Planes, Trains, and...uh...Trucks

Gotcha, didn't I? Okay, maybe not.

The past month has been a transportation bonanza for the little guy. Just for the heck of it, when we were up in Portland for my sister-in-law's wedding, we took a day and thought we'd head for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, only to find it was closed. Thankfully, my father-in-law had a backup plan that had us schlepping all the way to McMinnville to the Evergreen Aviation Museum, the home of the H-4 Hercules, otherwise known as the Spruce Goose.I had no idea it had been moved over sea and land all the way up to Oregon from Long Beach. It took years to fully restore the sucker (which really should have been called the Birch Behemoth, since most of it is actually made of birch, though I think Howard Hughes would have hated that nickname, too) after many years of being on display near the Queen Mary and having various tourists tear off bits and pieces of her to take home as souvenirs. Now the H-4 shares space (dominates it, rather) with many, many different types of air and spacecraft, including a B-17, a Titan II missile, a replica of the lunar module, and, my personal fave, a Russian space capsule that looks like one of the Discovery pods in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

What did the little guy like, you ask? He ran around and sat in every single old first class seat that was set up in the place (Evergreen Aviation refurbs planes for many airlines, and they have set up all the first class seats ripped out of those planes in front of the video screens showing important movies about the B-17, or the Blackbird, or the history of the H-4, etc., etc.), he headed over to the kids section and sat in their helicopter mock-ups for a few minutes, then he happily crashed planes on the flight simulators. The Spruce Goose was just another plane to him. I think he was more impressed by the beach balls that Hughes had had stuffed into the wings and the body of the plane so that it would still float and thus be more easily recovered if something went wrong in the flight tests. Oh, and he also went into hysterics when I didn't get anything from the gift shop for him. I am one cruel mother.

A week or so ago, I headed out to get the little guy from school and saw some signs for SteamFest on Magazine Street. Since I had some extra time, I detoured a little and followed the arrows on the signs. I then knew I had to bring the kid over to the park the next day to see what this organization had wrought. The Louisiana Steam Train Association was founded around the restoration of the SP 745 steam engine, and they had the thing all fired up and set up so that anyone could stand with the engineers and look into the flaming furnace. Yes, it was puffing smoke. Yes, we had to position ourselves occasionally so that the soot wouldn't get all over us and into our lungs. Was my son excited? Yes, but not by the engine, which, initially, he was freaked out by and came up the steps to visit the engineers only after I climbed up there and showed that I was okay and I was not getting fried by the furnace (hell, glass furnaces are much, much worse). It was all about the caboose and the model train set inside one of the train cars the 745 was pulling. Hey, it was a beautiful day. He had a great time. He even ate the pizza slice that I purchased for him at the food booth without taking the cheese off it. Thank goodness for small miracles.

So, miracle of miracles, my son doesn't want to be a nonconformist for Halloween this year (i.e., no costume whatsoever).

"What do you want to be for Halloween?" I asked him last week.

"A bus driver!" he said with absolute certainty.

Oooo-kay. Bus drivers don't look too much like Jackie Gleason anymore.
I waited a little too late to get the hat, which was all right, because little Mr. Certainty changed his mind. "I want to be a supplies truck driver!" he said.

No, people, don't look at the plane.
A little to the left...there you go!

Oh, joy.

I did get a costume from the movie Cars - Tow Mater, the rusty tow truck voiced by Larry the Cable Guy. "What do you think?" I asked my son, who would see that it was, at least, a truck.

"But Moooooom, I wanna be a supppliiiiieees truck driiiiiiver!!!!!" he whined. "I don't wannnna be a rusty old truuuuuck!!!"

Thanks, kid. Thanks a bundle.

Yesterday, after school, I took Supplies Truck Driver to Office Depot to pick out a cardboard box. He danced to the checkout counter with the box around his body, singing "I'm gonna be a truck driver! I'm gonna be a truck driver!!!" Mom worked her costume magic on the cardboard box, with the help of scissors, spray paint, Crayola Kids Paint, and blue painters' tape.

The kid walks into school this morning behind the wheel of one smart-looking truck, if I do say so myself, and his Deuce McAllister-clad teacher starts laughing. "Yesterday he was trying to tell us what he was going to be, and nobody could get it at all!" I started laughing, too, thinking about a four-year-old trying to explain himself: "It's a supplies truck. You know. It brings supplies to the airplanes..." He had quite a crowd of classmates around him this morning, little Spider-Men and Wolverines and Power Rangers and princesses and cheerleaders wanting to check out his cardboard ride.

