Hearing the Banshees of Inisherin

Discerning what "Banshees of Inisherin" is all about is the central mystery of this wonderful film and the answer remains unsolved until the very end.

Padraic, the protagonist, but not the central character, goes to collect his best and longest friend, Colm, who for the first time simply ignores Padraic's rapping at the window and Padraic, confused, and disturbed trudges off to the pub, where he had thought he would be drinking dark beer with his friend and he commiserates with the barkeep, who asks the obvious question, "Are ye row-ing?" That is are you having another fight, which, apparently is not unheard of between the two friends.

No, that is not what is brewing, as Colm finally arrives at the pub and announces that he no longer likes Padraic, and no longer wishes to be friends with him, without explanation. Of course, Padraic asks what has caused this rift and Colm replies he has simply concluded Padraic is a waste of time: Padraic's conversation is filled with the trivia of daily life, down to what he finds in the scat of his donkey, which, after lo these many years, Colm now finds agonizingly banal and "dull." His friend has become a bore, or, more exactly always has been, and Colm realizes he has only limited time left on earth and he doesn't want to waste it on the mundane and the boring. 

He might be a bored housewife on the way out the door after 20 years of an unfulfilling marriage.

Colm wants to create music, like Mozart's, which will last through the ages, after him. Colm is looking for the transcendent and the immortal and Padriac celebrates the joy of every day life and compatible friendship, of being "nice."

All this is happening while the alternative to brotherly love and tolerance is echoing in the distance, across the water, as the Irish Civil War is burning itself out, and its explosions punctuate the calm of Inisherin erratically. 

The town policeman tells Colm he is looking forward to a free lunch he'll earn by attending an execution but he can't recall who is being executed or why--all the policeman cares about is the lunch. He is the ultimate in "not nice."

Padraic's sister, Siobhan, confronts Colm with the very obvious, "But Padraic has always been dull," so why reject him now for what he is and has always been?

Colm has no answer for this other than to say that dull is not enough. Fifty years from now, nobody will remember Padraic for being nice; nor will anyone remember Siobhan fifty years from now. But people will remember Mozart hundreds of years from now, a 17th century musician, Colm says, remembered, not for being nice, but for being great.

Siobhan notes that Colm has not even placed Mozart in the proper century, suggesting that Colm has no real grasp of what real greatness is.

August Macke

It is this moment which challenges Padraic's very essence. Why should being "nice" not be enough, not be celebrated?  He invests that word with so much more than "nice:" Nice envelops the quality of kindness but it also extends to ordinary things, which make life rich. Nice is the every day joy of living, the stuff which people who have been told they have only a short time to live, so relish. The joy of every day things. Obama once observed that as President, he missed this stuff the most--just going down the block and getting coffee, just washing dishes. 

(To which, famously, Obama's  wife interjected: "And when have you ever washed the dishes?" in a scene which could have fit seamlessly into Banshees.)

Padraic unleashes a volley which stuns everyone: It's not important his sister will not be remembered by others in 50 years; what is important is that he thinks Siobhan is nice right now, which, of course, totally endears him to Siobhan, and which makes her decision to leave her brother even more difficult. Padraic continues that Colm can have his friend, the policeman, Peadar, for whom a free lunch is more important than any sort of justice. And, for good measure, Padraic throws in the true stunner: Peadar is well know to be sexually abusing his son, both sexually and physically.

In fact, the character of Peadar the policeman is pivotal in revealing a decent side of Colm: It is after the policeman blindsides Padraic, striking him to the ground, that Colm gathers up his former friend and sets him on his cart back home, and later Colm lays out the nasty cop with a blow after Peadar threatens Padraic. 

But Colm is not the man we can actually sympathize with, even though it is his struggle which drives most of the movie. He could have explained himself more kindly to Padraic, and his insistence on cutting off his own fingers places Padraic in an agonizing position. 

In the end, Padraic is driven to a classic Greek tragedy place--he has got to say, like Antigone, "No"; he has got to stop being nice and start asserting himself, which he does with fire and which, in the end, he embraces. 

Colm has insisted he stop being so nice, and in fact the very first time Padraic stops being nice, however briefly, is the first time Colm finds him interesting.

