Rhinocrisy

I am back from Mexico!^*

I have learned many things, some of which I even remember. More on that later. Some anecdotes from the trip home:

Detroit is the worst airport I have ever been in. It took an hour to get through customs. They inspected my luggage twice at two separate checkpoints. In their defense, I did have a healthy tan and a scruffy beard.

On the ramp to the plane to Boston, a small rubber wheel nestled against the hull of the plane warned us, “Danger! Do not touch.” It wasn’t obvious why it was dangerous. The guy in front of me leaned down and touched it.

My cab driver on the way home was an angry gnome of some sort. He may have been experiencing gnome culture shock. He made arcane hand-spells to try and get the pedestrians in the crosswalk to move faster and rolled down his window to shout at people who honked at him for driving in two lanes at once. I short-changed him by a dollar when it came time to pay because I didn’t have that much American currency on me.

…to fool the proletariat into thinking they are affecting the world, while deeper structures remain intact. So go vote for Rhinocrisy at the Koufax awards. We are a long-shot, but I just want to get on a big beautiful ship (see below). You just scroll down to the comments, write “Rhinocrisy makes me feel all warm and fuzzy,” and then go read some of the other blogs that are probably even more deserving.

A San Francisco sports columnist writes:

Before we paint [steroid-popping home run whacker Barry] Bonds as a crack-dealing serial killer, remember that he did nothing more than gaze at a big, beautiful ship cruising by him. Aboard were countless athletes juicing up on steroids, racking up astounding statistics, showing off their biceps and knowing they wouldn’t be penalized. Bonds wanted to be on that ship. He joined a cast of thousands. If we’re looking for the real criminals of this world, let’s go check the streets.

Let’s see what we can do with this:

Before we paint former Enron Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Skilling as a crack-dealing serial killer, remember that he did nothing more than gaze at a big, beautiful ship cruising by him. Aboard were countless executives juicing up on options, racking up astounding statistics, showing off their portfolios and knowing they wouldn’t be penalized. Skilling wanted to be on that ship. He joined a cast of thousands. If we’re looking for the real criminals of this world, let’s go check the streets.

Or how about:

Before we paint heroin-dealing serial killer Charles Manson as a crack-dealing serial killer, remember that he did nothing more than gaze at a big, beautiful ship cruising by him. Aboard were countless psychopaths juicing up on crank, racking up astounding body counts, showing off their pimped rides and hoping they wouldn’t be penalized. Manson wanted to be on that ship. He joined a cast of thousands. If we’re looking for the real criminals of this world, let’s go check the streets.

Just as I was starting to think that maybe there were good reasons to question the Dubai ports deal, David, in comments, shows us that Frank Gaffney is behind this firestorm. Yes, that Frank Gaffney. The only question now is who Gaffney is really representing in all this. Who are the other port management firms? Who could come out ahead if Dubai gets blocked?

Andrew Sullivan, everyone’s favorite gay Republican blogger, is quoted in Dana Milbank’s political gossip column in the Washington Post:

“This is a big-government agenda,” he said. “It is fueled by a new ideology, the ideology of Christian fundamentalism.” The bearded pundit offered his own indictment of Bush: “complete contempt” for democratic processes, torture of detainees, ignoring habeas corpus and a “vast expansion of the federal government. The notion, he said, that the “Thatcher-Reagan legacy that many of us grew up to love and support would end this way is an astonishing paradox and a great tragedy.”

Oh yes, we all remember the Thatcher-Reagan legacy so fondly, don’t we. No, Andrew, you moron. George W. Bush is following the same policies as Reagan. He is just better at it. Let’s think back on his small-government budgets, which created what were, at the time, unimaginable deficits. Or how about his small-government Attorney General, Edwin Meese III, who supported government censorship of not just pornography but also rock & roll records. Since some of us aren’t old enough to remember the joy of Congressional hearings about Prince, Madonna, and 2LiveCrew (who were there just to prove that the threat of censorship does not in itself guarantee indefinite shelf-life), there is still this brilliant Frank Zappa debate, preserved in silicon and iron filings for your viewing pleasure. (And in case that isn’t enough of John Lofton’s proto-Bushian Christian fundamentalist wingnuttery, you can also read him in conversation with Alan Ginsberg.)