That big, big smile on his face was worth most of the aggravation. Most of it. I can't return the Cars suit, so I think I'm gonna be Mater this year. I'm getting a tad rusty around the edges, anyhow.

Happy Halloween, everybody!

Mazel tov to Maitri on her measured, thoughtful appearance in this article in the Washington Post. The blogpocheh is getting more and more recognition out in the wide, wide world these days, and it's good to see and hear.

What the WaPo article got me thinking about, though, is that age-old question us Jewish folks have in the backs of our heads whenever any of our numbers have ventured out into the public sphere: insert political office/acting job/media position/celeb status here and ask "is this good for (insert your religion/race/creed/generation/gender/sexual orientation)?

from Arthur Szyk's Haggadah: The Four Sons

It's a tad early in the Jewish calendar for this story, but as part of the seder service on Passover, time is taken out of the retelling of how we all hauled our enslaved butts out of Egypt with help from God and Moses to talk about the four sons - one who is wise, one who is wicked, one who is simple, and one who doesn't yet know how to ask a question. Each one asks a question about Passover (except for the last one), and the father of the sons is advised on how to answer each son.

There have been discussions since time immemorial about the meaning of this part of the Haggadah. They run the gamut from why it is even in there to who or what each son represents. What Arthur Szyk's illumination does is put out there yet another interpretation of the parable, circa 1939.

Read as Hebrew is, from right to left starting in the upper right hand corner, the wise man is a yeshiva bucher, a student of Torah and a possible rabbinical candidate. The wicked man is a fully assimilated Jew who has tossed off the clothes and the attitudes of the shtetl Jew. The simple man is chubby and open, and the undecided man is at a crossroads, neither here nor there in his clothes or his thoughts. At a time when the Nuremberg Laws were closing around Germany's Jewish population with an iron fist and the eastern European and Soviet Jews weren't much better off, Szyk's version of the four sons parable is a cry for Jews to take pride in their Judaism.

Keep Szyk's men in mind when you contemplate this: A wicked son - what does he say? "What mean ye by this service?" He infers "ye", not himself. By shutting himself off from the general body, it is as though he denies the existence of God. Therefore thou shouldst distress him too, replying: "This is done because of that which the Lord did unto me when I came forth out of Egypt" - unto me, not him; for if he had been there he would not have been delivered.*

Ouch. I don't care who you are, that's gotta hurt. And anyone who takes it upon him/herself to cast off his/her heritage has to know that this kind of pain is part of the deal. In the 1930's, Szyk presciently saw assimilation as an issue of life and death for the Jews, and he chose to work against it, immigrating to England and lending his artistic talents to supporting the Allied war effort and the struggle for Israel's independence.

This still happens with so many people in this world. It can be so much easier to go along in order to get along. Being true to where you come from is the hard part.

Of course, this can also cause problems if one goes the "my people, right or wrong" path. It's a different kind of myopia that can blind one to what is really there. It can also close off any hope for compromise, any empathy. Which helps answer another important question about the four sons parable: why is that wicked son even there? Why allow such a guy to sit at your table and be so insolent?

It might just be so that we who have invited the schmo to the table can keep our minds open. We might all learn something from contact with each other. And, who knows , the benefits might outweigh the drawbacks, or the whole experiment might well prove to be a disaster, but we have at least got to try.

Jindal is at Louisiana's table now. The debate concerning how good he is for the Indian-American population will most likely become more heated as time passes, but what would be worse would be no debate at all over the subject. Ultimately, the people that argue together have a better chance of staying together.


*translation courtesy of the Szyk Haggadah

Every day, I am split in two.

Small hands reach for me every day. Hands attached to a being who trusts me. A person who hasn't spent much time on this earth, but who is experiencing it largely through the prism of my home. Which is shared with him, and his father, and three pets. All this child knows is that Mom is his caretaker, his noodge, the source of his nicknames to date, the one who monitors his DVD viewing and his snack intake, the giver of baths, the reiner-in of the repetition of untoward phrases learned ("dirty trash can full of poop" and "pecker face" come to mind), the chauffeur, and the reader of books and fixer of toys. He knows that Mom is a laundress, a dog-walker, a cat-box scooper, a baker, a mac-and-cheese maker, a pancake-making supervisor, and the lady who puts on the GhettoFunkPowerHour for him to dance to every so often.