In the end, it is Colm who suffers the greatest abuse, but it is a suffering he has invited and in some way deserves. Padraic has had to change; his suffering has made him less nice and more interesting. His path down that road to nastiness is step by step, first lying to an innocent musician which he rationalizes as a lie which will be discovered and will be harmless in the end. But, step by step, he moves away from a man who prattles on about his donkey's scat to a man who burns down the edifice of a lost friendship.

Getting Lady Chatterley Right, At Long Last

 

Adapting any novel for a feature length film is always a kayak run down class V rapids, but when your novel is D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover," the cauldron is especially daunting.

Any print to film challenge has multiple hurdles to leap:

1/ Every reader has already seen the character's faces, bodies and habitus in his or her own mind's eye, so the casting is always treacherous, finding just the right look, voice, carriage for each character. 

I don't know who did the casting for Netflix's Lady Chatterley, but whoever it was got each character just right, with the possible exception of Clifford, who I had pictured as a young Michael Redgrave type, or possibly a young Christopher Plummer, with fine features, high cheekbones and thin lips. 

But that is a quibble. 

Lady Constance Chatterley herself, Emma Corrin, has the sculpted features, the asthenic qualities which give her instant vulnerability and upper class credibility. Jack O'Connell is just right for Mellors, not movie star hunky, but plenty good looking enough to be believable as a temptation for Lady Chatterley, and her first look at him bathing naked in an outdoor shower beside his hut is lovely, as just a glimmer of a smile flits across her face and you know he will set her fantasizing.

2/ Each important character and incident has to be managed and choices made to keep the length down to about two hours. The screenwriter here, David Magee, simply has made all the right choices. 

In the case of characters, all the important folks made the cut, and the decision to economize on the Irish playwright, Michaelis, is a sound one. His role is just a cameo in this version, but that's all he really needs.  In the book Constance has a brief, unsatisfactory coital experience with him, but he only really serves to show how unsatisfactory simple sex is for Lady Chatterley.  He is simply too uncouth for her, and he complains about her climaxing before he has a chance to do so, as if that is her fault.

But all the other scenes, the important scenes, are there, from her initial sighting of Mellors, to her holding the hatchlings, "New Life!" to her mad, naked  dance in the rain, to the wheel chair scenes between Clifford, Mellors and Constance. All the important stuff makes the cut.

3/ The actual themes are every bit as clear and artfully presented in the film as in the book:  Laure de Clermont Tonnerre has kept the pace exactly correct, made the right choices presenting the sex, which has to be volcanic and raw to make Constance's choices understandable. Even the brief scenes of Lady Chatterley masturbating have a clear point--she is missing sex, which you knew from earlier scenes she had once enjoyed. 

Clifford's belief that his class was meant to rule and the lower classes to serve; Clifford's idea that Constance should produce an heir by taking on the "right sort" of lover; Clifford's ruthlessness about keeping the coal miners repressed with low wages and his lack of sympathy for the common folk whose economic fate he controls and most shockingly, the deep seeded ideas about not mixing classes.  

The Neflix Lady Chatterley highlights Constance's rebellion against the gilded cage in which she finds herself trapped. When she raises objection to Clifford's plans to keep wages low, she is told she is thinking like a woman, and when Clifford tells her she should feel free to acquire a lover because he cannot get an erection, that might seem open minded and even generous on his part, but he conditions this liberty with the comment, straight from Lawrence's original text, that he trusts her to choose the right sort of fellow, not the sort he might object to--so even in his emancipation proclamation, he still insists on control.

All this prepares you for the gradual alienation Constance develops toward her husband, and it allows us to understand what Mellors means when he says the upper class men he sees at Wragby, the estate, are "dead" men. Constance knows he has chosen exactly the right word for what she has been seeing in the drawing rooms, the dining table and the village, where she can feel the "drizzle of resentment" from the coal miners and villagers, as Lawrence put it. You see that drizzle on screen here.

Hilda, Constance's sister, who is her champion and her rock, is, still, apart from all her stellar qualities, shocked and repulsed by her choice of lover: For Constance to choose a servant rather than someone of her own upper class is tantamount to the plantation mistress at Tara taking on a Negro lover. 

No important detail is omitted: Even the story that both Constance and Hilda had taken on lovers as adolescents, when they were at school in Germany, surfaces and this  becomes important as it serves to demonstrate that this class of English is not so constrained as to think sex belongs only within the confines of  marriage, but they do believe that there are "proper" partners.

