Who Killed Fiction (and Why)?

If you want to feel really good about your community, publish a book.

That's what I learned last year. I thought releasing my first novel, after such a long process, would make me feel good about myself. But instead, it made me feel good about other people. I have been so gratified and amazed by how eager people are to help me, how much they want to see me succeed. I do believe that is in part because I wrote a good book, and because people see it as useful to social justice movements, specifically to justice for Palestine. But many people reached out before they'd ever read the book, and that includes people I never thought liked me, people I've had ambivalent political relationships with over the years, and even some people who don't agree with my politics on Palestine. Coworkers bought multiple copies to give to their families and friends for Christmas presents, while some of my good friends had private book signings (Tory bought more books than we sold at the Modern Times reading). Local bookstores have promoted it and let me know when there were problems in the supply chain.

I've also gotten some wonderful nuanced feedback from writers I respect, which will help me as I delve into Book 2 of the Rania & Chloe Palestine mystery series (pleased to have editor Elana Dykewomon back on board for Murder Under the Fig Tree). I've gotten used to talking about my writing process, how art differs from life, and had opportunities to reflect deeply on the events in my life that led to embarking on this project. I even remembered what I was working on before I went to Palestine, and made a commitment to get back to it before too long.

One of the less encouraging things I've learned is that fiction is out of favor in US culture right now. I've been surprised by the number of people who have told me, “Oh, I don't read fiction.” I'm not sure how I missed knowing this, since as early as 2004, commentators were reporting that “Although fiction still sells in great quantities … the attention of publishers and booksellers has moved elsewhere. Everyone in publishing agrees it is getting harder to sell a new novel, even by a distinguished name, in this country; book buyers seem interested only in non-fiction.” “The top 10 non-fiction books on the bestseller list always outsell the top 10 fiction books, save an occasional mega-seller,” wrote Anthony Chatfield in 2007.

Blogger Scott Esposito suggests that this trend reflects a desire for instant gratification: nonfiction offers the appearance that we've made an immediate gain in terms of useful knowledge. Another reason nonfiction might work better for people in this overscheduled information age is that it's easier to pick up and put down, or read parts of, requiring less commitment than a novel. Who, after all, really read Thomas Pickety's bestseller on capitalism from start to finish? I really liked Patrick Cockburn's The Rise of the Islamic State, but it didn't exactly make me miss any bus stops because I had to find out how it ended.

At the same time, alarm bells have been sounded by those worried about gaps in our kids' education – the same ones unwilling to address the elephant in the room, poverty. Researchers claim that high numbers of graduating students “may be able to compute a math problem or analyze a short story but they can't read a complex non-fiction text.” To remedy this perceived weakness, the Common Core Standards “calls for a shift in the balance of fiction to nonfiction as children advance through school. According to the CCSS guidelines, by the end of 4th grade, students’ reading should be half fiction and half informational. By the end of 12th grade, the balance should be 30 percent fiction, 70 percent nonfiction across all subject areas.”

I seriously question whether students can in fact analyze a short story if they can't “read a complex text.” The key words “analyze” and “complex” are not defined, at least not in any of the metareports I looked at; I didn't see the original data, which is attributed to the creators of the ACT college readiness exam. If by “analyze,” we mean anything beyond describing what happened (which is not analysis, but reporting), analyzing a work of fiction should require more complex thinking than reading even the most difficult nonfiction work because the information in a remotely well-written nonfiction text should be communicated directly, while the themes and lessons of fiction must be intuited or derived by careful attention to the symbolism of events and characters. A more likely explanation of the disparity between students' ability to analyze fictional versus nonfictional texts, if it exists, might be that the fiction they are reading is chosen, by themselves or their teachers, for its relevance to their lives, while the nonfiction is simply presented as information they need to know.

I remember when I was in graduate school complaining to my teacher, the always brilliant Michael Rogin, that I couldn't remember dates and characters in history.

“Can you remember the plots of novels?” he asked.

“Sure,” I replied. (The same might not be said today, when I can easily read half a mystery before realizing I've read it before. But that might have more to do with the books than my failing memory.)

