Tuesday, August 24, 2010

The Daily Dish Needs to Serve Up a Recantation

When the California Supreme Court upheld Prop 8, prominent, gay, conservative blogger who prides himself on constantly trying to see what's in front of his nose, wrote in a post titled: Prop8 Ruling: The Right Call that it was a "perfect decision" since "It would have been dreadful if voters were retroactively told their valid vote was somehow null and void - it would have felt like a bait and switch and provoked a horrible backlash." Sullivan's a blogger I read quite often. He's always passionately opinionated - right on many issues, badly wrong on a few very important ones like the Iraq War (which he backed vociferously and then, to his credit, apologised for) and just plain, egregiously nasty on some - like his support for removing the transgender community from ENDA.

He's a bit of a lapsed conservative who clambered onto the Obama's bandwagon early on - at least partly because of his apparently deep detest for the Clintons - but his roots show every now and then, as in his reaction to the California SC Prop 8 ruling, which harks back to the ridiculous position of many conservatives in the US that people's will must supersede the courts' even on a question related to fundamental rights. The post surprised me because if nothing else Sullivan claims to be a keen observer and advocate of democracy (witness his vigorous and useful support for the Green Revolution in Iran last year and his posts in support of the "Ground Zero Mosque")- apparently he sat through only half the civics 101 lesson related to democracy being about the rule of the majority while skipping the part about minority rights being guaranteed.

Having ecstatically welcomed both the initial gay marriage ruling by the California SC and then in a more muted way Judge Walker's recent ruling invalidating Prop 8 - Sullivan should really be admitting to being wrong - in welcoming the ruling that upheld prop 8 and wrong in his understanding of how a democracy should work. You can't be the most prominent conservative, gay blogger on the internets writing primarily on politics and policy and be so wrong without admitting it, if you are to retain your credibility. And if doesn't think he was wrong, then it would be a great idea to state that as well and have his reader's debate him on the merits of his position.

Appending his original statement welcoming Prop 8 being upheld to his recantation would be a great idea. I've linked to it in case he has trouble locating it in the prolific archives of the Daily Dish.

Monday, August 23, 2010

The Newly Type B Kids on the Block

So many flowers to smell, so little time

In an interesting article, a Japanese professor argues that there might be a sociological explanation for Japan's twenty years of economic stagnation - beyond a compulsive savings nature that is after all common to many other Asian societies. He posits a novel idea: that Japan is becoming a society that has outgrown growth; where the young, growing up in an aging, shrinking society and a warming world are increasingly frugal non-consumers and if that means that they end up being a smaller (though very prosperous) power, then that's just fine with them. And in any case, its slowly shrinking population could lift Japan's GDP per capita, already sky-high, even with no actual growth. In a sense he's saying Japan is transforming into a Type B personality quite distinct from Type A countries like the US, China or India or even its own relatively recent, hyper-competitive past. Instead it may be on its way to becoming, sociologically speaking, the Eastern-most member of Western Europe - several of whose nation states have also come to peace, in the last decade, with marginal growth rates (albeit at very high GDP per capita levels) and stable to shrinking populations. Western European nations don't seem to see GDP growth as a validation of a self-important self-image or an expression of their suppressed martial urges but as a means to providing their populations with a higher standard of living. Beyond a point, several have chosen to give their workers more paid days off in a year than increase productivity and GDP growth rates. Seen this way, Japan isn't suffering from a twenty year malaise but has simply opted out of the rat race, having gotten where it needed to get to. So they're trading in yen they could get in the future for some more zen in the present. It's an intriguing argument - can an entire society give up greed - and in doing so, collectively find greater inner peace?

Whether the writer is right or not about Japan, I suspect he is correct in his lateral suggestion that outgrowing growth might be the only sustainable option "in a world whose limits are increasingly apparent".

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

A Very Long Engagement

And A Very Long Post. :( I did try to shorten it, I promise I did

What’s in a name, the Bard famously asked a couple of centuries ago. And today that refrain has been taken up by those members of the religious right who just cannot understand why domestic partnerships or civil unions in states like California or New Jersey aren’t good enough for the gay community. Why do they need to horn in on an institution that for eons and in nearly every civilization known to man, has undeniably involved a commitment between a man and a woman. Some of my straight friends, all liberal, have asked me the same question. And when I first moved to the US from India, fresh out of the closet, I kind of agreed with them. I didn’t think it was really important to call a domestic partnership a marriage. Let me explain.

