On this day in 1911, the great playwright Tennessee Williams was born. He is most known for A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. What has always bugged me is how Hollywood just loved Williams. But they glossed over the homosexual themes there. That was true of both Cat and The Night of the Iguana, which don’t make any real sense unless you divine it. Of course, the plays kind of had the same problem. I do tend to think that Williams would have written better plays had he not been writing during such a tender time.

But to me, Williams will always mean just one thing: The Glass Menagerie, his breakthrough play. I rather liked the play when I was young; I think I was 13 when I first read it. But I didn’t really get it. So about a year ago, I read it again. Now, of course, the play makes far more sense to me. And I feel like I understand all the characters. They are all so wonderful, most especially because of their flaws. And like real people, what’s good about them is also what’s bad about them.

Here is what is probably the best filmed version of the play. It has an amazing cast: Katharine Hepburn, Sam Waterston, Joanna Miles, and Michael Moriarty. It is directed without too much reverence by Anthony Harvey, who directed one of my favorite films, They Might Be Giants. It is very close to the play:

What I didn’t know about the play was that it was quite autobiographical. That’s most especially true of the mentally fragile sister Laura, who is the heart of the play. She was based upon Williams’ older sister Rose. In fact, the “gentleman caller” in the play has nicknamed Laura “Blue Roses.” Rose apparently suffered from schizophrenia. She and Williams were very close growing up. But while Williams was working in New York, Rose was given a lobotomy. As was always the case with those, the only question was just how much harm they would do. In Rose’s case, she was left incapacitated for the rest of her life.

Williams was devastated and it is speculated that his heavy use of drugs and alcohol were related to this. In addition to taking care of her over the yeas, he left the bulk of his estate for her care. Even in her state, she outlived him by 13 years. It’s extremely sad, but I prefer to think of her like this:

Happy birthday Tennessee Williams!

I was introduced to a very interesting book by Henry Farrell, a political science professor at George Washington University. This last term, he has had a reading group with seven female seniors and most recently, they read Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. The book looks at how the party culture works for affluent people, because they don’t need hard majors with good GPAs. Their social connections and financial resources will land them in a good place after college. But poorer kids end up being pulled into the party culture where they end up without bankable skills and often without even a degree. And they are usually saddled with debt. Meritocracy rules!

Farrell’s group affirms the book’s findings on the micro-scale. And there is much more to the book on that level. Much of it is terribly troubling, including how the party culture puts women much more in threat of sexual assault. What’s more, the college administrations seem to either be unaware of the problem or disinterested. And you can see why. If they wanted to do something about the problem, they would have to sit the poorer students down and tell them: you aren’t equal to the rich kids; you can’t act like them. And that is anathema to the mythology of America.

I’m more interested in the book on the macro-scale. According to conservatives, income inequality is all about education. If the poor would just get educated, everything would be fine. Now, it turns out this is not true. Education is a small part of the problem, but that’s all. Paying for the Party illustrates this.

Inequality in this country is best thought of the same way that institutional racism is—of course, they are very often one and the same thing. The best case scenario based upon the book is that we will get our poorer students to work really hard and get good grades in engineering and pre-med programs. But that in itself says, “America is not an meritocratic country!” All we see is that if the poor are very bright and very hard working and very lucky, they may do as well as the stupid and lazy and unlucky children of the rich do.

I’m quite willing to admit that an American ideal is that people should be able to work hard and get rich. Where I differ from conservatives is that I don’t think that having rich parents should tilt the playing field entirely in your favor. And note: these rich kids who do well despite sliding through college with easy majors and bad grades (think: George Bush the Younger) already had enormous advantages before they got to school. Those advantages helped before they were even born, with better prenatal care. It extended to better nutrition growing up, better schools, better social exposure, you know: better lives.

So the question is, are we as Americans going to continue to accept living in an aristocracy but still hold up the ideal of meritocracy? Because it is more than just unpleasant for the poor; it is wrong. At least in an honest aristocracy, the poor aren’t blamed for not being rich and powerful. Here it is the worst of all worlds. The poor have lives that suck and they are told that it is their own fault. Six out of ten of the wealthiest people in America inherited their wealth. And it is only getting worse. So it is either time to change that or to stop pretending. But we won’t do either. Because the facts and the myth flatter the power elite.

On this day in 1881, the great composer Bela Bartok was born. When I a music major in college, a lot of people were really into Bartok. I never got it. It always seemed to me that there were more interesting modern composers like Elliott Carter. But now I get it. Bartok is kind of like Schoenberg without the rigidity. He didn’t worry about traditional tonality. But he wasn’t out to protest it either. And as a result, his music is surprisingly melodic. And it has wonderfully complex but non-traditional harmonies and classical counterpoint.