“That's because you attach symbolic significance to the events in the story. If you can do the same with historical events, you'll remember them too.” It was good analysis, good advice and it helped me become a better nonfiction reader. It might well work for students who are having the same trouble today. More to the point, if the “complex texts” are about things they think they need to know about, they will probably figure out a way to understand them.

The solution may well be worse than the problem. A series of studies that came out a few years ago found that reading literary fiction increased readers' empathy. One study used “a variety of Theory of Mind techniques to measure how accurately the participants could identify emotions in others. Scores were consistently higher for those who had read literary fiction than for those with popular fiction or non-fiction texts.” Of course, once again, key words like “literary” and “popular” fiction are not defined. Examples of the literary works included books by Don DeLillo, Charles Dickens and Louise Erdrich, while popular fiction included Gillian Flynn and Danielle Steele. One hypothesis about the difference was that the characters in the popular works were not as well defined. I might offer some other hypotheses regarding Gillian Flynn (a friend and I just watched “Gone Girl” on TV) – such as that her characters are so unpleasant, one would not really want to get inside their emotional worlds. And yet, as I have previously mentioned, Flynn is often included among genre writers who have “crossed over” (a review of her book, Sharp Objects, says, “this is more literary novel than simple mystery”).

I haven't seen studies proving this, but I don't need any to know that fiction also helps us stretch our imaginations. Reading fiction is essential to the creation of revolutionaries, because if you can't imagine something that doesn't exist, you cannot help to create it. Is that perhaps a reason why these education reformers are so determined to limit the time that kids spend exercising their imaginations? Or is it simply that their own imaginations are so starved, at this point, that they can't remember the joy of being transported into another place, another time or another person's reality?

I went to see 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens" the other night. I enjoyed it, especially the 3D effects. But there was a lot less to the story than in the 1970s episodes, which is not saying that much. There's almost no character development; it's two hours of nonstop battle scenes. The best mainstream movies I saw last year, “Spotlight” and “Trumbo,” along with some I didn't care for like “Bridge of Spies,” were barely fictionalized versions of true stories. Among the 12 top grossing films of 2015, nine were installments in multi-film franchises, two were based on old television shows, one was based on an alleged true story and one was a remake. Only two, “Inside Out” and “The Martian,” were original fictional narratives.

Those of us who write fiction might need to start fighting for its place in our culture, for the sake of the culture as well as ourselves.

Murder Under the Bridge has gotten some excellent reviews.

Middle East Monitor
East Bay Express
Counterpunch
Library Journal

I've also done quite a few interviews on radio and even one on TV. If you're interested, you can find some of them on my website.

I will be reading in Washington, DC on January 16 (Politics & Prose, 1:00 pm), Richmond, VA on January 19 (Fountain Books, 6:30 pm) and Portland, Oregon on January 22 (Another Read Through, 7:00 pm). More information.  If you're in one of those cities and can't make the reading but have time to get together, please email me.

Five Alternatives to “Thank You For Your Service”

I cringe every time I hear the words.  That’s okay, though, because so do the people they are directed to.

I’m talking about “Thank you for your service,” the nifty catchphrase that’s supposed to make sure Iraq and Afghanistan veterans – or War on Terror veterans, if you will – never feel the sting of rejection that Vietnam Veterans did.

I guess I missed the moment when that particular murmur became de rigeur.  It must have been around the time “No worries” entered the U.S. lexicon.

But no worries; whenever and however it got started, I hereby declare it done.

Vets say they hate it because the people saying it don’t really mean it.  People don’t really want to hear about their service; they just want to thank them and move on.  I think people do mean it, but it doesn’t mean what they think it does.

Here’s what it’s supposed to mean:  Regardless of what I think of the war you fought in, I appreciate the fact that you were willing to die to keep me safe.