And, of course, Hilda fears Constance is simply enraptured by the sex with Mellors, given her husband's inability to satisfy her, which to her is simply not the point of a man. For Constance, the point of the man is the rapture, not to mention his capacity for tenderness and the other qualities she finds more important than his social status. She says they should escape England and flee to Australia, where they can be "left alone."  This is D.H. Lawrence peeking through the visuals. 

I've read "Lady Chatterley" at least four times through the years. The first time, I was simply too young and too unsophisticated to see the class issues--all I was interested in was the sex.  Later, I saw the story as primarily about the notion of fidelity and betrayal. Later still, the class prejudices leapt out, and I wondered how I could have been so dense as to miss all that.   And finally, the last time, I saw it as an ode to life and the imperative to pursue every day as a gift, because, as mortality begins to loom large, you look back and think how silly societal strictures really are.

Scanning through some of the reviews of this Netflix version online I've been surprised and disappointed about how thoroughly most reviewers have missed the essential quality of this Netflex version. There have been other attempts at "Lady Chatterley" -- all of them forgettable. 

But this one is a gem. The director, the actors, the casting director, the screen writer and likely a lot of folks I don't even know about like the cinematographer have all succeeded where all others have failed before them. 

If there was ever a film which demonstrates how it is actually possible to transform a print book into a living film, this Netflix effort has achieved that.

This version is a triumph and it is the only film version I can say would be worth watching even if you've never read the book, before you read the book, because it is that good.

Half a Percent: How Much of a Problem is Transgender?

 

Googling the question: "How many transgenders live in America?" you get various answers, but the most generous estimate is somewhere around half of one percent of the population identifies as transgender or gender fluid at any given time.

There are, of course, no real numbers, no good numbers. 

As someone who has devoted his career to thinking about some very rare conditions, along with the common ones, The Phantom is moved to ask: Why are we so concerned about the transgender folk who live among us, our fellow citizens?

Thinking about my own high school, that means in a school of 2,000 students, we are talking about, roughly, 8 students. 

Assuming we are talking about half of these folks who are male transitioning to female, you're down to 4 students. 

Now Ron Desantis and Ted Cruz and Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene will howl about the danger of having these students undressing in the girls' locker room, sharing bathrooms with "normal" girls or trying to swim as females on the girls' swimming team, but really, how likely is this really ever going to be a problem? 

This is not to say there haven't been problems: When a swimmer who lived the first 18 years of life as a male, developing male muscles, joints and bones under the influence of testosterone began to swim as a woman on the Penn swimming team, that swimmer crushed the competition and the existing women's records for the sport.

Penn Swimmer

So one person can cause a disturbance.

Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome

And then you get to the problem of a person who did not need to ask a doctor's help to become a gender bending individual. Caster Semenya, the South African women's track star, who has set all sorts of records has posed a problem, not because she is transgender, but because she is like genetically male, while not being biologically entirely male, and, in fact she does not have a penis. But she may have testes, or had testes in her inguinal canals once. From what you can see on the internet she has partial testosterone insensitivity syndrome.

Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome

She is a rarity.

It should also be noted, she did not seek to have her gender altered by any doctor, if she has this syndrome. She simply "is" this way.

Gdansk, Poland 

So why are the Republican culture warriors like DeSantis and Cruz so obsessed with these rare cases?

Paul McHugh, MD

The answer may be because these are cases which make people who are "woke" or otherwise open minded look foolish or bizarre or simply ridiculous, as they try to cleave to a position of extreme tolerance in a case which tests the understanding of the average citizen, who is unversed in what exactly transgender is, and how that may be different from "intersex" or from homosexuality or pseudohermaphrodism, each of which is separate and different from each other. 

So the far right has found the perfect scapegoats, small in number, poorly understood, people who most people have no first hand experience with.

Society of Assassins

 

Rife throughout internet sites like Twitter are posts suggesting that Vladimir Putin's days are numbered and few, as an assassin's bullet is, as only internet seers can know, already loaded and aimed at his head.

It is a curious thing, this Twitter syndrome of Wishful Assertion Syndrome: some people seem to be comforted by simply saying something will happen with great assurance, and when it does not, never mind. It was pretty to think it.

But it has made The Phantom wonder about the role of assassination in the control of events. The Phantom became fully sentient during that time of assassinations: JFK in 1963, Martin Luther King in 1968 followed by Robert Kennedy, that same year. 