To me, most of his music sounds distinction impressionistic. But while people like Debussy were very modal in their music, Bartok went his own way. As a result, one doesn’t really hear people who sound like him. His is work is idiosyncratic. I found the following very interesting quote from Milton Babbitt, “Bartok’s solution was a specific one, it cannot be duplicated.” He meant this as an insult, but I think it is the greatest compliment. Bartok’s work was very different from one composition to another. Why should he write the same thing over and over again? He was a composer, not a theorist.

To get a good idea of what Bartok is all about, you should really listen to his Second Violin Concerto. But it is difficult. So here is the much easier Concerto For Orchestra, which was one of the last things he ever wrote:

Happy birthday Bela Bartok!

Researchers at MIT and Harvard noticed that less than 10% of venture capital money in Silicon Valley went to companies by women. So they decided to look at see if there was some real reason for this like woman not having as many startups or if it was just sexism. Can you guess what they found? They took actual startups and presented them to actual venture capitalists. But they randomized them so that sometimes a woman was presenting and sometimes a man was presenting. They also broke the sexes down into attractive and ugly.

The result? The venture capitalists said that they would invest 68% of the time when it was a male presenting. When it was a female, only 32% were interested in investing. So a startup was twice as likely to get funding if it was headed by a man. I’m a cynical guy and even I was shocked by that. But it gets worse. Attractive men were even more likely to get funding. Attractive and ugly women did not have a statistically significant difference, probably because to the venture capitalists, all women are unappealing.

I got this information from a Forbes article, New Research: VC Preference For Men Persists (And Attractive Males Fare Best). It is telling. After going through the research, the author seems to have forgotten what the study showed and tried to minimize its importance:

That’s not what the research was about. And regardless, the research indicates that if an attractive man starts a new fashion company, investors are far more likely to give him money than if a woman had started it. There are lots of other reasons why women don’t get as much investment money as men. I’m sure that men being more aggressive helps them. But this study strips away all of that.

The last third of the article is an inspiring story of a female entrepreneur who beat the odds even after the “funding community rebuffed her.” These are a mainstay of conservative apologetics for inequality. If one woman can make it despite the sexist racist ageist system, then anyone can! Of course, that doesn’t follow. And regardless, all that means is that an exceptional woman can do as well as a mediocre man. That isn’t any reasonable person’s idea of “equality of opportunity.”

Jeffrey Rosen wrote a very interesting article in New Republic, The End of Anti-Discrimination. It is about the Hobby Lobby and Conestega Woods cases that the Supreme Court is hearing. But they deal with an issue that has been much on my mind: where does it stop? If a company can say that it ought to be allowed an exemption against providing birth control in its health plans, I don’t see why a Christian Scientist employer couldn’t say it is only willing to provide prayer for its employees’ healthcare needs.

The article goes one step further. As Rosen notes, both cases “will force the justices to confront the future balance between the First Amendment on one hand and anti-discrimination laws on the other.” The article is based upon a podcast between two lawyers on each side of the case who nonetheless agree that this is the issue. The article isn’t this blunt, but I think it is important to be clear. A Christian hotel owner could say, “The Bible says that the races should be separate. Most of my guests are white. So I won’t provide accommodations to blacks.”

I don’t see this happening. What the court will most likely decide, if it finds in favor of these companies, is some principle that will limit the ruling. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In Citizen’s United, the courts just brushed away such concerns. And here, they might say, “Sure, people could use this law to discriminate, but that isn’t going to happen.” You never know with this court. It has, after all, three justices who are little more than right wing partisan hacks. You have two justices who are extremely conservative. Three justices who are moderate. And one justice who is somewhat liberal. That’s a recipe for bad law. And bad law we have been getting.

But even if we do get a very limited ruling, it will be very bad. It will set up a structure for more and more businesses to use their legal rights to punch holes in workers’ rights generally. But the issue is much bigger than that. This whole push of the Supreme Court to codify business rights as equal to individual rights brings on nothing short of the end of democracy. As we’ve seen over the last hundred years at least, the powerful can manipulate the political process as surely as a puppeteer controls a marionette.

In the short run, I’m very concerned. The rich have managed to acquire almost all of the wealth in this country. And now they are trying to corner the market in power. Or maybe they already have, since both political parties are beholden to them and the courts are firmly in their pockets. Whether they can completely disenfranchise the people at the ballot box remains to be seen. I’m not at all sure they can’t. So in the long run, I’m also very concerned.

Afterword

There is a “bread and circuses” aspect to modern America. The power elite have been pretty good at allowing the middle class to be savaged, but still limp along. At the same time, there are more than enough circuses. But I fear that one of the biggest circuses for my fellow liberals is social liberalism itself. That stuff doesn’t harm the power elite because mostly they too are social liberals. And they keep us all focused on these relatively minor (high up the hierarchy of needs) issues so we don’t do anything about the fact that we live more and more in squalor.