Seems harmless enough.  But it’s not.  Here’s why:

• The purpose for which people fight does matter.  The troops know it and so do we.  A lot of us have participated in things we thought were a good idea which weren’t.  But we don’t get “thanked” for them.  They’re not “service.”  A service has to benefit someone.  Just thinking you were doing a good thing isn’t enough.  These kids may have signed up to keep us safe, protect democracy, bring liberation to the Iraqis, protect Afghan women from the Taliban, but they didn’t do any of that.  When we thank them for participating in a lie, we perpetuate and enlarge the lie.  That’s called doubling down on our folly.
• The lie becomes its own raison d’etre.  On The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore the other night, a vet explained that the troops are not thinking in geopolitical or global economic terms.  The only thing they’re thinking about, he said, is protecting the guys on either side of them.  Unfortunately, that’s another way of saying, “American lives are the only thing that matter.”  That’s what got us into this mess in the first place, and it’s a problem when you’re sitting in someone else’s country with many tons of destructive equipment.
• The actual services people perform every day are not valued.  Airline pilots don’t call out the names of teachers, nannies and nurses and thank them for their service.  We don’t say thank you to the kids who got a job at McDonalds after school to help pay their families’ rent or the ones who are watching their little siblings while their parents are at work.  We certainly don’t say it to the people organizing Black Lives Matter marches.  The message to the returning troops is that nothing else they do, no matter how much more worthwhile it may actually be than whatever they did over there (which they’re right, we really don’t want to hear about), will ever earn them the appreciation we’re giving them for participating in a grand lie.  And what it says to the young people who didn’t make that fatal mistake is that unless they’re willing to be violent, no sacrifice is worthy of our thanks.
• The people who are busy thanking the troops love to talk about “accountability.”  Yet for the returnees, there is no accountability.  It’s true that no one wants to hear about what they did, and it’s also true that no one makes them say what they did.  Many of them did terrible things.  No, it wasn’t their idea, but again, many of us join in bad schemes that weren’t our ideas.  And for some of them, it was their idea.  If one-third of women in the military are sexually assaulted by their fellow soldiers, someone is doing all that assaulting.  Ultimately, they know what they did.  For those with a conscience, it will haunt them forever.  For those without – well, that may come to haunt us forever.

So here are some things we could say to those returning vets in the airport, instead of “Thank you for your service.”

1)      “I’m sorry you were lied to.”  Okay, it’s not poetry, and it might not make them happy.  It’s honest, and it might lead to a conversation.

2)      “What are you going to do next?”  It’s never too soon to remind them that they do have a future.

3)      “How are you?”  Simple, but to the point.  You have to want to hear the answer.

4)      “What would you like people to know about what happened there?”  I’ve actually tried that one.  It’s always interesting.

5)      “Welcome home.”

Five Things I Love And Hate About New Years

I love New Years.  I love all of them – Jewish, pagan (which would be Halloween), Julian, Chinese, gay (now known as Pride Sunday – the newspaper I work on, UltraViolet, changes volumes in June) … haven’t been to a Nawrouz (Persian New Year) or Diwali (Indian New Year) celebration as yet but hope to soon.  I love it because let’s face it, New Year = Hope, and I’m an optimist.

Rebecca Solnit, in her otherwise amazing piece in The Nation, claims, “Optimism says that everything will be fine…,” but she’s wrong.  Optimism says, “Everything can be fine.”  As I was discussing with friends last night, all activists are optimists (even the ones that are ceaselessly negative in meetings).  That’s what enables us to keep going, despite the appearance of getting nowhere.  Optimism says, “We can do it.”  New Years is the Time of the Optimist. 

Here are a few of the things I love:

• Wrap-up shows.  Even though they’re mostly all the same, I love seeing the highlight reels, seeing what made people’s lists.  Love hearing the best speeches and jeering at the worst.
• Best of lists, especially books.  This year’s top entries were For Harriet’s 10 Books Released by Black Women in 2013 You Should Read and Jessica Valenti’s “My Top Ten Favorite Feminist Articles of 2013”.
• Smart people waxing reflective.  See above-mentioned Rebecca Solnit and my girls on yesterday’s KPFA Women’s Magazine.
• Law & Order marathons.
• Hearing all the best music of the year at once.

