Rhinocrisy

It’s midsummer tonight, which I think should be celebrated with some sort of Bacchan orgiastic rite. But rites of any sort, let alone orgiastic ones, are not quite a la mode, so I suspect instead I’ll have to imagine one in my head. It will go something like this:

There will be no talking and no singing. Only throngs of silent people and the voices of drums. The only manner of speech permitted is motion - the frenetic motion of limbs, stamping of feet, sway of hips and shoulders. Everyone is naked and anonymous, smeared in clay from head to toe, hair matted, eyes wild.

There are no lights. Only the light of the full moon and fires. All manner of fires - torches, bonfires, gourds filled with flaming oil. Some are carried, whirled in dances, burning fiery trails onto retinas. Some are left behind, thrust into the ground to mark the path.

There is an air of violence, an energy so imminent that the crowd salivates; but none of it is threatening, because everyone feels it. It is the common cord tying everyone together, into one mass.

In the center of that mass is the focus of that violent attention: a statue made of wood and reeds. It is Crapulence, bloated and lazy, odious, worthy of disgust. It is being dragged by chains along the ground, scraping and hissing in protest.

The procession moves through the streets, gaining mass, losing mass, now catching its breath and now flying forward undefatigably. It reaches the river, the edge of the water. The statue is surrounded on all sides, a dark mass ringed by flickering flames. The flames dance towards it, as if sucked in by an indrawn breath; then away. Then with a sudden rush they converge, and the statue goes ablaze.

It slides forward into the water. Now the torches are extinguished; now the only light is the burning mass, crackling, popping, throwing great showers of sparks up into the sky as it collapses in on itself. It sinks under the surface with a final, protesting hiss, leaving a crowd of naked human beings, breathing hard from exertion, the mud running off their bodies in sweaty trails, turning aside and at last seeing each other in the moonlight.

I’ve reached a critical point in my graduate career - I’m simultaneously at the nadir and the apex, and now I look forward to an exhilirating descent coupled with a grueling climb. An unfortunate property of such extremities is that one would rather linger there than move on; it’s hard to find any joy in actual motion, physically slogging through the jungle, cutting your way through thorns and wading through mud. And somehow, the fact that completion is in sight is nearly tantalizing enough that it feels like actual satisfaction.

On top of this is the fact that I’ve historically avoided hard work. I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate in that I’m blessed with a combination of talent, parents who whipped my ass into gear, and a manic energy that imbues me with near-miraculous focus when the time comes for it. If not for this, I would undoubtedly be making my way as a shiftless layabout of some variety - stoner, philosopher, resident of my parents’ basement.

Anyway… deep breath. Here I go.

NY Army Reserve Guard kills 2 superiors. Turning point in the War on Vietnam, turning point in the War on Iraq. It’s not huge until it’s a consistent pattern, but there’s nothing like being killed by your underlings to make officers want to get the fuck out.

My roomie pointed me to a post by Sean Carroll on the recent incident involving Kos and a certain TBS web-ad for the show “The Real Gilligan’s Island”, featuring Mary Ann and Ginger in a pie fight.

I’ll get the obvious stuff out of the way: Kos is a moron. His response was ridiculous, regardless of your opinion of the ad. It showed a complete lack of respect for his comrades and their concerns. He deserves to have his face buried in shit for a while. Fortunately the fallout hasn’t been all bad: check out the resulting Women Kossacks bleg (warning: it’s still horribly ugly in appearance).

As to the ad itself: I’ll admit, I find it titillating. I clicked on it. I’m not particularly embarassed about that fact. But note this aside by Sean Carroll:

One indication of the fact that the world has not achieved perfect gender equity is the paucity of ads featuring oil-wrestling matches between hunky men in Speedos. Not, I expect, that such imagery would be very attractive to many people of either sex.

So, why is it sexist to watch two statuesque women smearing pie over each other? Obviously there’s a certain amount of objectification inherent in making something arousing. But I don’t think anyone in particular would complain, if it weren’t that men didn’t resolutely refuse to be made into sexual objects.

I shan’t minimize the role of gender disparity in perpetuating this situation. For many (if not most) men, interactions with women continue to be defined by sexuality, and women are made to assume the role of sex object whether they want to or not. The same is decidedly not true of men; women are not given much freedom to express any notion of a male sexual aesthetic or to shamelessly objectify men (whether they want to or not). As many important people have said, and with more erudition and footnotes than I can manage.