Oh, and Mom happens to sing - though he doesn't want me to about 95% of the time - and she also happens to teach occasionally. And Mom types on the computer a lot. Mom also kvetches about her bubble being invaded when she's typing on the computer.

Anybody see the fault line here?

Yeah, I want to get out of the house more. I just don't know what the hell I'll be doing with myself when I'm out there. The last full-time job I had nearly fried my brain and burned me out, big-time.

The last craft show I worked with my ex-boss was simply a final demonstration of what I was gratefully leaving at that point...and, because my quitting involved my husband's job skills taking us to the northeast, I wasn't burning any bridges with Ex-Boss and inviting various curses, ailments, or pin-pricks from a voodoo doll with my hair on its head (hell hath no fury like my ex-boss...) to affect my person. I was able to extricate myself from the job with only a touch of annoyance and remarkably few to no hard feelings. She hated craft shows, but she got to especially hating this one through a series of events that simply happened.

We were in a quonset hut at a sprawling convention complex. The show was a garden show, but we figured we had some good glass tcotchkes and some metal fountains that would sell well, it wasn't too hard a trip to take to get to the place, and we didn't have to set up a tent, as the show was indoors.

The first mistake was letting the woman in the booth directly behind ours piggy back onto our electrical hookup we needed for the fountains. She needed it for the video monitor she was showing of her copper kinetic sculpture sprinklers, objects that can be staked in your yard and hooked up to a garden hose. When the water is running through the sculpture, it turns and waters your yard.

The next mistake, according to my ex-boss, was even coming to the show in the first place. Sales were not going well for us. The glass hummingbird feeders weren't even doing well. It was just a bad show. It happens sometimes. Spring was a bad time of year to try to sell stuff. The crowd just didn't have the disposable income for the work we presented. Ex-Boss, however, treated it all as though it was proof positive that the world was out to get her and take her livelihood from her. And it all started with letting the woman in the booth behind have access to our electrical outlet.

The ranting and railing against the woman behind us, whose only crime was having more sales than we were having, was of truly childish, nasty proportions. The only thing that kept me gritting my teeth and holding all of my frustration with the ranting in was the consolation that this, too, would pass, and I would be leaving it all behind shortly, thanks to my husband's headhunter and my morning sickness from hell. Otherwise, I would have burned my bridges with Little Ms Steinbrenner right then and there.

Some days, the only difference I can see between dealing then with the ex-boss and dealing now with the little guy is the large age difference between them and the fact that I'm not getting paid by my son, or anybody else, for that matter, to take the crud he dishes out. I'm going through a period of time with him right now where I feel as though it will simply be the same ol' ordering around of Mom (and the admonishing of the little guy by Mom on proper manners) and the constant in-Mom's-face for the next God-knows-how-many years...his age will be the only change.

And I can't just walk away permanently.

The things about getting out into the job lots that I am dreading having to deal with: the fact that I will most likely have to miss many, many days due to my being the only kin located close by that my son's school can call on in an emergency (like the accident he had in his pants today), that I will most likely be penalized in one way or another based on that fact, and - worst of all- that I will end up with another childish maniac of a boss who will think I am so much of a loyal stalwart that my pay can be delayed or passed over to the next month because, hey, I'll understand her cash-flow situation (Yeah, I was a total idiot for those last two months. Shame on me, dammit.).

Work sucks.

Motherhood does, too.

Rock and a hard place. Managing two evils, or staying with the one right now. Yeah, yeah, I know I shouldn't be putting my darling child into the realm of being called "an evil", but sometimes I am just waiting for his head to spin around.

Do I really want to see if another employer exhibits the same signs of being possessed?

Answer: not right now.

I'm gonna listen to the little guy talk about his imaginary friend, Skipper the penguin, instead. He's even drawing some great pictures about Skipper's life. I just hope the term "pecker face" stays out of the story. My ex-boss had the gutter mouth, but she just didn't have the imagination...

Got word of this latest through Sheckrastos and Jeffrey.

My response to this: not only are you apparently cheering for a separation of church and sports when you are cheering for the Red Sox in the Series this year,...



...you are also telling Sox player Kevin Youkilis to whack Mel Gibson over the head with his kick-butt style of play. And Youkilis is not "the Greek god of walks" as his former manager Billy Beane once said of him. He's one helluva Jewish ballplayer.