Here’s what I don’t love:

• False cheer
• The emphasis on dating and being kissed at midnight
• Resolutions – especially since so many of them will have to do with dieting, like being thin or depriving yourself is what makes you a good person
• Fixations on elections and what the year will bring for politicians
• Hearing all the worst music of the year at once

Here are a few of my best ofs:   

Books:

• WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES by Karen Joy Fowler  - can’t say enough good things about this one (thanks, Julie).  Run don’t walk to your nearest indy bookstore.
• QUIET: THE POWER OF INTROVERTS IN A WORLD THAT CAN’T STOP TALKING by Susan Cain - okay, it’s mainstream and promotes a false dichotomy between “extrovert” and “introvert”.  I learned a lot about myself and others.
• SHAKE OFF by Mischa Hiller (thanks Radhika) – thriller by a Palestinian author with a Palestinian protagonist.  Great characters, fast-moving plot.  Just bought SABRA ZOO (his next), but making myself read some serious fiction first
• THE SECRETS OF MARY BOWSER by Lois Leveen - not perfect, but engrossing story of a freed slave who returns to Richmond (my hometown) to spy for the North.  Great woman protagonist; good antidote to “12 Years a Slave” (the movie, not the book) with its lack of depiction of agency by the slaves.

Articles & blogs

Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science? (Eileen Pollack) 

Happy to see feminists challenging some harmful dynamics within our movements, without lapsing into solipsism:

• On cynicism, calling out, and creating movements thatdon’t leave our people behind (Verónica Bayetti Flores) 
• Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each OtherAccountable (Ngọc Loan Trần)  
• What picketing taughtme about feminism (Julia Carrie Wong) 

After seeing Henry A. Giroux on Bill Moyers, I became a devotee of Giroux and his Public Intellectual Project.  This article rocked my world: The Spectacle of Illiteracy and the Crisis of Democracy 

Actions

• Anti-Gentrification Activism in San Francisco – it’s been a long time coming, but the last year has seen an explosion of activism to halt displacement and reclaim the city for the people who made it. Hopefully not too late! 
• San Francisco Google bus blockade (subset of above)  - great new tactic, lots of positive energy, hopefully folks won’t overuse it.
• Anonymous queer art countering Islamophobia on San Francisco public transit 
• Rising of the Fast Food Workers 
• Free Bradley (Chelsea) Manning Contingent and other actions at SF Pride:  Nothing like telling people they can’t do something to get people’s creative juices going.
• Boycott SodaStream Super Bowl Video Contesxt – in response to SodaStream’s Super Bowl commercial promoting its settlement-made product, US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation sought spoof ads from far and wide.  Check them out.

Wishing everyone a joyous, contemplative, creative and revolutionary New Year

The Anti-Feminist Mystique?

I think I must be the worst feminist journalist/blogger in the world, or at least the country.

It’s tempting to pretend that I was just too cool to write about 50^th anniversary of The Feminine Mystique’s publication, but the truth is I had no idea.  I somehow managed to get left off the list for review copies of the reissued volume, no one invited me to be on a panel on its impact, and goddess knows my friends weren’t talking about it.

courtesy: www.tressugar.com

In fact, the date might have slipped by me altogether if I hadn’t bought a Kindle last week and celebrated by spending even more money on a subscription to the New York Times.  So yesterday, on my way to work, I read an article by Janet Maslin reflecting on the book’s impact, and it had links to a piece that had appeared a couple days earlier and that referred to another piece – you get the picture.

Everyone, it seems, was celebrating this momentous day except for contemporary feminist activists.  Amitai Etzioni diaried (is that a word? Why not if “diarist” is?) about it on The Daily Kos.  Historian Peter Dreier wrote about it on The Huffington Post and Truth Out.  New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Gail Collins, who wrote the introduction to the 50^th Anniversary edition, hosted a video round table and gave an interview to The Atlantic.  (The Atlantic, incidentally, has had no less than six articles about the book in the last few months, most by men and fairly uncharitable).  Third-wave feminist Kathleen Parker wrote a snotty “Who needs it?” column in The Washington Post.