But I don’t think this is all. Not long in the past, there definitely was a notion of male physical beauty, one appreciated and even held forward by men. If we dip back into ancient Greece, male sexuality was prized even above that of women. E.g. Plato’s Symposium, where this brief excerpt is just one of many lines celebrating the homosexual relationship above the heterosexual:

And am I not right in asserting that there are two goddesses? The elder one, having no mother, who is called the heavenly Aphrodite-she is the daughter of Uranus; the younger, who is the daughter of Zeus and Dione-her we call common… The Love who is the offspring of the common Aphrodite is essentially common, and has no discrimination, being such as the meaner sort of men feel, and is apt to be of women as well as of youths, and is of the body rather than of the soul-the most foolish beings are the objects of this love which desires only to gain an end, but never thinks of accomplishing the end nobly, and therefore does good and evil quite indiscriminately. The goddess who is his mother is far younger than the other, and she was born of the union of the male and female, and partakes of both.

But the offspring of the heavenly Aphrodite is derived from a mother in whose birth the female has no part - she is from the male only; this is that love which is of youths, and the goddess being older, there is nothing of wantonness in her. Those who are inspired by this love turn to the male, and delight in him who is the more valiant and intelligent nature…

This was unquestionably not a society with gender equity, but the sexuality of men was certainly celebrated.

So I think there’s as much or more a component of homophobia inherent in the dearth of male sexual objectification. Men might be willing to accept such a position (or rather, to impose it on each other), except for their galloping fear of being perceived as bent. Of TV in Ancient Greece, women might have complained that it was sexist to show the Skipper and Gilligan mud-wrestling and completely elide the unworthy females (and what about Mrs. Howell?). In other words, there’s nothing inherently sexist about two women having a half-naked pie fight. It’s the underlying implication: who gets to decide what’s sexy and what’s not.

FAIR has an incredibly infuriating article on the Downing Street Memo and the flippant refusal of the corporate media to give this “paranoid theory” any coverage.

The Wisconsin State Democratic Party passed a resolution at its convention calling for the impeachment of the President.

WHEREAS, the Downing Street Memo shows that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld began planning and executing the war on Iraq before seeking Congressional and UN approval;

WHEREAS, UN weapons inspectors showed prior to the invasion that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; and

WHEREAS, there is further mounting evidence that the Administration lied or misled about “mushroom clouds,” “connections to 9/11,” and “war as a last resort” as they sought UN, Congressional, and public approvals;

THEREFORE, RESOLVED, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin asks Congress to immediately begin impeachment proceedings against President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.

Note that this resolution was passed by the, ahem, sovereign body of the people (the rank-and-file party membership), and not the politicians who represent them, so it doesn’t actually mean anything.

I forget if I mentioned it here, but if you haven’t already done so, sign John Conyers’ petition regarding the Downing Street Memo right away. Takes only a second. He’s going to deliver it Thursday.

A concrete example of the detrimental effect of being caught in the coils of Christian fundamentalism:

A team of Korean^* scientists under the leadership of Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk recently announced that they had successfully created 11 lines of stem cells from separate patients. The same team in 2003 announced that they had successfully cloned a human embryo by replacing an egg cell nucleus with a normal nucleus (which is necessary to prevent the recipient’s immune system from rejecting the derived stem cell line^†).

This contentious announcement was immediately greeted by a flurry of disapproval, including by our own President, who said that he would veto any legislation devoted to expanding research into embryonic stem cells^‡, and windy moralists harrumphing about the possibility of reproductive cloning.

It’s unclear to me why reproductive cloning is being thrust into the therapeutic debate - we regularly develop technologies that simultaneously allow for great ill and great good (though I also fail to see why reproductive cloning is so horribly evil, as opposed to just terribly bizarre). We simply elect to avoid doing evil. We make such decisions every day; one doesn’t demand that we stop the manufacture of scalpels simply because they can be used to slice open jugular veins.

And it’s no more clear to me why religious people cling to the particular viewpoint that the zygote is a human being. This is certainly not a position with much Biblical justification, since not too long in the past (ca. 1700) the whole concept of fertilization was unknown, and we imagined that sperm were homunculi, “little men”, that grew into a fetus when nurtured by the mother’s womb.