Editor B has a link to YatPundit's neighborhood association meeting post on DailyKos.

I want to say how happy I am that I don't live in Lakeview. I want to say that there probably aren't that many people in Lakeview who share these same views and who use "Democrat" as a code word for "Other", but I'm really not sure anymore. I want to tell all of those crackers to go to hell, but, in a way, they are probably already there. I want to shake them all silly and tell them we are all in the same boat and that the racism makes things much worse. I want to make every one of them very, very ashamed and disgusted with themselves somehow.

The blogpocheh is having one hell of a week as it is.

I think I'm gonna go clear away all the banana leaves Dan cut off the trees in the backyard. If anyone sees a crazy woman stinking of rotting bananas running around Lakeview and trying to beat some sense into some residents with a bunch of bananas, then you'll know why.

Please bail me out if I get hauled in...unless Eddie Jordan decides to set me free first. Then I'll lead everybody from OPP - all of us "Democrats" - to Lakeview.

___________________

10-26: Ladies and gents, I apologize for my "crackers" comment. Someone in the comments to this post did call me on blanket labeling an entire neighborhood based on the actions of a few blanket labelers who just happen to live in that neighborhood.

I have this knee-jerk response to those who will bend language to suit their own purposes, and hearing about these few people who oppose public transportation because it will bring a nebulous, undesirable "Other" into their neighborhoods, or those folks who would use "Democrat" as a derogatory code for black...it just really burned me up. It does not, by any means, indicate that everybody in an entire area thinks that way. Once again, my apologies if I have offended folks in Lakeview who were lumped in with my angry, snap assessment.

Last week, my son's class was acting up. The kids weren't behaving as they should have been when they usually line up to head out of the classroom.

The teachers were chagrined. "This is very rude behavior and we expect better of you," the teaching assistant said. "I guess we've been letting things slide without too many consequences, but now we will have to start in on some discipline measures."

The kids settled down...except for the little guy. He started in on the weird slurping sounds he makes when he's trying to be the tick-tocking crocodile in Disney's Peter Pan, and the teacher called him on it.

"Now, son, that's very rude and disrespectful. Do you really think that's right? Do you do such things behind our backs?"

The little guy thoughtfully stopped and meekly said, "Not this time."

Why do I now feel like he channeled some of our local officials as of late?

Maybe it's all about the full moon, especially now that I've gotten a load of this. As if things aren't weird enough...Update, 10-25: I spoke too soon. If this IS true, the DA's liable to be tarred and feathered and run outta town. Are we all certain Halloween is NEXT week?

___________________

Flashback to No-Cal, mid-1970's.

A child and his mom are trolling the aisles in the grocery store. The child has been learning about death, and he decides to begin what his mom, years later, will term his "first actuarial query". Seeing an elderly lady going the other way down the aisle, he asks her, "Are you old?"

"Well, yes, I guess so," the lady answers.

Then, the child asks the question that makes his mom want to fall right through the floor and disappear.

"When are you going to die?"

Much to the lady's credit, she answers, "When I'm good and ready."

Morals of the stories: kids will always come out with stuff that makes you want to cringe. It's been going on for generations, and it will always be going on for as long as human beings are walking the earth.

And, from the very beginning, we are all trying to figure out some universal truths. We grasp at life and try to understand its end, and we struggle to one degree or to many, many degrees with everything in-between. Our need to compare and contrast, even to horrifically absurd proportions, is one way of trying to make sense of the world. There are times when this kind of analysis simply needs to be suspended until everyone is out of danger and the perils have passed. This is one of those times.

Afterwards, we can talk all we want.

When we're good and ready.

10-25: However, it seems some are always ready to think the worst. We really can't do much about this kind of speculation except to keep railing against it as best we can and keep plugging along in our lives, no matter how insane things are. Keep telling the truth, even when, all about you, others might see you as a Cassandra.

Yep, it's annoying, tase-worthy songs week in the NOLA blogosphere.

Here's my contribution:


Enjoy! (hehhehhehhehheh...)

___________________

Update, 10-24: Haven't had enough of annoying music? Go here for more, you masochists. Money to burn? Go here. You'll be so sorry you did, but it's only especially funny if you subject others to it.

"...the camera lobotomizes what you point it at."

- One of many gems Stephen Colbert comes out with in this past week's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Have a listen to "Not My Job" for more.

