Germaine Greer versus Australia:

I was 12 years old when I decided that I had to get out of Australia if my life was to begin. I had been bored ever since I could remember. I was ungainly and I was bored by sport, which in Australia is a sure sign that you're a bad person.

"I was 12 years old when I decided that I had to [blank] if my life was to begin." Isn't that pretty much the feeling of being 12?

The first time I ever sprang for the hardcover price of a book because I couldn't wait until it came out in paper, it was for a book by Germaine Greer. The price was $5.95. What great fun that book was back then! I well remember the shock--more shocking than Janet Jackson's Superbowl breast--of the photo of the brash feminist as she appeared on the back of the book: she wore heavy eye makeup right when it had seemed that we weren't going to do that any more.

Janet Jackson's Revelation. Well, I don't watch football and am only looking at the still photo that is up on Drudge, but based on that, I find MTV's apology pretty funny:

The tearing of Janet Jackson's costume was unrehearsed, unplanned, completely unintentional and was inconsistent with assurances we had about the content of the performance.

The costume was obviously designed to tear away to reveal precisely what was revealed. The "tear" is just too neat, too improbably made through tough fabric/leather, and too well-targetted. And what's with the giant metal attachment?

I do believe this part of the apology--or, I mean half, of it:

MTV regrets this incident occurred and we apologize to anyone who was offended by it.

Basically, that is: we want those who were offended to still like us. Of course, if no one were offended, it wouldn't have been worth doing.

UPDATE: On reflection, I realize that there are plenty of reasons to do it if it didn't offend anyone! One reason to do it is to shock and surprise, but if it didn't upset anyone anymore, obviously, plenty of people would enjoy seeing an exposed breast and some people would be interested in the fashion innovation.

Spiritualizing Hamburgers. Nina's blogging the Sunday Times interview with the Salvation Army commissioner:

So that tidy little sum of $1.5 billion that Kroc left to the Salvation Army (the single largest philanthropic donation to an organization ever)? It's going to the building of new community centers that'll dispense not so much the food and shelter thing (how déclassé!), but advice on how to sustain a marriage (GW, your message is on a roll!), how to enjoy family life, and how to build character and cultivate spirit. When the Commissioner of the Salvation Army was asked how poor people would be able to attend to their souls and their families without food or shelter, he answered that in addition to programs on nutrition (there's a bit of an irony in using of McDonald's fortunes for this), they'll teach poor people how to sit down as a family and enjoy "the fellowship of just being able to sit together."

Consider that the man himself remains somewhat poor:

My wife and I are paid about $500 a week for the two of us. That comes out to about $28,000 a year. ...



Do you feel poor?



Not at all. The Salvation Army also provides our house and a car. My wife and I are very happy.

Consider too that it is more centrally the role of government to provide the basic economic safety net. Government should not feel free to shift that responsibility onto private charities. And private charities are especially important doing what government shouldn't be doing, especially with respect to providing religion and similar spiritual support for people. Is it wrong to choose spiritual care over food?

"Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!"

UPDATE: Nina has a response to my response. I think a key question here is: what did the donor intend? I'm going to assume that Mrs. Kroc was well represented and advised and knew what her contribution would be used for and knew how to restrict the use of the gift for another purpose if that is what she had wanted.

An Italian gynecologist of Somalian descent, Omar Abdulcadir, proposes an alternative to female genital cutting/mutilation, the NYT reported yesterday:

That alternative, as he described it, would be a piercing of the tip of the clitoris that would draw just a drop or two of blood and would be largely symbolic. He said he would use a topical anesthetic.

Jacob Levy over at Volokh Conspiracy comments:

The question is, soughly, whether the substitution of a relatively humane procedure performed hygenically for a monstrous one performed unhygenically outweighs the cost, i.e. undermining the attempt to stamp out female genital cutting and the attitudes that generate it.

(Soughly? I can't even think what that is a typo for. And why is Volokh Conspiracy already up to Wednesday? They blog fast.)

Surely as between the two procedures, it would be better to have the far less extreme one, just as it would be better to be tortured for an hour than for a year. If we could be assured that those who would otherwise have the radical procedure would switch to Dr. Abdulcadir's procedure, and everything else remained equal, we should support this innovation. The first problem is, as the Times article reveals, perhaps no one would move to the middle ground:

Several opponents said immigrants who were deeply invested in tradition would probably deem the alternative insufficient, while immigrants who were liberated from that tradition would feel no need for a substitute.

Sometimes there is no middle ground. The second problem is that becoming involved in developing a middle ground seems to legitimate the evil extreme, and it participates in evil. So we can't trust that everything else would remain equal. Levy has written a book on multiculturalism, which I haven't read, but I rankled at his blogged comment "A Seattle hospital considered doing precisely the same thing a number of years ago, until it was bullied out of it by activists and by Patricia Schroeder." There is at least a basis for principled disagreement here about whether compromise is acceptable. Those who resist compromise are not necessarily bullies. I'd like to know more about exactly how the "activists" misbehaved, if they did.

