White House open for business...

The clever folks at Reefer Magnets have been selling these magnets for a while, but I thought of this paper-doll type dress game again this week when George W. Bush came out with a couple of announcements that seemingly diverge from some of his key policies. He risked angering his conservative backers with support for the immigration bill and he proposed a meeting of industrial countries on limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Some commentators have argued that he is looking toward his legacy and so is worried about the role he has played in thwarting progress on these two major issues. So, dressing up as a forward-thinking, rational person -- a costume that doesn't seem to be included in this selection.

On the other hand, if you think about these two issues, these are good examples of the places where seemingly liberal policies also happen to serve the interests of the business community. This is clearest in the case of immigration, since of all the loud mouths that you'll see denouncing illegal immigration none of them belong to business owners, who know that their profits are directly dependent on low-wage workers with few rights. Although business leaders have spoken out against required reductions of emissions (particularly the auto industry, obviously) there are also many business interests that see the control of global warming as absolutely in their favor -- insurance companies, some agricultural interests, etc. (It's no coincidence that Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who always keeps his focus trained on what's best for business, has begun to make his mark in environmental issues and especially in climate change.)

Ideally policies that respect the dignity of individuals while fostering prosperity and policies that protect the long-term health of the environment would be the kind of things that everybody could get behind, so I don't think that the interests of business have to be thwarted in order for good social policy to flourish. But if legislation is crafted primarily to serve the needs of business without participation from those who put social justice and environmental justice first, we'll end up with the same predictable results. So I don't think George Bush is dressing up as a liberal to make himself look good in preparation for the G8 meetings; his proposals represent a real opportunity for progress on these difficult issues and yet still need to be shaped through dialogue with the left, the people who have been fighting for the issues for decades.

get on the bus!

Ok, public transportation is the opposite of glamorous, but that's exactly why it's important to keep reminding ourselves (and our lawmakers) of its importance in the big scheme of things. Apparent 'solutions' to the emissions crisis like hybrid or hydrogen fuel-cell cars garner the spotlight because they combine gee-whiz technology and the lure of the familiar (a change that will permit us to keep living exactly as we do -- no need to change development patterns or driving habits!).

So here are my top ten reasons to take public transit:

10. Have time to read.
9. Indulge your people-watching jones.
8. Indulge your eavesdropping jones.
7. See new neighborhoods in your city.
6. Save money (even if your city's buses cost $1.75/ride as ours do here, it's still an enormous savings over owning, maintaining, insuring, fueling and parking a car).
5. Get more exercise, as you walk to and from the bus stop.
4. Zone out on the way to work rather than playing chicken with feral drivers.
3. Never have to worry about parking when you reach your destination.
2. Be a part of a real solution, not part of a real problem.

and the number one reason to take public transporation is...

1. Get out of your bubble and live!


Here are a couple of links to organizations working on the policy aspects of public transportation, especially as it is implicated in smart growth:

Surface Transportation Policy Partnership

Smart Growth America

and a smart political blog -- not devoted to public transportation but has an on-going thread about abandoning one's car in favor of the bus in Asheville, NC:

brainshrub

Girl Talk

Two interesting stories in Slate that taste interesting together:

Bloodless Revolution: The abolition of menstruation. By William Saletan

and

The Goodling Girl: How Monica Goodling played the gender card and won. By Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick

The first of these gives a good, if minimal, overview of the contorted relation between nature and culture implicit in our understanding of menstruation, as brought to light by the new pill which is being marketed to help women avoid having a monthly period. The second is a sharp analysis of Monica Goodling's canny choice to present herself as a powerless appendage to her bosses at DoJ rather than accept responsibility for going beyond the law in using partisan judgments to disqualify job candidates.

These stories have in common their obvious utility as evidence for the depressing conclusion that, as Bazelon and Lithwick write, "we haven't come as long a way as we'd hoped, baby." But even beyond that, they point to something very particular about the slippery way that notions of weakness get tied up with notions of femininity. Monica Goodling's story is relatively familiar and easy to recognize in other contexts, where women's power gets exerted under the cover of powerlessness. This cultural pattern is sometimes disavowed (as in Goodling's case), sometimes revered (by the vanishing breed of believers in matriarchy, for example) and sometimes reviled (as when a lug-headed acquaintance once explained to me his conviction that caucasian men who marry Asian women thinking they are submissive often get a rude awakening when they find themselves under the thumb of a steely-willed if quiet wife; a clever racist-sexist two-fer). In all these versions the weakness associated with femininity has enough cultural torque to allow a different kind of power to be wielded in its shadow; on closer inspection either the weakness or the power turns out to be a screen for the other.

In the story about using a birth-control pill to stop menstruating, there is also a strange interplay between apparent weakness and apparent strength. Is menstruation a liability -- both because it could be seen as draining physical strength and because it functions as a symbol of everything that women are and men are not -- or is it an asset -- because it is part of the overall process of fertility and thus a symbol of the almighty womb? Or is it (as I would contend) neither a liability nor an asset, but a basic bodily function that, because it is linked exclusively to women, gets drawn into the complicated cultural game of hide-and-seek to which women and their agency are relegated? In other words, the ambivalence about menstruation is another facet of the ambivalence about women's difference from men and the newly-public (though not really new) choice of whether to have a period or not is another example of the way that women's choices and actions come to be viewed as not really their own. Saletan writes, "The danger, from a standpoint of emancipation, is that some of these women won't shut off the bleeding to satisfy themselves. They'll do it to satisfy others." Well, maybe that's true, but if menstruation weren't already a charged signifier of all the ways that women are different from men, would we worry about this possibility any more than we worry about overweight people who lose a lot of weight (are they doing it for their health or to look good?)?

welcome to thumblepie

Welcome to Thumblepie, a blog that elevates humility, thumbs and pastry to their proper artistic and spiritual level.

Some of my obsessions: the politics of public transportation, the moral virtue of engaging in debate, the pleasure of discovering how other people see the world.

To kick off with the first of these: public transportation could save our lives if we would allow it to. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but think of everything that would change if US cities had the level of public transportation seen in European cities (or even in Canada). Of course, what everyone thinks of first is the environment and, yes, more public transportation could make a huge difference in our uphill battle against global warming. On an individual level, there's also the obvious benefit of getting more exercise, since using public transportation usually involves at least a little bit of walking. But it would also mean more efficient and more pleasant use of land -- instead of swathes of land given over to housing sprawl and asphalt and strip malls, we would have more compact development which mixed residential and commercial uses (because if you're going to commute to work on public transportation, you're not going to live 40 miles away from your job). And this kind of compact development would have further good effects: more sense of community, less alienation, safer streets (more people on the street walking or waiting for buses at all times). It may sound crazy to claim that public transportation can reverse the decline of communities, but I think that when you ride the bus it is hard to imagine that you are alone in your neighborhood, that your self-interest stops at your front door and that your decisions (about consumption and everything else) don't affect other people.