I saw this in my paper this morning, which stayed amazingly dry despite sitting on my front steps in the driving rain for a few hours (I stepped over it when I directed my son through the water to the car, thinking it was a lost cause, but I yanked it off the steps on my return to find it dry despite the wet bag it was in).

I'm suddenly feeling very, very alone and out of it. Maybe those TV cameras have lobotomized the viewers and not the performers. Update, 11:33 AM: Okay, CenLamar helps me feel a little bit better. Not much, but a little.:

Notice how Jindal failed to win 29 parishes outright, and notice how large swaths of the state rejected him and his candidacy. Parishes colored red are parishes he won outright, while parishes colored blue are parishes whose voters rebuffed Jindal and cast their votes for someone else. Those dissenting votes are significant, as Jindal’s name recognition was near universal. Ceci n’est pas un mandat; ceci est un portrait d’un État divisé.One good thing about all this rain: it might prevent this from happening - or, at the very least, it might shrink the turnout. I'm just picturing Ann "Coughlin" Coulter having to swim to the auditorium for her talk. Not only is she an advocate for "perfected" Jews, she is a willfully ignorant tool with regards to the facts surrounding 8-29 and after. Once again, folks, don't give this talking head a live audience tonight...and tell your friends to stay at home safe. Y'all be well and be careful out there.

from Ray Fenwick by way of Subversive Cross Stitch

Hey Michael!

Replace the beast's face with Jindal's, and I'll make one of these babies for ya.

The pattern pictured above certainly describes the regard in which I feel the GOP holds the people of this state. And the election of Pinhead Bobby will ultimately not help matters much down here, unless he can somehow prove by example that he's not a right-wing tool.

He's got four years to do so.


Yeah, I'm not holding my breath, either.


*Sigh*

I've still got property on the brain. Especially since yesterday and last night got kinda weird for me. I know the police are supposed to be guardians of life, liberty, and property, but the way they're going about it is creeping me out.

Came back from walking the dog to find a fellow walking up the street towards our house, then turning back around as though he was undecided as to whether or not he should approach. He was definitely in some sort of law enforcement capacity, as I could see that he had a gun or two on his belt, but he wasn't wearing an NOPD uniform. He finally decided to head back to his unmarked car, walking past me as I let my dog in through my gate.

"What was that all about?" I asked one of my housemates, who was sitting on the front porch.

"Couldn't tell you," he said. "It looked like he was going to come on up to talk to me, but he turned around and left."

As we watched Quasi-Cop go driving off, we talked about strange happenings in the 'hood. A car backfired like a shot the other night, and the house across the street from us that has been for sale for forever and is supposedly uninhabited proved to have an occupant after all. Some redheaded guy came out to check on things, then headed on back in. Later on, when Dan went out himself to talk with some neighborhood guys on the corner about the backfiring, they said they'd been approached by three cops investigating the noise.

What really freaked me out, though, was when I was headed home from choir practice last night and some police cars were coming through a crossing a block from my house. I stopped at the corner to let them pass, and one of the officers flipped on a spotlight and shined it right in my face. Thankfully, I guess I passed the quickie exam, because he drove off down the road...and I was even more grateful soon afterwards when I found that I'd left my purse at the synagogue. It would have been a real joy if I'd been stopped and suddenly found I had no license with me. "But, sir, I left it at choir practice!" would be my cry as they took me off to wherever and impounded the car. Choir practice...heh...a likely story.

ANYway, I calmed down a tad after heading back and getting a former synagogue president and current choir member to unlock the place so's I could get said purse and drive back home in a legal manner, and I found this gem over at Tim's. "Oops" just doesn't cut it when you have dominoes disguised as supporting concrete pilings. If it ain't the cops, it's contractors you've gotta worry about.

And then there's this most recent election coming up tomorrow, in which one determining factor in the city council race might well be the mystery demographics of the people who are currently living in New Orleans minus the diaspora that is scattered about the country...the displaced New Orleanians that the Walking Id fought so hard to have as eligible voters (vote early from wherever you are!) in the mayoral election that helped put his sorry self back in office for another term. An estimated 100,000+ registrants are now off the books in the city, and who knows how that's going to affect the At-Large circus. If more conscientious folks haven't been bored to tears by the campaigns of those vying for the governor's office, they could well turn out and make it tough for "Pinhead" Bobby Jindal to coast through the primary (CenLamar has many, many reasons why Pinhead needs to stay out of the governor's office - I really wouldn't be surprised if Jindal refrains from voting for himself after reading all they've got on him) . Sheckrastos has got it right in his one-word assessments of those involved in the latest gubernatorial debate - they all start with the letter "I" for a reason.

