Keep that spit to yourself

Perhaps it represents a point of cultural divergence - like the tipping system in the US, which I'll come to in another post - but whatever the source of my intolerance, the fact is, I cannot abide it. I just read an article suggesting that more anti-litter fines are needed in order to offset the fact that littering has soared by 500% since the 1960s and now costs the UK £500m each year. Fine. Good plan. And you know what else should be included in those fines?

Fines for spitting. The thing is so thoroughly vile and vomit-inducing, and I can't understand it.

Someone is always spitting in my immediate environment, and I am bothered both by the act of expulsion and by the product as it rests menacingly on the pavement: all globulous and frothy, threatening either to make me retch or to make me fall if I step in it and slip. Then parts of my person would be covered in someone else's sputum, and I might be forced to run home and boil myself in bleach. (Obviously, I probably pick up all manner of human issue without even knowing it. I'm fine with not knowing about it - that probably means it was negligible anyway. But knowing about it is the thing that would do me in, especially in the case of spittle. I'm afraid it's too much for my weak constitution.) I'm torn between looking straight ahead because I don't want to see the stuff every ten paces, and looking down to make sure I don't step on it. I usually stick to keeping my head up and using preemptive peripheral vision to avoid suspicious pools on the street. And people ambush me to too, the double-crossers. I very rarely look at strangers, although now, with all the random beheading going on, it's probably advisable to do so. But the moment I break my pattern to smile back at a pleasant-looking fellow, he turns out to be one of them: a spitter, who as soon as he has finished smiling at me, turns the other way to hack something up. Then he looks back my way to smile again! I'm not smiling at you, fella. You have just completely forfeited your smiling privileges.

Seriously, people. What is up with all the spitting? What is the source? Talk to me. What's going on in there that you constantly feel the need to eject something from your body? I'm genuinely curious because it is alien to me. And whatever it is, why is it that women seem less afflicted with it? Surely, if there were some condition creating festering pools of phlegm that needed to be expectorated every five minutes, women might have it too. I swear this didn't start as a 'women rule, men (quite literally) drool' exercise, but thinking about it, I can't recall seeing very many women lobbing spit at the sidewalk. We also tend not to pee against people's guard walls, so I'm guessing we're just in general greater fans of decorum.

I have spit stories too: like the time a man walking on a busy street dredged up a huge bastard of a loogie and let fly, only he misjudged the wind and it went splat onto the face of a little girl behind him as she held her father's hand. Her father looked at once pained, angry, violated and confused, and then promptly homicidal.

And my friend swore to me that people spit inside the trains all the time. I told her she was surely mad; and that no one would have the gall to spit indoors on a hard surface (!). How wrong was I. No sooner had we had that conversation than I saw a man cheerfully spitting up his entrails in a corner of the train. I, who have been known to yell at strangers for sticking gum under seats, was stupefied into silence.

The problem is, people in big cities tend to have a very low glare factor. In a place where people don't even bother to look at each other and where we act like we're each floating about in our separate bubbles, registering disgust with a look is rare. So people either don't know what such a look means, or more to the point, probably don't care. Growing up, spitting was frowned upon. People still did it, of course, every now and then, but Bajans have a high glare factor, and a low tolerance for public nastiness. I've seen people caught in coughing fits unwittingly cough up phlegm, and then sit on the bus looking nervous with a mouth full of spit, waiting until they could get off and find a hidden patch of dirt to get rid of it. It's at least acknowledged as an indelicate exercise, so even when you're forced to do it, you try to make it inconspicuous. I much prefer that approach to the sport spitting approach: just dropping little blobs of squickyness all willy-nilly as if you're being scored on it.

People might balk at the idea of being fined for spitting, but it's not like being fined for vomiting or for crying. Presumably you have some control, or at least enough forewarning to be more discreet about it. I might throw an apple core under a bush where I know it's hidden and will bio-degrade, but I won't leave it on a bench or drop it on the pavement. And in these cold months, spit doesn't dry for ages. It just hangs out, watching the game, drinking a Bud. So it's almost as much of an eyesore as solid litter. Plus, it just grosses a mongoose out, man. Bring on the spit police.

Gran Torino: Right on the Munny

Still woefully behind on my movie-watching agenda, I did at least manage to see Gran Torino over the weekend. I could’ve sworn I heard Dr. Manhattan whispering to me from the Watchmen poster as I walked into the theater, but I stood firm, and managed to find my way into the loving arms of Clint.

I wasn’t even going to write a review of the film – if this even qualifies as such – because it is pretty straightforward enjoyment as films go: it is simple story-telling almost perfected. Clint (you guys don’t need a last name, right? Because I know him like that) plays Walt Kowalski, a racist, xenophobic, ornery old fart of a widowed war veteran who, having lost his wife – his only love in life – and alienated his sons, is left to contend with his own mortality and with being the last surviving white, red-blooded American in a falling-down neighbourhood taken over by immigrants. This is until he has occasion to save and befriend Thao, a Hmong teenager who lives next door, and who becomes indebted to Walt after having tried to steal his 1972 Gran Torino as part of a forced gang initiation.