So what’s left to say?  Not too much except that:

(1) A surprising number of the major pieces were written by men, and many of the ones by women – especially the hostile ones  – mainly quote men;

(2) Nearly all the comments on the aforementioned video debate – which is highly entertaining and I recommend it – are by irate men who clearly have not read the book but think they know what it says;

(3) It’s amazing how much outrage the book still provokes – again, mostly by people who never read it, as Stephanie Coontz documented in her book A Strange Stirring; and

(4) People are, as always, quick to condemn prominent feminists where they would be more forgiving of almost any other icon who was but a product of her time.

I only saw Friedan in the flesh once.  She came to speak at my college.  All the feminists on campus were there.  A Black woman – that’s how they identified then -- got up and asked a question, I don’t remember exactly what it was but basically she was taking Friedan to task for ignoring the specific oppressions of women of color and poor women.  Friedan reacted like a skunk whose tail had been stepped on.   

“Don’t make me the enemy,” she screamed. 

 The woman she was screaming at, a friend of mine, ran out of the room in tears, followed by other Black women who gathered around her.  I and some of their other white friends followed.

“That’s why we’re not in the movement,” I heard one Black woman say to the woman who’d been the target of Friedan’s venom.

I was so humiliated.  I couldn’t believe she’d done that – this woman that we all looked up to.  It was just a terrible day all the way around.  It was doubly shocking because obviously that wasn’t the first time Friedan had been challenged on racism.  It’s kind of like how angry Bill Clinton used to get when feminists criticized his policies or his mediocre record on appointing women to high positions.  You always think that years of being publicly criticized would make people grow a tougher skin – or maybe even be able to listen and hear what people are saying.

Given that experience, it’s surprising that I feel like defending Friedan now.  Or maybe it’s not.  Maybe I’m remembering times when I didn’t behave well in public.  Or maybe I’m thinking ahead to a time when something I did or said that seemed groundbreaking is going to seem antiquated and even counterrevolutionary.

Either way, it’s hard not to scream when I read something like Ashley Fetters’ “4 Big Problems with The Feminine Mystique,” in The Atlantic.  Fetters begins with “It’s racist. And it’s classist.” (quoting the estimable bell hooks for the specifics) but quickly moves on to quote biographer Daniel Horowitz to support the claim that, “It’s founded on a lie.” The lie in question is Friedan’s choice to deny her past as a union organizer and “radical leftist” (Horowtiz’s phrase).  So are we supposed to disrespect Friedan because she was concerned about working class women, or because she wasn’t?  Or are we just supposed to disrespect her -- because?

(Because I know how very interested you are in the minutiae of my life, let me just mention that this is the first blog post I've been able to do completely from home, having finally gotten my place wired on Saturday.  It's fabulous.)

Gillian Flynn and the Myth of the Murderous Moms

Recently a coworker who knows I like mysteries handed me his copy of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

I was ambivalent about it because, one, I had read Flynn’s Sharp Objects, and didn’t like it that well, although it had some good elements.  I particularly didn’t like the fact that all the villains were women or girls and all the men were kind of saintly, if clueless.  And two, it meant lugging a hardback book around for a week.

In the genre fiction writing class I just took, the teacher was talking about why some genre writers “cross over” into “literary” fiction, while others don’t.  Gillian Flynn’s name came up.  He said the difference between her and all the writers stuck in the “pocket mystery” section of the used bookstores is that she has a better agent.

But Gone Girl was such a huge best-seller, and the only other mystery writer in my writing group had raved about it (though she and I don’t necessarily have the same taste).  So I decided to give it a whirl.

Near the end of the first half, I told a friend, “This book really surprised me.  I kind of love it.”  It’s extremely well written.  It’s not necessarily more “literary” than a lot of other mysteries – Marcia Muller does great place evocations, Sara Paretsky builds unforgettable characters, and they both do great issue coverage as do Walter Moseley (who may also be considered “cross-over”) and Tony Hillerman.  But Flynn’s writing combined the quality most important to me – which I inelegantly call “unannoyingness,” with a biting satire that made me want to jump up and cheer.