It was always the liberals, the progressives, the men who looked like they might just want to change things, who got shot. People asked, "Why is it always the liberals, never the fascist thugs?"

Of course, in one sense, the answer was obvious: The guys who wanted to keep on lynching Negroes were the guys with the guns. They were, at core, murderous thugs whose idea of how to get what they wanted was violence. Blood is their argument.

And the men who live by violence take great pains to be sure they do not die by violence because they are living in the mindset of violence. You didn't see Joseph Stalin riding around in an open car like Kennedy in Dallas.

On the other hand, Hitler did just that, and never got shot. 

And people did try to assassinate Hitler. The numbers vary, but at least 42 attempts on his life made the Google list and there were likely others. The most famous was the July, 1944 plot at Wolf's Lair in Prussia where an briefcase with a bomb was placed at Hitler's foot, exploded killing 4 and wounding 20, but Hitler suffered nothing more than a perforated eardrum and his trousers were shredded.

If ever there seemed to be divine intervention...this would seem to demand an explanation from Christopher Hitchens. How could a man standing right next to a powerful bomb survive so unscathed? Of course, at the time, this miracle seemed to confirm the belief of true Nazis everywhere that in Hitler's case that widely used motto "Got Mitt Uns" which Wehrmacht soldiers carried engraved on belt buckles, was clearly true. 

God, or the physics of explosives, saved Hitler.

Of course, if Hitler had been killed, and the German army sued for peace in 1944, then the truth about the concentration camps might never have been known. The Nazis might have continued to rule Germany after an armistice but as it played out, Hitler would not allow for anything but utter  annihilation and the complete destruction of the Third Reich and nobody could argue about a stab in the back causing Germany's defeat. 

No such explanation seems to apply to Vladimir Putin. He simply is the only man who seems to matter in this war on Ukraine, and there do not seem to be any hidden concentration camps in Russia, only a society where there is no real dissent allowed and a population as duped as the Germans were.

And it's not that violent, murderous men never get assassinated: Reinhard Heydrich, as murderous a Nazi as ever emerged did get killed, but again he was so arrogant, he rode around in an open car. George Wallace, the ardent segregationist was shot, but not killed, and he remains the sole exception to the rule that right wing zealots do not meet with violence. 

Stalin was never touched. 

Hitler was never assassinated--he simply lost the war and knew his head would be on the block. He had seen what happened to Mussolini, who was strung up in a public square when his army lost.

It's pretty clear the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers have no plans to assassinate Trump or DeSantis or Rand Paul or Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene or the gun toting Lauren Boebert.

Violent parties do violent things.  During the Weimar Republic, as democracy was stirring in its cradle after the First World War in Germany, somewhere around 400 assassinations of liberal or left wing politicians ripped through the government. Less than 10 right wingers died by assassination.

So, if history is any guide, the Democratic Party and democracy in general will not gain advantage by any assassin's bullet. 

The Good News from TWiV

I started listening to This Week in Virology (TWiV) in March, 2020 and the cast of characters have become my long distance friends, as they came at the problem from their various perspectives as virologists, immunologist and lab folks. 

Back then, Rich Condit, who was on the faculty of a Florida university after knocking around academia for years, said we all ought to understand that anything this learned panel said should be taken the spirit of "current knowledge" will likely be wrong 6 months, a year later, because this is a new virus, at least to science, (although it may have knocked around in some form in bats for years).  But as they speculated about how the pandemic would end, one possibility was it would mutate into new, more benign variants and, like other coronaviruses, it would devolve into a virus we all get, but after the runny noses, the sore throats and headaches and aches, we get past what feels like "the common cold."

They cautioned, at the time, that would be the rosiest scenario and the disease could follow  a course more like influenza, which kill millions worldwide for years.

Now TWiV has interviewed Jake Scott, MD, from Stanford who says that in his infectious disease practice he has seen only 2 cases of serious COVID this year.  While he laughed about Joe Biden's "The pandemic is over," he conveyed much the same feeling, as he walked through the numbers and the stories of hospitalized patients and how things have changed.

Basically, people over 60 have to worry, but young, vaccinated people--and there is some reason to believe even UNvaccinated people--may do just fine with the new Omicron variants.

I had listened less often to TWiV over the past few months, as they drifted away from talking about COVID and I find their clinical guy, Daniel Griffin, insufferable. Griffin was so good early on, but the more exposure he got the more excrutiating it became listening to his self promotion and supercilious riffs on why he is the only physician in America who practices evidence based medicine. 

But Dr. Scott now says we have come to the Promised Land, or, not really the promised land because TWiV did not promise anything, but, more accurately, we have maybe arrived at the ardently desired land, where the COVID variant which has become dominant is not killing many people and making people miserable with "a cold" for a week, but otherwise not burdening hospitals with admission and ICU illnesses.

He said some new things--like the idea that instead of under-using Paxlovid, he thinks we may be over using it. It might be okay, even for an 80 year old with a positive test, otherwise healthy beyond old age, to just "ride it out."

Makes me feel better about what I saw in New York City, where young people crowding into bars and people eating at restaurants and going out wore no masks and looked blissfully indifferent to the risk of COVID.

Of course, the winter season awaits us, and SARS COV-2 is a winter virus, but the news looks hopeful.

And the gorilla chest pounders among the political Right will claim they were right all along and we should have never closed schools or worn masks or insisted soldiers be vaccinated. But, of course, it's all about timing. Those things likely saved lives then although they may not be necessary now.

And, what the Right is now trying to co-opt or ignore is the fact that actual scientists, who used the scientific method, which depends on evaluating evidence rather than just proclaiming stuff, these scientists with their wondrous vaccines saved more lives than all those Right Wing Rand Paul, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Roger Stone will, in aggregate, ever save.

The Seed of the Coming Man

 

"The cleverest trick used in propaganda against Germany during the war was to accuse Germany of what our enemies themselves were doing

--Joseph Goebbels 

 “He doesn’t have a birth certificate, or if he does, there’s something on that certificate that is very bad for him."

--Donald J. Trump

Berlin, April 30, 1945.

Traudl Junge, 25 years old, has been one of Adolph Hitler's personal secretaries for just over two years and was among his closest and most trusted intimates, along with the former bricklayer who became his personal valet, Heinz Linge. 

                                    

Traudl Junge

With Russian artillery enfilading the compound grounds outside the Fuhrer bunker, the Fuhrer realized the time had come, it had come down to capture, suicide or an attempt to escape.

The idea of escape with the Russians on the doorstep strikes many today as preposterous. But the bunker was not surrounded, and Martin Bormann managed to walk out of it in full uniform, and to reach a railway station and a panzer tank. 

Linge walked away from the bunker, only to be captured at See-Strasse.

Most remarkably, Traudl, as depicted in the movie "Downfall" was able to walk through Russian lines, holding the hand of a young boy. Russian soldiers were well known to rape any woman--as Stalin said, that's what soldiers do--but they were said to be surprisingly kind of children. 

So, people emerging from the bunker, did manage to escape the tightening noose. 

Two bodies, burned beyond recognition were found outside the bunker, but hands and feet had been burned off, so no fingerprints could identify them, even if there had been on record fingerprints of der Fuhrer. The only possibility, in the days before the advent of DNA profiling was identification by teeth and dental records. Hitler had a dentist, who could not be found, but an assistant to that dentist was produced, eventually, who verified the teeth found belonged to Hitler. 

That ended the problem of Hitler, for Stalin, for the new President of the United States, for everyone.

Traudl said she heard the shot from Hitler's room. Linge said he found the bodies and carried them out to burn them outside the bunker. He had performed his last service to his Fuhrer. As he tells the story, before Hitler turned to go into his suicide room, Linge asked him for whom he and the rest of the Wehrmacht should now fight and Hitler replied, "For the coming man."

Linge

How could such a fantastic idea that Hitler and Eva Braun escaped be taken seriously?

On the other hand, had Hitler asked Linge and Traudl to help him escape, who could doubt they would have done their last duty? 

That Traudl walked free, walked right out of the bunker and past the Russian troops says one thing pretty clearly: It could be done.

Adolf Eichmann lived in Germany and Egypt for 5 years after the war before sailing for Argentina from Italy. And when he arrived in Argentina, he lived in communities where German was the language of the village, so many Nazi's had arrived there. 

The idea that a submarine bearing Hitler and Eva could have arrived in Argentina does not seem so far fetched.

Eva Braun

A new start on a new continent.  Hitler was said to be in fragile health, but Eva was clearly in her prime and if she conceived in September, 1945, her child would be born in June, 1946. 

Blonde Eva

But hiding in Argentina would have, quite literally, have been to hide in plain sight. There were so many Nazis in Argentina it had become a joke. A New Yorker cartoon from the 1950's showed an SS officer in full uniform smoking by himself while his Argentine cowboy friends speculate about where he had learned to ride horses. 

"The Boys from Brazil" was a 1976 thriller about an attempt to clone Hitler, and implant his genes around the world, in dozens of young boys, in hopes another Hitler might be produced to lead the world to a Fourth Reich.

The Couple

A less fantastic story would be the simple transport and adoption of a child from Argentina to an American family of German origins, to raise as a sort of child rescued from the bulrushes to become the next leader of the coming Reich.

All you'd have to do is play around with his birth certificate.

The Trouble with "They" or How the Orcs Will Defeat the Good Guys

 

Republicans are always looking for a way to make themselves look like the common folk, to convince the HVAC  guy, the painter, carpenter, electrician, tradesman the Democrats are "egg heads" who despise them for being common, and who think themselves superior to those who did not go to college.

In "What's The Matter with Kansas"  a father seethes about how East Coast liberal faculty judge his son inadequate because his SAT scores are insufficient to get him into Princeton, despite his many talents: The kid can and has rewired the house, rebuilt the family truck, put in a new engine and transmission, kayaked down a class three river, scaled sheer rocky ledges and placed third in the county wrestling tournament. 

He's right, of course:  the sacred meritocracy sees and too often rewards spurious or irrelevant merit, while missing real talent. 

And then, there is the question of pronouns, which encapsulates so easily the great gap between "liberal" college faculties and even public high school faculties, and the thinking of ordinary citizens who are not, as  Republicans from Ron DeSantis to Ted Cruz, delight in saying, "woke enough."

In his Boston Globe piece, a professor at Boston College, says, "I'm .. a straight white-cis-male...and I strive to make my classroom as inclusive as possible." So he goes around the room and has students introduce themselves using this code, i.e., "share their pronouns."  But, "as my students began filing out of the classroom, one lagged behind, visibly distraught. They asked if they could talk to me about the way I ran the introductions. They identified as non-binary and used they/them pronouns, but they felt exposed and vulnerable when I told them to share that. I didn't make them feel included. I made them feel unsafe."

Let me say, in all caps, neon lights: NOBODY SHOULD BE DISPARGED OR DEMEANED FOR THEIR SEXUALITY, SKIN COLOR OR ANY TRAIT THEY CANNOT CONTROL. WE OUGHT TO JUDGE PEOPLE ON THEIR BEHAVIOR.

Having said all this, there is no good argument for the 99.9% of the population who has grown up from age 18 months learning and speaking English with pronouns which designate male as he/him or she/her to shift over to new pronouns.

You can be kind and considerate of gender fluid or non binary folk without trying to speak new gender speak and that 0.1% among us can accommodate to not being referred to as "they."

Beyond that, no school, and especially colleges, private or public--and BU is private--should attempt to be "safe places." 

Students, straight or gay, binary or otherwise, should go to college to challenge their own assumptions, to find no safe harbor for their deeply held convictions about sexuality, religion, politics, ethics, morality or philosophy. A college which seeks to be a "safe" place in fact ceases to be a college at all, but does, in fact expose itself to be a place of indoctrination rather than examination.

I do wish that it were possible to discuss, dispassionately, analytically and thoroughly, the questions which gender fluidity, transgender medicine, gender dysphoria, heterosexuality and homosexuality open.  I gather, having had no personal or recent experience on a college campus or in a high school classroom, this is not an option. 

Even at medical conferences, a political correctness has become so thoroughly institutionalized, without adequate discussion, that objective discussion freed from moral invective is not currently possible.

But I do know one thing, when Ted Cruz says, "I talked to a student recently at one of our woke campuses who said she is required in every class to introduce herself and to give her pronouns...Well, I'm Ted Cruz and my pronoun is 'kiss my ass.'"

And no matter how loathsome you may find Ted Cruz, you know one thing, he will get applause and delighted approval with that line.

Republicans cannot win over voters with their policies: They want to kill Medicare, Social Security, destroy the planet, deny climate change, drive gas guzzling pick up trucks, mine coal, ban abortion, call the rescue of a mother with an ectopic "pregnancy" murder of a child, make Donald Trump President for Life, support Vladimir Putin in his atrocious war against Ukraine, eliminate the separation of church and state, make Christianity the national established religion, send non white immigrants away and generally create a new Third Reich in America--so they have to look for "cultural" divides to attract voters to their side.