I say print out Cliff's agenda, make some copies, and pass it out to everyone you see. Good stuff there. Make your own decisions in that voting booth, folks, but be smart about it...or as smart as you can be, considering the choices.

Oh, and we got some great news at choir practice last night! Come our JazzFest Shabbat service next April, our featured performer will be none other than:



If anybody wants to join the choir and start rehearsing with a raucous bunch that loves to sling around some jokes involving organists and condoms between rehearsing liturgy in four-part harmony, let me know. No prior experience with Hebrew, Judaism, or singing is at all necessary. I can't say that Kermit will be barbecuing for the synagogue that night, though...

I've got property on the brain.

Michael's post about the funding follies surrounding the raising of his house got me thinking about it. To raise or not to raise? To "stay historic" or acknowledge the fact that one cannot rely on folks such as the Army Corps to keep the water out of your home if you leave it at the height at which it currently sits?

E summons some righteous, and rightful, outrage at the plans for a strip mall (obtained from Karen)...to be put on a swath of land on which a mall and a tire and car repair shop are currently silently rotting. Nobody rushed in to clear out those spots and make them viable retail or residential property shortly after the storm, and the businesses that are still in the surrounding areas are just barely holding on by their fingernails. A massive mall just got demolished further up the street from where the proposed mall is to be...so why put in a new one?

The folks at Audubon Place, the only gated community in New Orleans, want to isolate themselves even further from reality than they already are. Let's contest those property assessments, O people of privilege! Save that money from going to the city in which you reside! More on all of this, and some hefty, heated discussion in the comments, from Oyster.

And, finally, in the category of more property left to rot, I give you Ray's commentary and photos on the horrific state of the SUNO facilities. Why? Why is this happening? Who has decided that these buildings are so low on the totem pole that they can't even be gutted, only fitted with an ineffective ventilation system and left to sit?

Questions, questions...and nary an answer in sight.

Maybe these folks might have a solution to the rotting property woes. From what I saw yesterday (and Dangerblond as well), large groups of people will come if food is involved, music is a-playin', and everything is organized properly. Today a playground, tomorrow....SUNO!

Except...well...we've been short on the competent organization thing.

Ugh.

Why are there women who want to turn back the clock?

I'm all for this kind of looking back, if only to do what should have been done in the first place, when this amendment became a major national issue and then was dropped like a hot potato. Women, on average, still make less than men do. Any sort of family leave longer than three months is laughable to many corporations and businesses all over this country. Women should not be judged by their anatomy, and yet it keeps happening again and again. It has gotten to the point where women are turning on themselves when they ought to be working together to fight all this crap - working moms vs. stay-at-home moms is a case in point.

No, I'm talking about women who seem to be channeling some of the worst elements of prejudice and reactionary thinking. Women channeling Father Charles Coughlin, Henry Ford, various ayatollahs, mullahs, and imams who share an oppressive rigidity in their world views, Louis Farrakhan, any prim and proper matron who told you to keep your ankles crossed and refrain from smoking in the street...you know, women who buy the idea that the world needs to be one homogeneous museum of a planet in which everybody knows their places and stays there, quietly. They then take that idea and do their best to sell it, sounding like robotic Stepford wives and looking worse.

Women like this one:

She was a round-faced young woman with doe eyes and a pretty smile who was among several fluent English-speakers recruited by the students after the takeover. She had spent part of her childhood in Philadelphia while her father had worked on his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, and she had fully absorbed the language. In fact, when she had returned to Iran as a young girl, her English had been better than her Farsi. At Amir Kabir University, she was formally a second-year chemical engineering student, but she had long since grown more interested in the turbulent postrevolutionary politics playing out on campus. She had been raised in a Western-style home but had embraced the distinctively political Islam taught by Ali Shariati and others, who subscribed to the traditional leftist belief that capitalism was, at its core, the systematic exploitation of the weak.*

Nice to be able to parlay a skill into a prominent role in assisting a cause. Nothing wrong with that. And there are a number of things wrong with what people have done with capitalism. Any -ism practiced without some sort of conscience indeed risks becoming an end in itself for those who decide their own personal fortunes are much more important than anything else.

There is such a thing as balance, however. And this was a woman who helped tip the scales.