One bit in particular has already risen to the level of feminist classic.  If you’ve read the book or a review of it, you know what I’m referring to.  But in case anyone hasn’t, here it is (again):

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl...(How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)”

If you’re a feminist, you can’t not love a book that contains those paragraphs.  I tore through the alternating chapters counterposing the diary of Amy, the embittered trying-to-be-Cool Girl with the present-day tribulations of Nick, the apparently bumbling, lying, philandering wife-killer.  Now I knew that the story was sure to turn, because it could not be so simple as it seemed, and I had more or less guessed how.  But I was unprepared for how cheated I felt when I realized that the character I’d grown so fond of was as fictitious as Cool Girl is.

The book kept me turning the pages, I’ll say that for it, and it retained flashes of brilliance.  But by the end, I threw it across the room, saying, “This woman is anti-feminist.”

How could Flynn go from uber-feminist to anti-feminist in 200 pages?  The only possible answer is that she’s neither.  I looked online to see what other women were saying.

The best thing I found is “Gone Girl and the Specter of Feminism” from a great blog called interrogatingmedia:

Ultimately, Gone Girl is done in by its ambition. It desperately wants to do interesting, subversive things, but in trying to, falls into some really misogynist narratives and implications. …

In the end, I suppose Gone Girl is really indicative of a post-feminist mindset, wherein the problems of misogyny become somehow the fault of feminism. Perhaps this is why the novel has a weird jab at post-feminist men. Perhaps that’s how one can say brave rape victims are tired, and go on to write a novel like Gone Girl. Or how we can blame the lack of diverse female characters on girl power. It’s a strange world out there for feminism, but this particular mystery isn’t fooling me.

Unfortunately, Ms. Interrogating and I seem to be out there mostly alone in the feminist blogosphere.  Most bloggers and reviewers quote the Cool Girl passage, nod to Flynn’s formidable writing skill, and accept her skewering of feminist tropes as so much good storytelling.

“There’s a difference between writing misogyny for misogyny’s sake and pointing out that misogyny exists and is as insidious in fiction as it is in the real world, and that’s what Gone Girl gets right.” http://earlybirdcatchestheworm.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/gone-girl-by-gillian-flynn-review/

“But even with this feminist treatise hidden within, Gone Girl has no particular affiliations. It’s not really a feminist novel, nor is it a political one. It’s just a damn good book about murder, marriage, and mystery.” http://www.literarytraveler.com/books/murder-she-wrote-reviewing-gone-girl-by-gillian-flynn/

“Gone Girl is ultimately a political novel. More accurately, it is a feminist novel, and it is at its most exhilarating in this particular manifestation of its existence.
Gone Girl is a feminist novel in the elementary sense that it would have been impossible for a man to have written it. No man writing today would be allowed to take the side of a falsely-accused rapist and portray his alleged victim as not only a fraud but a vicious aggressor.” http://tychy.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/book-review-gone-girl/

Had I not read Sharp Objects, I would have dismissed Gone Girl as basically falling into the “wanting to do something different” trap and ending up being predictable in an under-analyzed way.  On her website Flynn says the reason she writes women villains is that “I’ve grown quite weary of the spunky heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas that stock so many books. I particularly mourn the lack of female villains — good, potent female villains.”

I don’t know what Flynn’s been reading or watching, but in the mysteries I read or watch on TV, I would say a woman is the killer eight times out of ten.  Even if it’s a guy – as in Tana French’s In the Woods – a woman pulled the strings.  There are whole television series devoted to women who do bad things, from “Snapped” about women who kill to the British hit series “Bad Girls” about women in prison to the Broadway mega-hit “Chicago,” you can’t turn around without seeing evil women.