H/T: Ed Kilgore

On this day in 1826, the writer, activist, and so much more, Matilda Joslyn Gage was born. There tends to be a problem for me when I write about the suffragist of the 19th century: they are so Christian. But Gage was a harsh critic of Christianity, which (if you haven’t noticed) is an extremely sexist religion as portrayed in the canon. She was more of a religious eclectic and mystic. In religion and politics, she was far more radical in her thinking than other more well known suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Brownell Anthony.

That in itself is typical of our sexist society. Sensing this, historian Margaret Rossiter coined the term “Matilda Effect.” This is the effect that is entirely still with us where female scientists are not given proper credit. A fantastic example of this is Rosalind Franklin. She died before her work was recognized by the Nobel committee, but her name was not even mentioned when Crick, Watson, and Wilkins were given theirs. What’s more, in his memoir, Watson made repeated attacks on her as a scientist and generally minimized her contributions to the science.

I think a different thing has gone on with Gage’s reputation. We always choose to celebrate the political activists who in hindsight seem less threatening. For all his greatness, we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday because Malcolm X still scares white folk. Similarly, Matilda Joslyn Gage is exactly the kind of women who today we call “bossy” or “bitchy” or the word my female friends insist I not us: a c-word. A great example of this was that Gage didn’t think, like most suffragists of the time, that women should be given the vote because of their feminine moral superiority; she believed in the essential equality of the sexes.

She was also against abortion, but for the most radical of reasons. She argued that men wanted to maintain their fortunes by having few children to dilute their inheritance. Although this theory is very clearly wedded to her social class, it is essentially a socialistic argument. Indeed, she argued that it was a “self-evident fact of nature which needs no other inspiration, to show the world that the mother, and not the father, is the true head of the family.” This was in reference to allowing women to divorce unfaithful men. It’s interesting that both of these conclusions would appeal to modern social conservatives. But her arguments are in the service of freeing women—the exact opposite of what the social conservatives are attempting to do.

She was also an outspoken advocate for Native American independence. She seemed particularly concerned about the floating commitments to the native populations. Whatever was in the interest of the United States at any time, that was the policy. Even today I occasionally hear people arguing that Native Americans should not be able to have casinos. So 150 years ago, she was still ahead of many Americans today. I couldn’t find any statues of her. We need to make some.

Happy birthday Matilda Joslyn Gage!

On the 14 March 2014 Real Time, Bill Maher had a few choice words about the biblical flood story. He said, “It’s about a psychotic mass murderer who gets away with it, and his name is God. Genesis says God was so angry with himself for screwing up when he made mankind so flawed that he sent the flood to kill everyone. Men, women, children, babies. What kind of tyrant punishes everyone just to get back at the few he’s mad at…” Needless to say, the Christian community went more crazy than usual. It’s kind of strange, because what Maher said was not only typical of him but of most people in the atheist community.

In the details, however, Maher is wrong. I think that objectively, the Old Testament God is not a psychotic; he’s a psychopath. But most gods of that period were! The people didn’t conceive of entirely good gods, because they saw very clearly what their lives were. While they weren’t necessarily “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” they did see large numbers of their children die for no reason. God brought good things but he also brought bad things. He was very much like an alcoholic father.

Christian Jerry Newcombe shot back at Maher, claiming that God was mad at everyone except for Noah’s family and that’s why he drown them all. He then goes on to make an argument that leans heavily on a bit of apologetics that I associate with William Lane Craig. It is never stated this way, but it goes like this: we define God as perfectly good; therefore, anything God does is perfectly good. Thus, God was correct to judge those people and kill them. “He is not accountable to us,” Newcombe wrote, “We are accountable to Him.” And then Newcombe flits off to talk about the movie and how the flood story is symbolic of Jesus: you are either saved or you ain’t.

The problem with this article is that it proves Maher’s point. If God’s idea of good is what we would call evil, why is anyone worshiping him? And the answers always come down to the same thing, “Because I want to be let into the after-party.” That, of course, brings up the issue of intention. Is it really okay to believe in Jesus just to get the reward? Isn’t that kind of, well, pathetic? And what about God? He tricks humans by giving them brains which are designed to be skeptical. He puts all kinds of evidence out that indicates that he doesn’t exist. And then he punishes them for doing what he created them to do. Like I said: psychopath. But people like Jerry Newcombe have just decided that when God is a psychopath, it is by definition good.