...Here was this woman whose English was so fluent, and whose accent was so American, that she obviously had lived in the States at some point. She seemed bright and articulate. Why would she want to embrace this fundamentalist crap that denied her gender equal status with men? Why would she want to drape herself in dark robes?

"Why are you doing this?" he asked her.

She looked back at him, startled.

"Look at your status as a woman in this society...(w)hy would you want this?"

...She launched into her rationale for traditionalism, how it was, in fact, liberating for women. She and her revolutionary sisters were actually much freer than women in the Western world, who remained enslaved by the twin satanic values of commercialism and sexual exploitation. "I believe in the fundamentals of Islam," she said. "And my faith requires women to do this."*

The modern world can indeed be frightening. Increasingly, there are fewer hard-and-fast answers for everyone's basic questions concerning survival, education of our children, care for loved ones, job security, trust in the powers that be. For women, things are both better and worse. What better way to solve all of these problems for yourself than to embrace a tried and seemingly true set of rules? Retreat from the uncertain world.

For this particular woman I am talking about, her retreat led her to power. Initially, it was power over a small number of people, power that she had no hesitation in wielding.

The chubby, black-clad young woman launched immediately into a rant: "You are here to see the evidence of the plotting and spying your country was doing in Iran...your CIA has...the Great Satan in 1953...and it was the CIA and SAVAK that tortured and killed..." Timm tuned her out. She had heard it all a hundred times on TV. Standing before this round-faced, diminutive, arrogant yet familiar young woman who was holding her son prisoner, Timm felt all her fear drop away. She felt rage. She was here to see her son. She had nothing whatsoever to do with the things Ebtekar was going on about. She was a mother from Milwaukee who wanted to visit with her son. Timm started to cry, and then she started to scream at Ebtekar, woman to woman.

"You don't know what it's like to be a mother! What would your mother do if you--you can't be any older than my son is! And you've got a mother someplace. Underneath all that shit that you are wearing there's got to be a human being someplace. You've got a mother. How would she feel if you were locked up in a strange country someplace?"

She called Ebtekar cold and heartless.

"You don't even behave like you're human," she said. "Even these guards with their guns talk to us like real people."*

Nilufar (now Massoumeh) Ebtekar, a translator and spokeswoman for the Students Following the Imam's Line, or the 1979 American embassy hostage takers in Tehran, became a vice-president of Iran. The wearing of the hijab and the continued oppression of women in her country have apparently not affected the views she held well over twenty years ago. Why should it? She has attained power for herself with the help of her adherence to these views. To use the power she has attained to enact real change would be a blow to the legitimacy of her traditionalist beliefs. It would acknowledge that women are people with legitimate rights, rather than beings who are said to have nine parts of desire, and, because of this, they need to be covered up and hidden away, unseen and unheard.

Having read Mark Bowden's latest, and then seen Ann "Coughlin" Coulter negating the existence of the Jewish people shortly after finishing his book, I can only come to the same conclusion about Coulter that I have about Ebtekar.

...I turned on the TV in my hotel room and was startled to see Ebtekar's wrapped face. She was being interviewed on a split screen with a BBC announcer and Iran's new Nobel Peace Prize winner, Shirin Ebadi, talking about how proud everyone in Iran was of her, even though Ebadi was awarded the prize for work opposing the oppressive regime Ebtekar so ably represents and defends.

The announcer asked the Iranian vice president how she, as a woman, could defend a regime that forbade Ebadi to travel to Stockholm and receive her award without permission from her husband.

If Ebtekar squirmed, it was only for a split second. She smiled and segued smoothly into a recitation of the gains women had made under Iran's Islamic regime.*

Why do some women feel the need to turn back the clock?

Because, sadly, they must feel that doing so is the only way for them to gain power and attention for themselves. What is even sadder is that their opportunism has the effect of harming many, many other people who could use their consideration and compassion. It does indeed make us hesitant to consider them human, if only because they feel that many other people are not deserving of that consideration.

It is also why I ask all those who are reading this to boycott Coulter's appearance at Tulane next Monday the 22nd, and urge many, many others who might even remotely consider the possibility of attending to stay away. The less of an audience the woman has to speak to concerning her narrow views about government, religion, and other subjects, the better. Please contact these people to make your views known as well:

Tulane University College Republicans - the sponsors of the event

The Tulane events calendar has a telephone number that can be seen here.
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*all quotations from Mark Bowden's Guests of the Ayatollah