A couple years ago I was bored one night so I decided to check out “Law & Order: Los Angeles” on on-demand.  (Okay, I was really really bored.)  I started watching the first episode.  Since the teenage actress was the first suspect, I figured she likely wasn’t actually the killer, but when it turned out to be her mother, I turned it off and went on to the second.  In that one, a young woman who’s recently been released from prison is found dead and the killer turns out to be her rapist cellmate.  Tried the one about the mistress of the Congressman.  It seemed like the woman’s ex-husband had done it, but no, the Congressman’s wife had hired him.  In the one where the female pro golfer is killed, the prime suspect is the male golfer she was besting, but of course his mother turned out to be the mastermind.  I think the series went eight for eight that night.  The only thing television cop-and-lawyer shows have more of than female killers is Black women judges.

Flynn’s fascination with female killers, she says, came from her childhood love for Brothers Grimm fairy tales.  “Screw the blonde, gentle heroines, it was those wicked queens and evil stepmothers I adored.”

The fact is that those fairy tales, just like the murderous-masterminding-mother-wife motif in Law & Order, expressed the fear of women’s power in a gender-stratified patriarchal society.  It’s not that I think anyone is sitting there saying, “Let’s make all the women killers so people will agree with taking away women’s right to abortion.”  But it’s nonetheless true that in a country obsessed with stopping women from “killing their babies” it helps to have images of murdering mothers all over the media.

Gillian Flynn may be “tired of brave rape victims,” but unfortunately, men are not tired of rape.

The Battle of the Buses: Another Round for These Freaks and These Soldiers

Okay, I paraphrased that Joni Mitchell lyric.  And why am I suddenly stuck on song lyrics from my youth for blog titles?

A little while ago I wrote about ad wars that have broken out around the country, pitting people opposed to Israeli policies against those who brand all criticism of Israel anti-Semitism.  That propaganda war came home recently in a particularly ugly way.  A professional Islamophobe named Pamela Geller, the driving force behind the campaign to prevent an Islamic cultural center from being built sort of near the World Trade Center, decided to post these ads on buses in New York:

 

For anyone who can’t see it, the ad features a quote from Ayn Rand:  “In Any War Between the Civilized Man and the Savage, Support the Civilized Man.”  Under that it says, “Support Israel/Defeat Jihad.”  It’s red, white and blue on a black background.  “Support Israel” is surrounded by Jewish stars (which I personally consider anti-Semitism, but we won’t get into that).

New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority rejected the ads,saying

“they violated its prohibition on ads that demeaned individuals or groups on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin and five other specific categories. The group was given the opportunity to revise the ad, but it refused, and claimed in a lawsuit that the agency’s “no demeaning” language restriction was unconstitutional.

The [federal district court] judge … ruled that the rejected ad was “not only protected speech — it is core political speech,” expressing a “pro-Israel perspective on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict” and implicitly calling “for a pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy with regard to that conflict.”

As such, the judge held, the ad “is afforded the highest level of protection under the First Amendment.”

The day after the judge ruled in favor of Geller’s organization, American Freedom Defense Initiative, they signed a contract with San Francisco’s Municipal Transit Agency, known as Muni, to carry the ads.  Muni says it just wanted to avoid a costly lawsuit, since it seemed like it would lose.

The ads went up, and a furor broke out in San Francisco.  Some people started online petitions.  Others wrote letters to the editor.  Still others didn’t bother waging a campaign to get the ads removed, but set out to modify them with creative graphics.  One such graphic superimposed a hand stamping “Hate Speech” over the text, while another remade the words to say, “In Any War Between the Colonizer and the Colonized, Support the Oppressed.  Support the Palestinian Right of Return.  Defeat Racism.”

courtesy:  Robert Mackey, NYT blog

Geller, who has been branded an extremist hatemonger by the ultra-Zionist Anti-Defamation League, as well as the Southern Poverty Law Center was disinvited from speaking at a Zionist Organization of America event.   Not surprisingly, Geller lashed out at the Zionist establishment, which is a regular pastime.  She has described Abraham Foxman, long-time director of the ADL, as “a Soviet-style, Soviet born leader” and claims that “New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg … has never met an Islamic supremacist he didn’t bow to”.  One prone to conspiracy theories might suspect that Geller is really a shill to make the mainstream Zionist organizations look moderate.

After a week, during which the buses carrying the ads seemed to grow scarcer and scarcer on the street (don’t ask why I know), Muni put up a disclaimer opposite the ten “Savage” ads.  The disclaimer ad reads:

“SFMTA policy prohibits discrimination based on national origin, religion, and other characteristics, and condemns statements that describe any group as "savages."

There's an arrow pointing to the ad it’s criticizing.

The disclaimer begs a lot of questions, including whose idea that ridiculous arrow was.  One friend wondered why they didn’t post it as a “surgeon general’s warning” right on the thing it was criticizing.  Probably they fear that would violate their contract and let them in for a lawsuit.  Personally, my biggest wonder is why it took them a week to put it up.  Did they think no one would notice? Did they feel they needed the pressure to justify the unusual step of putting up a message countering something running on their own buses?  Or did it actually take them a week to figure out what they wanted to say?

Geller is now preparing a new campaign to attack Muni for its rebuff:  “Why Is the City of San Francisco Enforcing Sharia Law?” the headline asks.  Seriously; here's the photo.  

She’s also put up different anti-Islam ads in Westchester, NY train stations and is getting ready to launch the “Defeat Jihad” ones in New York, now that she’s won her case.

Meanwhile, a group of wealthy donors kicked in to run a counter ad on 50 Muni buses, borrowing Geller’s color scheme to promote the message, “Stop 30 Billion/Spend Our Money at Home Not on the Israeli Military”.  Rumor has it the price tag was $20,000.

Now I’ve agonized over the question of whether Geller’s ad really is protected free speech.  With due respect to the First Amendment, in which I’m really a big believer, I just don’t see it.  First of all, this is not a free speech zone.  As I just said, it costs thousands of dollars.  So it’s already being heavily regulated and made available only to some people.  Why is ability to pay an okay limiter of free speech, but willingness to stay within certain parameters of civility is not?  I would not support a policy that you can’t take an ad promoting Israel, or Bahrain or Russia (where a court has just upheld the ban on gay pride events), though I wish people would not do so.  But a policy that says you can’t call people “savages” doesn’t seem overly limiting to me.

Second, there’s a big difference between criminalizing speech and regulating it.  If Geller wants to stand in a park and hold up a poster with her hateful slogans on it, she should and does have that right.  (Though it seems to me I’ve seen footage recently of people being teargassed and arrested for trying to hold signs in public parks all over the country … wasn’t it something about 99%?)  But policies regulating what you can buy ad space for seem okay to me.  Cities regulate all kinds of things with permits, and the courts generally uphold them.  Why is transit advertising so sacrosanct?

Some people say, well, but if they can refuse her ad, they’ll refuse ours.  A friend in Seattle has been involved in some similar battles up there.  A couple years ago, Seattle Mideast Awareness Committee planned to run ads on buses saying, “Israeli War Crimes–Your Tax Dollars At Work.”  The bus company initially accepted, but backed down in response to pressure from the Anti-Defamation League and other Zionist organizations – the same ones Pam Geller calls apologists for promoters of Sharia law.  After that affair, the King county bus company revised its advertising policies to state explicitly that the goals of advertising on its buses are “Maximizing advertising revenue; maximizing ridership; maintaining a position of neutrality on controversial issues; preserving the marketability of advertising space by avoiding [potentially objectionable] content”.   Hence, according to my friend, they are only accepting ads that are selling something.  My friend, and others, see this as a loss, leading to “a lack of political spice in bus ads and a less robust political discourse”. 

I don’t agree.  I, and many people I have been privileged to work with, are pretty good at getting our messages in well-traveled venues, and we don’t need to give $20,000 of hard-earned money to the government in order to do it.  I signed the petition to Muni, of course – how could you not, but I am more drawn to the DIY (or in this case SIY - Say It Yourself) approach of subverting the Geller ads.  It’s hard for me to get outraged over the government doing the wrong thing; when it does the right thing, it’s usually for the wrong reasons.