The idea that the zygote contains a soul is similarly bizarre. Whence, then, the souls of monozygotic twins? Are there two souls inherent before the zygote splits? Or does a second arrive when the cells are cleaved apart? Does the soul, also, undergo a mitotic division in tandem with the zygote? And what of frozen embryos? Are their souls held in limbo? Isn’t it a great crime to be imprisoning human souls indefinitely that way?

These sorts of thorny issues don’t seem to confound any fundamentalist, however, and there remains a dogged insistence that we respect the sanctity of the human embryo. Thus, it is impossible in the U.S. to obtain federal funds to do the sort of research that Dr. Hwang is performing. One CAN obtain embryos and do research on them within the U.S. (and escape prosecution for murder) - but you have to get your embryos overseas and your research must be privately funded.

Juxtaposed against this is the use of adult stem cell lines, which many pro-lifers feel is a better ethical alternative. I had a near brush with this a few years back, when I came up as a match for a leukimia patient. Marrow donation is probably one of the most common and direct potential applications for stem cell research. It’s a simple procedure: they draw serum from the donor, spin out their marrow stem cells (which periodically migrate into the blood and can be encouraged to do so via drugs), and inject them into the recipient’s blood stream, where they will hopefully resettle into the marrow and begin producing blood cells.

This is one of the few instances where stem cells can be easily isolated, but it’s also a clear instance where adult stem cell research won’t suffice - there’s no stem cell line to isolate and cultivate in the recipient at all because it’s been killed by chemotherapy, which is why donation is required. Meanwhile the patient must languish for months in a sickly state, waiting, often in vain, for a suitable match to appear.

The sort of expertise that would allow us to convert embryonic stem cells into a viable marrow stem cell line is years away. It’s absurd, however, that we preclude the very real and very exciting possibility of completely obsolescing marrow donor databases, simply because of an idiosyncratic and wholly unjustified belief about the nature and timing of the soul.

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^* South Koreans - North Koreans are caught in the grip of such dire poverty that it is impossible to imagine them accomplishing such feats. A recent survey of North Korean refugees found that the average height for teenagers was under five feet; the North Korean army had such difficulty recruiting soldiers that they had to revoke their minimum height requirement. The products of severe malnutrition and famine; food shortage remains a problem.

^† Self/non-self recognition remains one of the most awesome things the body does. At the centers of your lymphatic system are B-cells, which are trained to recognize only foreign proteins through via a simple culling mechanism. Every B-cell creates a unique receptor molecule through (essentially) a random process. When created, the cell has no idea what (if anything) this receptor will recognize. But it can test it against the range of proteins produced by the body (since, after all, every B-cell is equipped with a complete map of everything the body is capable of manufacturing). If its receptor is built to recognize an endogenous protein, the B-cell terminates itself. Thus, the library of surviving B-cells will be equipped to detect only foreign proteins - including transplanted tissue. Therefore, it’s necessary that the derived stem cell line be genetically identical to the recipient. This is done by cultivating the cloned egg until it’s reached the blastocyst stage (~1000 cells) and harvesting embryonic stem cells from it.

^‡ Dr. Hwang immediately shot back, “With all the great scientists and the great potential of the United States … if because of some policy hurdle, the researchers cannot realize their dreams, I believe, as a fellow scientist this would be very regrettable.”

I mean, we’re going to have to give it to Cheney every fucking day, practically:

Cheney said “The important thing here to understand is that the people that are at Guantanamo are bad people.”

<stupid>Is he talking about the inmates or the guards?</stupid>

For all the ways science is misused and abused — something we document way too often around here — it is still sometimes used for good, rather than evil. To wit: in the last 10 days, 3 new patents were granted with the word “orgasm” in the text. My personal favorite was the “Intravaginal stimulation apparatus,” which is apparently a way for one to manipulate a vibrator with one’s ankles rather than having to get tendonitis from pushing and pulling something at such odd angles.

There was also the use of (5R)-(methylamino)-5,6-dihydro-4H-imidazo[4,5,1-ij]quinolin-2(1H)-one, (5R)-(methylamino)-5,6-dihydro-4H-imidazo[4,5,1-ij]quinoline-2(1H)-thione and pharmaceutically acceptable salts thereof to “induce mating” (yikes!) and to treat “hypoactive sexual desire disorder, female sexual arousal disorder, male erectile disorder, female orgasmic disorder and male orgasmic disorder.”