the dead

And we're singing:
You got to fill your heart with pure love
You got to fill your heart
You got to fill your heart with pure love
Pure love

Listen to the band sanctify

We got to fill our hearts with pure love
We got to fill our hearts with pure love
We got to fill our hearts with pure love
We got to fill our hearts with pure love
We got to fill our hearts with pure love

***********

December 25, 2008 noon UPDATE! Several donations have arrived. So, a poem for the occasion, too.

Why I Am Not a Painter

by Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

Women of Interest: An occasional series, entry 2

(source)

Born: Kattowitze, Germany, July 28, 1906

Died: La Jolla, California, February 20, 1972

Nobelist in Physics

Maria Goeppert-Mayer developed the nuclear shell model of atomic nuclei, an achievement honored when she became the third woman ever awarded the Nobel Prize for physics, in 1963. She shared the prize with J. Hans D. Jensen, who had independently developed a similar model, and with theoretician Eugene Wigner.

Although she lived a life of scholarly privilege, with the support of her family and many notable scientists, she was not able to secure full-time work in her field until she was 53. Mayer performed most of her scientific work as a volunteer.

Maria Göppert came from a family of academics. Her father was a professor of pediatrics and the seventh generation of university scholars in his family. When Maria was four, he moved the family from Kattowitze to Göttingen so he could teach there. Maria idolized her father. It was expected that she acquire an education because of her family pedigree in academics. Maria attended a small private school that prepared girls for the university entrance exams. In 1924 she enrolled at Göttingen in mathematics.

Göttingen was then a world center for physics (and the new study of quantum mechanics). The Göppert family had friends who were prominent scientists, and Maria's social contacts included Niels Bohr and her teacher, Max Born. While attending Born's physics seminar, Maria decided to study physics instead of mathematics. Born's other students included Fermi, Oppenheimer, Dirac, and von Neumann. Maria thrived in this environment. For her dissertation (1930), she calculated the probability that an electron orbiting an atom's nucleus would emit two photons of light as it jumped to an orbit closer to the nucleus. Her challenging calculation was confirmed experimentally in the 1960s.

Maria married physical chemist Joseph E. Mayer in 1930 and together they moved to Baltimore, where Joe was a professor at Johns Hopkins. Maria adopted a hyphenated form of their names and anglicized the spelling. She had an attic office and a mixed assortment of honorary job titles, but no pay. She nevertheless produced ten papers, a textbook, and her daughter Maria Ann during her time in Baltimore. She was pregnant with her son John in 1938, when Joe unexpectedly lost his job. They left Hopkins for Columbia University.

There, they wrote a classic textbook, Statistical Mechanics. Again, Goeppert-Mayer had office space, but no pay. During the Second World War, she worked on uranium isotope separation, under Harold Urey and others who helped develop the atom bomb. After the war, the Columbia physicists moved to Chicago, and the Mayers followed.

Maria worked at the Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago and at the Argonne National Laboratory. In 1948 she started her work on the nuclear shell model. Chicago received her willingly and gave her great respect, but no salary. In 1956, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Three years later, she and Joe accepted professorships at the new University of California campus at San Diego.

When the Nobel Prize was awarded to her in 1963, a San Diego newspaper ran the headline "S.D. Mother Wins Nobel Prize." Shortly afterward, her health began to decline and she died in 1972.

Note from Heidi Li: Respect, membership in the National Academy of Sciences, a Nobel Prize - and no salary. Unpaid labor - what institutions does THAT remind you of? Puts me in mind of the need for: