Arresting French Women in Burkinis

A threat to public decency 

This week, photos emerged of four armed male French police officers demanding that a woman wearing a headscarf, long sleeves, and pants remove layers of her clothing at a beach in Nice. She was given a ticket for not "wearing an outfit respecting good morals and secularism."

In other words, she was wearing something resembling a burkini — a full-body swimsuit for women that is designed to be "in line with Islamic values" — that, as of this summer, was banned in 15 French towns, including Cannes and Nice.

Someone should really ask Donald Trump how he feels about the French burkini ban.

I would guess he'd be for banning burkinis  because the arrests are  aimed at Muslims and if women were allowed to wear burkinis on the beach, it would mean some women would not expose flesh, and once you allow women to cover up, you can never tell where that will lead us. Western Civilization would be threatened, for sure. 

Embracing  good morals and  secularism 

Apparently, the French are leading the way on this and have argued refusing to expose flesh on a beach is action which threatens a secular state, which I can understand, but also, get this, covering flesh is "against good morals." 

Whew! 

Exhibiting good moral character: Uh, maybe a burkini would not be so bad

Who knew? Stripping down is not only patriotic, an affirmation of the value of a secular state, but in France, it's good morals!

Burkini would violate God's will, in this case. 

My one visit to France changed my mind about the French, who I thought I would hate based on my experience with  French teachers in my American schools, but the actual French who live in France turned out to be gracious, lovely, polite and very funny.

Australian who would be arrested in France

Apparently, I failed to dig beneath the surface, or put another way, I failed to remove enough layers to really appreciate the French.

Oh, the horror!

Now, see, here in America, all these women would need is a note from the doctor saying they are acting upon medical advice to avoid skin cancer.

Oh, how far we've come. I remember when Bridget Bardot scandalized the French by wearing those provocative bikinis. Now it's immoral not to wear a bikini. 

Why is that policeman wearing long trousers? On the beach!

My Year on the Farm

Odd, how you can take in experience and not think much of it at the time, but it comes back later to enrich and inform you. This must be one of the few positives of aging.  

On the other hand, one has to keep in the front of one's mind the reality that memory is a construct in the present and is not reality.

That said, reading "White Trash" by Nancy Isenberg has stirred memories of my year on the farm, 1977-1978 in new and instructive ways.  She is talking about the letters written between Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Adams (my next Kindle download) and their discussion of class in America.  These men were, as most Americans once were, farmers.  They had cattle, and Jefferson had cattle of the human variety, namely slaves.

They both saw the world through the eyes of men who engaged in "husbandry" i.e., breeding of animals.  

Jefferson thought that Black people would, in several generations be bred out of existence in America, and he had theories of exactly what proportion of "blood" a person had to have to cease to be Black, which sound not too dissimilar from the racial theories of Adolph Hilter's acolytes.  Of course, impregnating Sally Hemings, whose father was Jefferson's father in law and whose mother was the daughter of a Black man, Jefferson took the leap into breeding out the Black. 

As, I learned in the early 1980's, at my inner city clinic in Washington, D.C., Blacks from Georgia, the Carolinas and Mississippi did not look much like Blacks from Liberia, Nigeria and Cameroon.  The American Blacks had much lighter skin, often had light, even blue eyes, and their hair was often straight. The African Blacks were inky by comparison. (Of course, the African Blacks, apart from their striking physical differences, had never been taught they were stupid, and they were engaging, curious, funny and intelligent by whatever measure you cared to use.)

So Jefferson's husbandry theories, put into practice by his fellow slave owners, who clearly had sex with their female slaves, did result in a genetic mixing which changed the population of American Blacks. 

For some reason, reading about all this, the image of American soldiers liberating a concentration camp in Germany, looking at the tattoos on the arms of the bodies in heaps popped into mind. "Like cattle,"  one of the American soldiers says, astonished.  That people could treat other people like cattle seemed incomprehensible to this American. 

And yet, there was Jefferson, applying principles of animal husbandry to his slaves and projecting the consequences when his fellow plantation owners did the same.

After 8 years in New York City, I moved with my then girlfriend (later wife) to a farm in Southern Rhode Island. It was a potato farm, with a white farmhouse and a lovely pond in front and every morning I went for a jog down the country road, past the farm houses of my neighbors and saw them killing things. They chopped the heads off chickens, killed turkeys, and raised pigs and other animals to be sent off to slaughter.  And they branded their victims, as the concentration camp cattle were branded, not with tattoos, but with hot irons.

One day, my girlfriend flew into my office, which was in an upstairs bedroom of the farm house, and said, "There's a guy, straight out of 'Deliverance,' with leather hands, at the front door. He has a gun and you'd better go speak to him."

He wanted permission to hunt on the farm.  We rented the farm and the owner had told me men might come asking to hunt on the land and to say no.  I explained this to leather hands and he accepted the news gracefully, and got back in his pickup truck and drove off. 

That year on the farm, especially coming directly from New York City, told me that life on the land was different and the mindset of country people was very different from city dwellers. I went 8 years in New York City and never saw death outside the hospital.  But in the country, people killed things daily.  Even the turtles in our pond were trapped and eaten by our neighbors.  Birds flying over head, fish in the nearby ocean, all killed, cut open and eaten or sold. 

People were just part of the continuum of the killing, and the breeding.

And this idea of people as just another sort of animal, with qualities you want to breed in and qualities you want to breed out, was woven into the neurons of Jefferson and Adams. There were qualities of beauty and strength which were visible and attached to them, almost as if they traveled in proximity on the same chromosomes (if Jefferson had known about gene theory) were other qualities, like gentility, intelligence and sound moral character.

Even Abigail Adams spoke of people of lower classes as "rubbage."  

Once can only imagine what the unwashed poor and uneducated who roamed the countryside and inhabited the towns of 18th century America might have looked like, how they might have behaved, but the best approximation I can imagine is from the website, "Shoppers of Walmart," where the most grotesque specimens of American humanity shock the tender sensibilities of suburban white Americans.

Reading "White Trash" once again drives home the folly, the sheer lunacy really, of Justice Scalia's fantasy that he interpreted the Constitution as an originalist, trying to get into the minds of the founding fathers and cleaving to the text of the Constitution as those 18th century men meant us to see it.

Intriguingly, Jefferson saw one class of men as particularly loathsome, and it was not the slaves but their overseers, the men whose job it was to drive the slaves to work harder, produce more, the men who held the lashes, who were there to keep the slaves in line, to keep order and enforce the rules.   These men were cruel and brutal to those they had under their power, but respectful to the point of obsequiousness when they doffed their hats to their employers, the slave owners. 

This class of men were the 18th century equivalent of today's policemen, caught between the large population they are hired to control and the ruling class who pay their salaries.

Reading Jefferson struggling with ideas of breeding, class, natural rights, one marvels at where we came from and how his ideas have been taken by succeeding generations of his countrymen and molded into a new, and what for him would be an unrecognizable, new form.

That Loathsome Spectacle Called The Olympics

Let the Show Begin!  1936. The Master Race Arrives!

The Olympic "Movement." Now there is a masterly stroke of marketing.

The Olympic movement is about wholesome competition, striving for world class excellence, friendship across cultures, peace, developing healthy, strong, untainted bodies. That is the sales pitch.

Of course, having known several young people who competed to reach the Olympics (diving, swimming, wrestling) and two athletes who actually got to the Olympics (kayaking), the Phantom is well aware of the virtues of sport, of mastery of anything. 

There are annual world championships, as any viewer of ESPN will know, in a wide world of sports.  But the Olympics seems special. It seems special because it has been marketed longer,harder and more expensively than any other. 

Words like "prestige" and "respect" and "going for the gold" all infuse the hoopla.

But among all the sports championships none matches the Olympics for sheer perfidy and ideological corruption. 

The modern Olympics is said to date from 1898, the brainstorm of a Frenchman, but the true dawn of the modern Olympic games is rooted firmly with Adolf Hitler in 1936.  All modern Olympic games flow from that Olympics in spirit and legacy. 

Before Hitler, the Olympics were a relatively modest affair, with temporary bleachers and venues and athletes finding lodging where they could. But Hitler saw in the Olympics just what Vladimir Putin and so many other despots and political hacks have seen: the most golden of opportunities to advertise his own philosophy and success.  

Hitler insisted the Olympic stadium be ten times as large as originally planned, built the first Olympic village to house the athletes. He had for years been organizing health camps for Hitler youth, with blonde boys and girls lifting logs and throwing balls and doing calisthenics and this was the perfect stage for him to show off the results of the great blonde master race. 

Of course, no Jews allowed. The best three women swimmers from Austria happened to be Jewish and they were forbidden to represent Austria and later banned forever from all international competition. 

Why Let a Little Racism Matter? Avery Brundage

Avery Brundage, who was the head of the American Olympic committee saw that the Berlin Olympics might collapse because, at first,  Hitler had no interest in seeing his master race compete against the "Untermenschen" or sub humans from around the world, including Negroes, Jews, Slavs and other non Aryans.  Determined to rescue the Berlin games, Brundage sailed for Germany and held much publicized meetings with Hitler and the Nazis, who, by that time saw an opportunity to glamorize their world view and agreed to one Jew here and there and some Black athletes.  So the games were on!  Of course, the tokenism was a sham and the truth was, there was so much money and political will little things like hate and exclusion because of race or religion were swept aside.

The whole spectacle of the three tiered winners stand, the raising of the flags of the three winners and the playing of the national anthema of the champion, tears streaming down his or her face--just so proud to have won for my country--is about as naked as jingoism ever gets. 

Oh, the horror! A political statement!

But politics and the ugliness is never far from stage. When Tommy Smith and Jon Carlos took the stand to receive their gold and bronze medals at the 1968 Olympics and raised their hands in a Black Power salute, to say we are not crying, we bow our heads because things are not good for our people at home--they were thrown out of the Olympics. They had made a political statement! Imagine that! A political statement in front of the flag poles and the band. How inappropriate!

And let us not forget a true American Hero, Joseph Frederick. You may not know the name, but you may have heard of "Bong Hits for Jesus."  That was the case which occurred when the Olympic torch was being carried through town and Mr. Frederick's high school principal insisted all the students line the sidewalks as the torch was borne down the street, an exercise of academic and patriotic value if ever a public school has had one. 

The First Amendment Takes a Hit from the Supreme Court

Mr. Frederick walked to the other side of the street, careful to be off school property and unfurled a banner, "Bong Hits for Jesus" as the torch was carried by. The enraged principal, her moment ruined, charged across the street, tore down the banner and suspended Mr. Frederick for 10 days. The case went to the Supreme Court, which decided that while Freedom of Speech had clearly been violated, Freedom of Speech was not as important to good order and discipline in public schools and found for the principal.

Thus the Olympics have been responsible for the most reprehensible decision by a Supreme Court since the Dred Scott case.  Some would argue Citizens United was just as bad, but that was really about whether speech is money and corporations people, so the principles are more diluted. Here we have, pure and simple, freedom of speech, the most basic right in any democracy, a casualty of the Olympic Movement.

More Reasons to Love New Hampshire

Drought has hit New Hampshire.  Laura Knoy, on New Hampshire Public Radio,  was talking about it my whole ride in to work this morning. 

When I arrived at work, I talked to a woman who lives in Pelham, who told me her lawn had turned brown but the main problem where she lives is not drought, but flooded basements.  

Flooded basements, in the middle of a drought? I asked.

Beavers.  The trouble was beavers.

Beavers have dammed a creek which runs along the back yards of  a dozen homes and it has backed up and flooded basements. One of the neighbors went out and shot some beavers and tried to break down their dam. (No easy thing, considering the construction. Not for nothing the beaver is the mascot of MIT.) Compared to this neighbor, my recent attack on the hornets' nest was a mere police action. This beaver thing was all out total war. 

The lady who reported this to me, Tammy, was still trying to make up her mind about the morality of the attack.  "It's not as if you can sit down and negotiate with the beavers," she observed.  "But they are very cute. And my other neighbor, who is a pigeon person was very upset."

A pigeon person?  

"He's in a pigeon club," Tammy said.

"A pigeon club?"

"They live in a coop and they are the type of pigeon which flies off somewhere with a message and then returns home. I don't know much about it. But he has no family, just a girlfriend of thirty years and these pigeons."

"is it just pigeons?"

"Also a few chickens and a rooster. That rooster is one stupid rooster.," Tammy said. "He sounds off all day long, not just at the break of day."

"One of my neighbors has been thinking about getting chickens," I told her. "But she was afraid of stepping on eggs all around the place."

"That's why you get a coop. Then they lay them in the coop. Plus, you need the coop because of night predators."

"Like what exactly: predators?"

Fox

"Foxes, mostly. But in New Hampshire, also fisher cats."

"I think we may have those in the woods behind us," I said. My neighbors had told me sound of the screeching I had heard at night was fisher cats. 

"If you've heard what sounds like someone strangling an infant, at night that's a fisher cat," Tammy said.

Fisher cat

"Then we have fisher cats. We had coyotes in Maryland, which everyone denied but we heard them at night," I told her.  ":Had to record them before people would believe it. People were in deep denial about the coyotes." 

coyote

"Same with fisher cats. " Tammy said.  "Nasty little beasts. Worse than coyotes."

"We have wild turkeys in the woods."

"Oh," Tammy said,  "Those are just New Hampshire squirrels. Very common."

Not my favorite neighbor


h

So that's a morning conversation around the water cooler at work in New Hampshire. 

In Washington, we talked about the stupid things politicians and pundits had said. With Donnie John and Bill O'Reilly on the loose, I can only imagine what conversations in Washington are like now. 

Homeless in New Hampshire

Homeless people in New Hampshire have to deal with the winter. I have often wondered what they do when the snows get deep. In the Live Free or Die state, there is a strain of thinking which is in essence, libertarian, which says, "Live and let live. Let the homeless be."

This morning New Hampshire Public Radio began a series on the homeless in New Hampshire and they played a sound bite from the mayor of Manchester, a Republican who is running for governor, who said, "There are people who simply want to be homeless, despite everything you might want to do for them. They just want to defecate and urinate in public."

So there you have it.  Would we have a problem with homelessness if the homeless refrained from 1/ Defecating in public places  2/ Begging?

There is an aesthetic problem for many people.
There is a psychological problem for other people, who look at the homeless and it scares them. There but for the grace of God, go I. 

Other people simply say to themselves: These people don't have to be homeless. I don't have to feel sorry for them and I certainly do not have to do anything for them because they want to be that way. They'd rather beg than work. 

It's an extension of that old, "The slaves were happy being slaves. They got good food and lodgings and didn't have worry about anything. They were good children and taken care of as such."

It was heartening to hear a chief of police  (in Concord?) who said, "Just because you're homeless doesn't mean you've given up all your rights."

I would really like to know more about what I assume is a diverse population of homeless people. Presumably some of them are simply nuts. I've had some interaction with homeless people who were clearly mentally deranged. But my son, my communist son, has taken homeless people out for lunch and got their stories and some of these folks were simply struck by bad financial luck, often compounded by illness in the absence of health insurance. 

I'd like to know more, but I wonder if there is any source in the state of New Hampshire, which even cares to look. There are government web sites but in none of these do I find answers to the questions I really burn to know.  For that you'd need an "ethnograph," as the anthropologists say.  The last place I saw any comprehensible depiction of the homeless was, you guessed it, "The Wire."

New Hampshire Heat Wave

North Hampton Beach Bungalows

Last summer, the summer of aught '15,  I stood on a six foot ladder and wielded a pruning pole to top off a few 15 foot paper birch trees growing between my house and my neighbor's driveway.  These willow birches are delicate trees and cannot bear the load of heavy snow and their brothers on the other side of the house, unprotected by buildings snapped,  and I had to cut them back and they may not survive.  Some evergreens, about the same size grow in a line with the birch trees along both sides of my property. 

This past winter was nearly snowless, at least compared to the winter of '15, when it snowed every day and the last remnants of snow persisted into May. People talked about how nice it was to have a winter you didn't have to shovel snow every day,  but the dry spell has persisted into the summer and now constitutes a drought, rare along the precious 18 miles of New Hampshire seacoast.  Lawns have turned brown and there is a watering ban.

But the trees between my house and my neighbor's driveway have taken no notice. They have grown above our roofs. 

Somehow I failed to notice until today, when I looked out my second floor window to look across at my neighbor's house and found the view blocked by a solid mass of green leaves.  I asked my wife when the trees had grown, but she hand't noticed either. She never looks out that set of windows.  We keep those blinds drawn, for privacy, but with the leaves, we need no blinds. 

Contraband Norway Maples

Walking the perimeter of my yard, I discovered growth has exploded all around. The only trees which have not tripled in size are the two illegal Norway maples, which may be trying to keep a low profile, knowing they are undocumented aliens and may be at any moment uprooted by governmental authorities. 

How has this astonishing growth happened?   These trees must have some source of water unavailable to the lawn.

Girl With Pig

On my morning bicycle ride, I ride past a farm on Timber Swamp Road. They have cows, and chickens and turkeys and two lamas, but my favorites are the pigs.  This farm inspired a painting by Obadiah Youngblood, and truth be told Obadiah is not an accomplished artist, but I like his Seacoast subjects, and the Girl with Pig speaks to that. 

Pigs just seem to belong. They don't worry about belonging; they just do. Pigs are simply not self conscious. 

It is 100 degrees F today. Mr. Tugboat, the Lab, plunged into the ocean as soon as he arrived for his morning walk down at Plaice Cove. There were six other Labs doing the same. Mr. Boat will not swim more than four feet into the Atlantic, ordinarily, unless there is another Lab going after a ball further out.  This morning he seemed only too happy to be in the water, a cool place to be.

Somehow, despite the drought, the heat, growth is happening, silently, relentlessly, mysterious, asking for nobody's permission along the New Hampshire Seacoast.

Honor Killings and Fatwas

Murdered to restore family honor

Say, what?

Two stories:  One about a woman, Qaundeel Baloch, whose brother strangled her in her own home because she had made videos which suggested sexual appetite, thus dishonored her family.  And the reporter, from Pakistan remarks casually, oh there are thousands of such "honor killings" every year in Pakistan, mostly by male relatives, fathers, brothers who feel their female relatives, daughters mostly, have disgraced them. This is what you would call, in anthropological terms, a culture more, or a group value which helps define what that culture is like, that is a value which may not be shared by every member of the group, but is embraced by enough members of the group to be considered a characteristic of that group.

The other story, on NPR about someone who had abandoned his Muslim faith and so a fatwa had been issued to kill him.  NPR got a professor of Muslim studies at some Washington think tank to explain this action, and the professor explained, as if this were all very reasonable, that not any "Tom, Dick or Harry" could issue the Fatwa--it had to come from an Islamic state and a "group of scholars" had to review the case, but if it were found that a Muslim had abandoned his faith, well then, yes, he can be legally and rightfully killed. 

And all this is said in tones of great reasonableness. 

I'm not at all sure all Muslims find this death penalty for blasphemy or apostasy to be reasonable and just, but the fact is, at least some Muslims, and Muslims in a position of power, apparently, think this is just fine.  This would be, from my point of view at least, a real problem.  

Now consider an immigrant population which arrives in a country seeking a better life, but when they arrive they proclaim they do not accept the idea of tolerance of the opinions of others.  That is simply not one of their values, because their religion tells them they should kill their sisters for offending the honor of the family or they should kill their neighbor because he has strayed from the Islamic fold. What do we do with this group? 

Has this woman disgraced her family's honor?

"Cultural relativism" may suggest no one culture should pass judgment on another, but what do you do when one culture does just that and decides to annihilate a host culture or a neighboring culture?

I'm not suggesting we ban Muslims at the borders, but is it not reasonable to require as the price of citizenship from every member of our society, the basic agreement to tolerance of different values? 

And if we have a group which speaks as a group, either by voice or by action, in a violent way, do we not have the right to condemn that group as a group?