It took me some time to fully absorb the fact that I’d moved to a place where virtually nobody cared about your sexual orientation – unless they were sizing you up for a date or a hook-up. It first hit me that I wasn't in Kanpur anymore, when after a full day of apartment-hunting, I found one that I loved: a fourth floor walk-up with warm,worn hardwood floors, no dish-washer and a view of the Golden Gate. As we walked down the four floors, I told the realtor that I wanted to rent it. Then I told her was gay and asked her if this was something we needed to reveal to the apartment-owner in case he didn’t want to rent to gay people, since I’d hate to star in an eviction drama on local news. My coming out did not faze her a bit, but my question clearly took her aback. When she recovered, she told me, firmly, that my being gay was none of the landlord’s business and that anyway there were anti-discrimination laws that prevented him from refusing to rent the apartment to me. Over time as I learned of all the other protections, and the freedoms – no – the Freedom, available to me to live like any other person, in California, it just seemed greedy to quibble over whether two lovers’ union should be called marriage or domestic partnership – specially when all the benefits were the same.

I was OK with joining up with the folks demanding gay marriage because to me it was a civil rights issue. I could see that the opposition, despite the welter of rational-sounding irrational reasons they put forward, really just felt that heterosexuals were better than homosexuals and wanted to validation for their feelings in the form of a discriminatory marriage law. It made sense to oppose such bullying, just as it makes sense to oppose attempts to block a mosque near Ground Zero. Despite being in favour of same-sex marriage, I didn’t really think it made a difference to me personally. My (over?)-healthy self-esteem, I felt, allowed me to not care what the opposition thought of domestic partnerships. As I saw it, when I found the right guy, we could probably have any kind of religious or secular ceremony we wanted; I was blessed with family and friends who would still attend and who would consider it as important a wedding as theirs; and the only thing that would be different would be a few words on a document that we’d never look at, after the day of.

That started changing when the first decision legalizing gay marriage was handed down by the California Supreme Court. I remember whooping with joy as goose-bumps clambered up and down my back. But I also suddenly felt scared. I was quite ready for a domestic partnership but somehow marriage seemed to have a whole lot more responsibility associated with it; something I hadn't felt until I was given access to it. It was a small shock to learn that I had the same attitude vis-a-vis marriage and domestic partnerships as the conservatives on the other side. I realized that while I understood marriage viscerally - having grown up in it and with it - I only had an intellectual understanding of a DP.

Yes, legally a California DP is exactly the same as a marriage where state law is concerned – but we don’t live in courts. We live in condominiums. In class-rooms and cafes. In all those places, we grow up laughing, talking, crying and learning about love and marriage, not love and DPs. Whether we accept or reject marriage as an institution, we involuntarily absorb and come to understand the value that society places on marriage. My self-esteem hadn't immunised me to social conditioning. My brain still told me that a DP was exactly the same as a marriage - at least at the state level. But that did not ring true for me anymore. Much as I disliked admitting it - marriage, to me, was a more important, more serious commitment. I knew it because my gut told me so.

A few months ago, bereft again of the option to marry, post-Prop8, I found out that my friends, liberals like me, have the same opinion-versus-attitude dissonance as I did. And are unaware of it just as I was. I was at a dinner at one of my closest friend’s house. He’d recently fallen in love with a wonderful girl. I haven’t known her for long but you can tell she’s not just good people. She’s very good people. He is Indian (let’s call him Ritesh) and she is American (let’s call her Angela). Both are as liberal as they come. As the party broke up, they saw us off to the door and as we were saying goodbyes, one of them happened to mention that they’d gone to City Hall that morning and become domestic partners. Astonished by the news and delighted for my friend, I instantly congratulated them on this huge step in their relationship. And then asked why they hadn’t said anything till then, and why we hadn’t celebrated the event. Ritesh shrugged. It was really just to help Angela get on his health plan, he said.

It took a few moments for this to compute. He was saying it didn’t necessarily mark a new step in their relationship – it was more like letting a girl-friend use your car when hers breaks down. I don't think they noticed - but I felt my face redden - I felt embarrassed and foolish. Embarrassed for having thought that their relationship was further along (effectively married!) - than it was. Foolish because, while for me entering into a DP was still a very significant commitment, for them it was less consequential than getting a driver’s license (something that would have merited a mention and a high-five, way earlier in the evening). I felt a bit like an colonial era African chief who, having happily settled for important-looking, colourful beads in exchange for his lands, steps out to find the polite settler kids playing a game of marbles with beads just like his.