We may gain from observing the Italian debate. The Times reports:

Italians are still absorbing [the reality of "sudden demographic changes"] and sifting through the related challenges, both practical and philosophical.

A front-page article in the Turin daily La Stampa on Jan. 23 asked why a symbolic alternative to genital cutting would validate that practice any more than the symbolic consumption of the body of Jesus at a Catholic Mass would validate cannibalism.

A closer analogy to communion would be if the symbolic genital cutting was performed on something that wasn't part of anybody's body! And of course there was never any actual cannibalism in the Christian tradition. The original Last Supper used only symbolic bread. There is no belief in the value of cannibalism that communion is honoring!

That said, Dr. Abdulcadir's procedure doesn't seem any worse than the sort of body piercings we tolerate people engaging in for all sorts of reasons. We aren't all up in arms about that. There shouldn't be discrimination against the religious motivation.

"What's really interesting... is how precisely wrong some of the information was," Former CIA Director James Woolsey said, discussing the Kay Report, on This Week With George Stephanopolous:

There was very specific and precise information which apparently turned out to be quite wrong. ... Human intelligence ... is not a panacea. If we had done a superb job and recruited a gaggle of Iraqi generals, as of a year ago, and had cleverly gotten case officers in to figure out how to debrief them, they would have, apparently, from what we're hearing now, all have said, yes, we have chemical weapons and would have believed it. Units to the right and left had them, from their point of view.

Has Justice Scalia “compromised his impartiality" by going duck hunting with Dick Cheney?

Jeffrey Rosen marshalls the evidence of Justices hanging out with Presidents: Harlan Fiske Stone played medicine ball with Herbert Hoover, Robert H. Jackson attended an intimate dinner celebrating FDR’s wedding anniversary, William O. Douglas played poker with FDR, etc.

But that was the old-style “model for male bonding between justices and presidents,” according to Rosen. After Watergate, he writes, "Washington became more adversarial":

Socializing among justices, executive officials and litigants continues, but on increasingly wary terms. Consider the unspoken rules of one of Washington's most exclusive poker games, which has included Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, Justice Scalia, and lawyers like Robert S. Bennett and Leonard Garment, the former Nixon counselor. Mr. Garment said that during the months he had a case pending before the court, he stayed away from the game. He lamented the growing concern for appearances, and insisted there is nothing wrong with litigants socializing with justices as long as they don't discuss pending cases. "If we can't trust justices to behave appropriately, and force them to live in a bubble," Mr. Garment said, "we can forget about the ability of a court appropriately to reflect a changing culture."

Even though Rosen doesn't think Cheney and Scalia talked about pending cases when they went duck hunting, he worries that justices are too isolated from the political sphere, especially from having informal contacts with politicians of different viewpoints. Rosen makes a big leap here, speculating that "the growing isolation between justices and politicians" is causing the Court to "treat the president and Congress as unruly schoolchildren rather than coordinate branches of government."

Presumably, Rosen is referring to the Court's enforcement of constitutional limits on the commerce power and on the power to legislate to remedy violations of Fourteenth Amendment rights. The NYT reader is expected to assume that these cases he's obliquely referring to are outrageously high-handed. There isn't room in this piece to seriously examine whether perhaps the judicial branch is simply taking its own role seriously, rather than disrespecting the other branches. Even if the Court has reined in other branches in some of these cases, that doesn't mean it has treated them like "unruly schoolchildren." It may simply mean that it has treated them as what they are, human beings engaged in the exercise of vast political power, tempted to undervalue the constitutional limitations that stand in their way.

Stronger doses of real political life don't seem likely to cure that perception.

Camille Paglia has something else to say about Madonna. This is from an article by Dinitia Smith about why "Sex and the City" is "a sociological event," representing "the spirit of the decade."

Ms. Paglia says, the success of "Sex and the City" marks a defeat for the "1980's anti-porn, anti-sex wing of feminists" and a victory for "the huge wing of us pro-sex feminists who came back with a vengeance in 1990, thanks to Madonna."

But even though "Sex and the City" is all about the spirit of the decade, it's full of what Paglia calls "archaic themes," themes found in trashy novels from the 1950s and 1960s, specifically "The Best of Everything," by Rona Jaffe (1958) and "Valley of the Dolls," by Jacqueline Susann (1966).

Too bad the Times article doesn't give us more verbatim Pagliaspeak. But other scholars must be drawn in to support the theory that the TV show is a "sociological event," worthy of scholarly commentary: Prada handbags and Jimmy Choo shoes are "apotropaic," "female sexuality is still punished," and the show is about "the semiotics of masculinity." That last, which the Times translates as "women trying to understand men," comes from a film studies prof who has written "a study of erotic fantasies about ... 'Star Trek.'"