A more explosive reaction to Maher was from young earth creationist Ken Ham. After noting that “God is a God of grace and mercy,” Ham goes on to say that Christians must pray for Maher. Because if he doesn’t see the light he will suffer the fate foretold in Revelation 21:8:

Now many people, like Tony Ortega at The Raw Story think this is ironic. But to the Christian apologist, it isn’t. God is a God of grace and mercy by definition. When he tortures, with fire and brimstone, those who didn’t crack his code, he is being merciful because he can’t be anything but.

Even though I’m an atheist, I rather admire religion in as much as people get meaning from it. But there are really only two kinds of Christians. The first kind are like your grandmother: they pick and choose and believe the nice bits. That’s sweet: God bless them all! But the rigorous ones—the ones who publish articles in The Christian Post, they have a different approach that does not deserve any respect at all. In their efforts to make all the parts work, they develop a god that is not in the least worthy of worship. And intellectually it is a crutch. People like Maher can point out really big moral problems in what is supposedly the Good Book. And their response is that no argument is acceptable; you just have to love God and you will see that everything he does is good, regardless of how pathological it is.

Bill Maher 1; Christian Apologists 0.

Afterword

Note that I often disagree with Maher. He can be a total idiot:

Bill Maher and False Equivalence (I win!)

Bill Maher Bashes Disability

Wrong Again, Bill!

Bill Maher Spouts Anti-Muslim Racism

According to the Malaysian government, MA370 went down in the Southern Indian Ocean with no hope of survivors. This doesn’t come as a surprise, but it’s sad. I had rather hoped that the plane had be hijacked so that the people had a chance. But it is not to be it would seem. Still many question remain and I wanted to address that: questions will always remain—at least for some.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve heard all kind of ridiculous speculation. There was the contention that the plane had been hijacked by terrorists who were fitting it with explosives. They were then going to crash it into a building in the United States. Or Israel. It seems that to many conservatives in this country, Israel is the most patriotic state in the union. Another theory was really a classic in the “government is so secretive except they left clues” genre: the plane was taken hostage and the American government was negotiating with the terrorists, but just wasn’t telling anyone. And, of course, there were actually people claiming it was abducted by aliens. My colleague at The Reaction tweet out this brilliant response:

But let’s assume the best: the wreckage is found and we have the black box and everything is figured out. In that case, people will still think there is some kind of conspiracy. As it is, I still hear people say that Flight 93 didn’t really go down. And one of their reasons: because there was no wreckage. Except that there was wreckage and it has been widely reported.

The problem is that for over two weeks, people have been able to speculate. And it was the best kind of speculation: based upon an almost complete absence of evidence! So a lot of people are vested in a particular theory. And if not that then at least the idea that there was something nefarious going on. And even if it turns out that the captain went crazy or something similar, that won’t be nearly as compelling as terrorists (Or governments!) conspiring to do their evil secret deeds.

So be prepared for being pulled into silly conversations about “what really happened” to Malaysia Airlines flight 370 long after you thought that everyone already knew.

Over the weekend, Isaiah Poole over at Truthout wrote, This Statistic Should Shut Down Any Talk of Cutting Social Security. The statistic: “36 percent of workers, according to one poll, have less than $1,000 saved for their retirement.” He’s right that it should shut down any talk of cutting social security, but it certainly won’t.

I’ve been pleased to see a lot more talk about raising Social Security benefits. What we’ve had until recently is a typically American “two sided” debate: on the one side is that we should cut or even eliminate Social Security; the other other side is that we shouldn’t do that. Yes, that’s our beloved Democratic Party: always taking a strong stand for not making things even worse. Even with the recent movement among some liberals, the current Democratic position is just to resist cuts.

Let’s compare our Social Security benefits to similar (but poorer) countries. The minimum benefit for an individual retiring in France is roughly $13,000 per year. The minimum benefit in the United Kingdom is $12,000 per year. Even poor Spain is $10,000 per year. Compare this to the minimum benefit in the United States: zero. Of course, the government will provide a base according to need. And for an individual that base is a maximum of $8,000.

If you look at the maximum benefit, you will find that the United States looks about the same. We are extremely stingy to our elderly population. And note, we don’t pay in much less. In fact, employees directly pay in a lot less in Spain. And the other countries generally allow a lot more flexibility. And the retirement age is younger. And they live longer in those countries. It really sucks to be poor and old in America. And we should be ashamed, except the power elite in this country don’t seem to be capable of shame.

So what are we going to do? Frankly, I have very little hope. The forty year push in the Democratic Party to meet with the Republicans (only to have them move to the edge of the extreme right) has brought us here. And the people are on the verge of rewarding amazingly bad behavior on the part of the Republicans by giving them the Senate. At this point, the official desire of the Democratic Party to simply hold ground on Social Security may be the best we can do. But that’s a self-fulfilling thing: it is our only option because for forty years, it was our only desire.