What strikes me is the similarity between Sullivan’s critique of Bush and Zappa’s critique of Reagan, which at the time turned Robert Novak into a burbling plush toy of condescention. Now we hear Reaganites saying the same stuff about Bush. What next, in 20 years will Karl Rove be saying that kind of stuff about President Malkin?

(Apologies in advance to readers of the future for linkrot. Complain to the Post.)

As someone who has dissed ethanol as much as anyone, I must say I am pleased to hear from a reasonably respectable source that the stuff is no worse than gasoline, and is potentially much better. I apologize for missing this article when it first came out. I think I was in my burrow that week.

Up next: Let’s figure out how to make ethanol without genetically modified monocultures irrigated with fossil water. (Says the guy who is 35 years old and has driven vehicles fewer than 20,000 miles in his life, pretending to be really happy that now he can get run down on his bicycle by people propelled by plant power. Yes, hooray. I guess it’s better than biking what used to be a coast road through a couple feet of water.)

We wouldn’t want anyone to fall victim to the hobgoblin of little minds.

So, the Antarctic ice sheet is drizzling 36 cubic miles of fresh water into the Southern Ocean every year, is it?

The findings… are a concern because the ice sheet would increase sea levels by as much as 45m (150ft) were it all released. The West Antarctic ice sheet, where the bulk of the melting is taking place, holds water that would raise the sea level by more than 6m (20ft).

This compares with Los Angeles, a profligate city of 12 million people, using one cubic mile of water per year. Not to mention that the instruments used to detect this change work by noting changes in the Earth’s gravitational field.

For some reason, people seem to think this is bad news. I prefer to see the upside. For example:

• In the United States alone, the country’s national Environmental Protection Agency estimates that drinking water and sewer projects over the next couple decades could cost $1 trillion. With most of the older system inundated in seawater, these expenses will be unnecessary.
• With New Orleans underwater, we will be able to quit worrying about whether to rebuild or not.
• As people from seaside regions around the world are forced to move inland, we will finally have a global reconciliation of “heartland” and “coastal” values.
• Hell, there’s nothing important along the coast anyway.

In the course of a book group discussion of Self-Made Man, a book about a woman who passes as male in order to explore men’s world, a friend asked, “women consciously redefined their gender. When and how will men do the same?” My reply follows.

I was raised among very few men and many women. By the time I was 16, I was fluent in both traditionally female tasks like cooking and dishwashing (I’ve never taken to dusting) and in (what I’ve since learned are) more typically female mental processes: seeing rape entirely from the victim’s perspective, distrusting competition, abhorrence of violence, a strong belief in listening. I let some typically male skills fade in the process — I ditched my 10-year-old’s fascination with computer programming, I never took part in organized sports, I actively avoided the horrific group male bonding games of getting drunk and going to strip clubs and picking up girls by lying to them and then laughing about it all. It never surprised me to be an outsider in high school or even in college, as I had been raised to believe that was the more honorable place. But as time went on and one crush after another told me how great a brother I was and then complained about her date-rapist boyfriend, as opportunities for travel and jobs and other new experiences were handed off freely to the most competitive and aggressive asses, I eventually started to learn to play the game. Today I am nowhere near as gentle and emotional and accepting and listeningful as I was 20 years ago. I still carry a reflexive distrust of men (which causes its own problems) and I still can’t throw a football 15 yards to save my life. But I now work in an environment that is very male-dominated, where I got hired in part because of my aggressive pursuit of the job, my ability to say, hell, if nobody else wants to barge in and talk to the boss and demand an interview that’s their (and often her) problem. I have found that a lot of women in relationships — including women who seem feminist and egalitarian in everyday life — deeply want a strong, decisive, pushy, “ravishing” lover. In short, playing by The Rules and being an asshole man is still very rewarding, while the voluntary sacrifice of power and privilege much of the time is rewarding only in that it lets a guilt-ridden guy like me sleep better at night.

This is a long way of saying that the problem of male power is largely an incentive problem. Every day, we all — including those of us who try to be conscious of this stuff — reward pushy asshole rapist men and their female imitators while allowing more talented, beautiful, caring people to fail in one endeavor or another. It takes constant vigilance in every field to change this. So far as I can see, creating better incentives and structures is not a task that requires groups of men to hang out together in the woods (which as Joel implies, can often amplify the less salutory characteristics even of the sweetest guys you’ll ever meet) so much as it requires everyone to speak up whenever they see injustice or what they see as fucked-up tastes and demands on the part of other people and institutions. That’s my sense, anyway.