When I asked Ritesh if he’d told his parents, he said he had but they hadn’t quite understood what a DP was, and so he told them it was like getting engaged. I didn't point out that it was considerably less than an engagement, really, since it was sans rings, celebrations or excited descriptions of the moment the proposal was made. Hell, it was sans a proposal! But I did think that he was in the right ball-park about a DP's visceral importance relative to marriage, for many, many people. It's really just an engagement.

Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, the first LGBT couple married by Mayor Newsom in 2004, were together for 53 years. As any woman would attest and many men will admit - that is a very long engagement.

And not something that anyone - gay or straight, American or Indian or Aleutian - would want for themselves. Or put up with.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Strumming Her Pain into My Fingers

A Paean to a Plaintive Melody



I stumbled into Sheryl Crow four years ago in Macy's at Union Square. The sorrow in her voice in "The First Cut is the Deepest" scythed through the mall chatter and into my consciousness. It took a few more moments for the lyrics to register and then suddenly I couldn't focus on deciding between three different, equally unimaginative towel collections. I remember turning around and looking up at the ceiling from where the music was being piped into the room. Being smart-phone-less at the time I had to memorise some of the lyrics and it was only after I got home that I was able to google them, discover the artist and fully hear the song that had had the effect of an acupuncturist's needle being tapped into a sore spot - producing sharp pain followed by a throbbing relief. I captured it forever onto my iPod. I began to research Sheryl Crow - that is, I looked up her profile on wikipedia - and came across more songs that I grew to love. The effervescent "Soak up the Sun" quickly became a standard accompaniment to a sunny mood while the mournful strumming and despair infused lyrics of "My Favorite Mistake" somehow seemed to make it perfect for quiet walks back home on cold, low sky-ed, foggy nights. Finding out that a song is self-referential generally endears it to me. The First Cut is the Deepest didn't seem to have much of a back-story but I discovered that Eric Clapton was Crow's favourite mistake. And that meant that the song quickly became the most played one in my ballads playlist.

It doesn't take much for me to love an artist and start sifting through her repertoire for treasure. Three good songs and an interesting (read loss or pain edged) life-story are pretty much all it takes. Having found three songs that I loved, I fast-tracked through a whole host of songs from Crow's past deemed worth listening to, by her Wikipedia profile, but nothing more caught my ear. What surprised me was that though she did pain, loss, sorrow, loneliness and other sad emotions more consistently and better than anyone else I'd heard, melancholy was missing from her music. Until, four years into liking her, I finally listened to "Strong Enough" without multi-tasking through it. It had resided on my iPod for some time without making its way into one of my playlists. Which meant I'd only heard it a couple of times. Its one of her more prominent hits and so I have no idea why I hadn't paid attention to it before.

The song is suffused with plaintiveness - you can hear it in Crow's voice, read it in the lyrics and feel it in the strumming. You might have noticed, dear reader, until last week I hadn't written for almost a year. For months there had been not a single sentence twisting around in my barren mindscape. More recently, there had been a few fragments - but they just never joined up to form a complete thought - no matter how long or how often I played my melancholy playlist. That playlist, you might remember, usually does the trick when I'm trying to write. It hadn't been doing its magic these past months. Last week as I listened to Strong Enough, I saw tendrils begin to emerge from the lonesome fragments - my very own green shoots of (literary) recovery - that began to hook together as the fragments coiled past each other. Those few sentences were enough for me to sit down and start typing in time to Crow's pain-stoked, pain-soaked chords - typing out a composition. Not a very good one and not my best, but a composition nonetheless. After almost a year.

So now Sheryl Crow is one of my favourite artists, Strong Enough my favourite song and neglecting to notice its true beauty until I really needed it, my favourite mistake.

PS: Lest anyone read between the lines -- it was the tone of the song that appealed to me not the lyrics specifically ;)

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Global Politics' Unsung Booster Dose of Estrogen

You may not have noticed - but 2010 has already been a banner year for women in high office. Through the 20th and 21st centuries - 110 years with scores and scores of power transitions in more than 150 countries - the world has seen only 69 women presidents and prime ministers. The list includes women who've won direct elections as in the case of Angela Merkel in Germany or been appointed as in the case of Pratibha Patil, who became President of India through an indirect election. Of these, 17 are currently serving in 2010 and another 4 served for part of the year. That is to say that 30% of all women heads of state or government that have ever served in the modern age - have held power in 2010. Women leaders have popped up in unexpectedly and in unexpected places - from Costa Rica's first woman President Laura Chinchilla who won in a landslide to Australia's new Prime Minister Julia Gillard who took power in a surprise constitutional coup, to Kyrghyzstan's (yes Kyrghyzstan has a woman president!) Roza Otunbayeva (pictured above) who did so in an actual coup. Finland, Slovakia, Croatia and Iceland all elected women Prime Ministers this year. And Brazil looks likely to elect its first female president in a couple of months. Something is clearly underfoot and one would have thought it would have caused more news by now.