And they have found one, served up to them by liberal Democrats who would rather be pure than powerful, who would rather lose every election for the next twenty years than part with their own self image of righteousness. They want to be pure, damn the consequences.

And when I say "they" I'm speaking of the plural.

Deena Emera and the Politicalization of Biology

 

In the July 24 "Ideas" section of the Boston Globe, Deena Emera, who is identified as a "senior scientist" at the "Center for Reproductive Longevity and Equality"  (a pretty loaded and packed name in itself) tells us that female elephant seals have "learned to mate in open water--not a trivial task--with males of their choosing" to avoid the "brutish 'beachmaster' who controls the harem of female seals on shore, where sexual intercourse ordinarily occurs, and at the discretion of the dominant male. 

One can only imagine Dr. Emera interviewing these female elephant seals about their motivation for free water frolic, and asking them if these extracurricular activities with non dominant males were really their choice, or whether they were simply accosted by off brand male elephant seals when the females thought they were freed from copulation obligations on shore.

Did Dr. Emera actually make direct observations, or did she simply read about all this?

Better yet, Dr. Emera tells us, female bottlenose dolphins, have devised an even more elaborate scheme to select who will be the biologic fathers of their children: "The dolphin vagina evolved elaborate flaps and folds that give a females some freedom of choice. Not the choice of sexual partner--male dolphins are aggressive and unrelenting--but of whose sperm she'll allow to fertilize her eggs. Females may position themselves during copulation , and contract or relax their vaginal muscles, to steer wanted sperm toward their eggs and unwanted sperm toward on of the end end folds."

And this, in the Boston Globe!

The Phantom has never fancied himself much of a scientist, but he has absorbed enough about the scientific method to wonder about those vaginal folds in the bottle nosed dolphin and how they work. The folds are, of course, anatomy. You can look at them, touch them, feel them, but you would need very special equipment and techniques, presumably, to be able to see them in action. Masters and Johnson, in their breakthrough research in human sexuality, had to position cameras and pressure sensors inside human vaginas. That required a great deal of cooperation from willing subjects, permissions, negotiations, special laboratories, and facilities. The Phantom can only imagine the difficulties doing these kinds of measurements cross species and in the water. Talk about dancing backwards in high heels.

And even if you could, somehow, trace the semen in its journey inside toward the eggs, and even if you could see that the semen from dolphin A gets diverted away from egg country, but semen from dolphin B gets directed toward the egg, you would still need to ask how the female dolphin does this, if it is a voluntary, conscious decision and for that, presumably, you would have to be able to interview the dolphin.

"These are just a few of the many examples in nature illustrating the choices that female animals are constantly making about reproduction and the lengths they go to make these choices...Males often have different interests and strategies for reproductive success, which may involve sexual intimidation, coercion and other methods to control female reproduction."

Having watched untold hours of David Attenborough's nature flicks showing aroused elephants, birds doing mating dances, frogs, wolves, buck deer, and most of all tigers (where sex can result in a dead male) and spiders, where the male is routinely devoured post coital by the female,  I was stunned to learn that, in nature, males are guilty of sexual intimidation, i.e. rape, of the female counterparts of their species.

But it is the last paragraph with illuminates Professor Emera's position:

"In the reversal of Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court's majority decided that abortion isn't deeply rooted in the history and traditions of the country, so it shouldn't bee protected by the Constitution. But in fact, female reproductive choice is one of the most deeply rooted 'traditions' of nature, one that can be traced back hundreds of millions of years."

So there you have it: Dobbs denies evolutionary history.

Dr. Emera

Dr. Emera has perhaps done such interviews with dolphins and elephant seals--her space in the Globe was limited and she could not cover all the details, but the Phantom remains dazzled by the idea of a bottlenose dolphin giving up her deep preference for dolphin B because, you know, he's just so cute, or maybe intelligent, or gentle and kind. 

Somehow, somewhere, the Phantom gets the idea that Dr. Emera's desire to come to the conclusion that females, ultimately, rule, throughout the phylum, across species, as an evolutionary imperative, guided her in the direction of seeing what she wants to see in her "science."