What's happening - or what I hope is happening: A gathering trend of women gaining more confidence across the world and demanding their fair share of power combined with populations slowly shedding centuries of patriarchy -- is not just worthy of making news but really of celebration. Not because of the reasons that are often put forward in casual conversation. That more women at the helm of world's nations will lead to greater democracy, lesser corruption, fewer wars, and in general better (if not good) government. Or to governments that are more liberal or care more for their minorities and disadvantaged classes .

There are women leaders who have proved each of those statements true - Aug San Suu Kyi has kept democracy's flickering embers alight in Burma for more than two decades. Phillipine's Corazon Aquino led that country out of the Marcos' dictatorship; Chandrika Kumaratunge reduced the police and militia excesses in Sri Lanka, and devolved more power to the Tamil North-east, Michelle Bachelet's two terms saw Chile's poverty rate fall to first-world levels and Iceland's Johanna Sigurdardottir legalized gay marriage (admittedly a little self-servingly given she's gay herself) as did Argentina's Kristina Fernandez.

But a broader scan of past and present women leaders shows that none of those assertions are truisms. For those who would like to believe that having women in power automatically leads to strengthening of democracy - I have two words: Indira Gandhi. Or maybe three - Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the two-term Filipino president who was accused of rigging her second election and who certainly had no lasting impact on her country's corruption. For every liberal Johanna Sigurdardottir, there's a Laura Chinchilla who firmly opposes abortion, separation of church and state(!) and gay marriage. Virtually nobody would accuse Margaret Thatcher of a surfeit of sympathy for the downtrodden masses. And it is doubtful Ukraine's narcissistic ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko cares for anyone other than herself. The Goldilocked leader's multiple terms in office brought as much drama and disarray as the fairy tale character did to the house of the Three Bears. (To be fair to her, she had a lot of help from the Ukraine's male leaders.)

The fact is, positive stereotypes can be as wrong and as misleading as negative ones. And can cause a fair amount of damage specially when they concern minority candidates in office. For when the candidate belies one or more positive stereotype and proves to be just like any other politician - and why shouldn't he, she, they? - what arguments are left to elect the second woman or black or gay president?

No, the trend needs to be celebrated, I believe, because there are other undeniable effects of increasing gender diversity in a country's leadership. More women in power makes government more representative. Women in government may not necessarily focus on better issues than male counterparts, but are likely to focus on (at least some) different issues that haven't received as much attention under decades of male leadership - simply because they bring a different set of life experiences to bear on the job. Tak rape (a global scourge that overwhelmingly finds female versus male victims), as an exemplar - How many men would have been in a position to understand the impact of rape on its victims better than Liberia's President Ellen Sirleaf who narrowly escaped that fate when imprisoned by Samuel Doe's government. Not surprisingly the first law she enacted as President was to make rape a non-bailable offence.

But most importantly, by giving women equal access to power, nations immediately double the size of the pool from which a good - or if they're very lucky, a great - leader can rise from. Finding great leaders who can transform a country for the better is incredibly hard and incredibly important. The difference between having a good leader versus a bad one could determine whether you end up as present-day Colombia or Venezuela, both imperfect societies but on very different paths with respect to improving human rights, civil liberties and economic conditions. The difference between having a series of average prime-ministers to a series of poor ones can determine whether you end up as Netherlands or Greece. And the difference between having a great, transformational President versus an average one can determine whether a new country descends into chaos like Russia did under Yeltsin or comes together despite decades of hatred and suspicion as South Africa did under Mandela.

Anything that improves the chances of seeing more Mandelas and Suu Kyis is something I want to throw my full - and falling (now that I'm going to the gym) - weight behind. Even if that means having to live with the Mayawatis and Margaret Thatchers who may also be churned up. And even if that means applauding Sarah Palin who is going to be responsible for South Carolina, Oklahoma and probably Georgia and Wyoming welcoming their first women governors in November.