It is a well-worn story of mutual redemption: the close-knit Hmong family with its open arms, old world traditions and delicious food teaches Walt how family is done; while Walt takes their boy under his wing and shows him his particular brand of manhood. I can’t say I was crazy about Walt as white Saviour to the immigrant community: he puts Thao to work repairing the ramshackle homes on his street that the Hmong have let fall into disrepair. We aren’t clued into why their homes are falling down. We can infer, if we’re feeling charitable, that since most of the young boys end up in gangs, there’s no one left to retile roofs and repair rain gutters. Or we can deduce that they are just typical, shiftless, lazy immigrant bastards. Walt certainly seems to think so, at least initially, and there isn’t much effort to disabuse of us this notion.

Arguably, there’s no need to bother getting offended by anything in this film: the main character is racist and we inhabit his world. But one could also argue that the film has a world of its own – a message for which Walt is only a vehicle – and if that too is racist in parts, then that might be slightly problematic. The film pushes you towards an uncomfortable edge. Walt drops the words ‘gook’ and ‘slopehead’ with abandon in his menacing zingers. And before he is reformed – if you can even call it that – you’re driven to erupt into what is at first laughter, but then degenerates into a nervous chuckle, as if to say “Oh silly old racist. Heh.” After he's reformed, things get even more complicated: the racial slurs directed at the Hmong are now meant to be terms of endearment; and now, no longer vectors of hate, are juxtaposed with the 'greedy Jew' and other racist stereotypes which Walt good-naturedly applies to his friends. I'm not sure that naive 'slurs are only slurs if there's hate behind them' message flies with me. But whatever your feelings on this, the dialogue does make you slightly self-conscious about your own engagement with racist vernacular. Discomfort is what the film does best, what it uses to interrogate the audience’s own perceptions of racism, and it is ingenious in this respect.

Another ‘technique’, which I quote/unquote because I’m not sure it’s a technique at all, is a function of the casting, acting and direction. Apart from Clint and a couple minor players, the acting…well…it pretty much sucks. Astoundingly, far from detracting too much from the film, it actually works in its favour. Bee Vang, who plays Thao, is perhaps the worst transgressor in this category: his body, his face, his mouth don’t seem to inhabit the space of the film. He is painfully awkward in delivering his lines and is extremely self-conscious as an actor. But his character is precisely all these things as well. Thao, having lost his very strict father and having been dismissed as the replacement head of the family for being ‘too girly’, is unsure of where he belongs. He feels awkward inhabiting his current space, but has not yet managed to find another, so the mirroring of Bee’s acting and Thao’s being works surprisingly well. And at no point did I think (well maybe once, but only very briefly) “Holy crap, this guy is a nightmare.” I didn’t fall in love with Thao, but I don’t know that I was meant to.

I did, however, fall in love with Sue, Thao’s sister, played by Ahney Her. Her acting sucked sometimes too, in similar ways, though not as often. But it added to the innocence of these children, so that by the time Sue becomes a victim of gang retribution, the audience feels personally wounded. Even in playing the feisty one in the family, Her sometimes delivered her lines like she was reading them from a script. She was, pointedly, not the smug American Juno. She was definitely the Other, the non-(American)Juno, fierce and independent but refreshingly so. Could this have been accomplished by hiring better actors with different direction? Perhaps. But this way worked, and I would imagine it rarely does. My movie partner didn’t agree, and I certainly see his objection: he was put off by the poor delivery, and felt that it sometimes plucked him from the created reality of the film so that he was aware he was watching a movie. That was not my experience, but I can appreciate how it might happen.

With the focus on simple story-telling, there were no complex tricks of cinematography, and I could certainly have done without the close-ups of Walt’s snarl, which cheesed the movie up a bit. And oh yes, there was some cheese to be had, in part provided by pieces of Clint’s dialogue. As famous as he is for his deadpan one-liners, there is such a thing as too many. ‘Too liney’, I call it, in my sophisticated, movie-critic parlance. But I had lots of laughs and was entirely dedicated to Walt as a character – another genius of the casting, because everyone loves Clint. Anyone else playing a racist, gun-toting bastard might have been significantly less successful: Walt, like Will Munny, is (by his own code) morally superior, highly flawed, efficient in retribution, unafraid of self-sacrifice and wholly awe-inspiring. And these are the best ways to watch Clint Eastwood.

I’m in “Good” Company: Hitler, Mussolini and Pinochet

The mongoose has her first guest post. Last week, Archbishop Jose Cardoso Sobrinho became famous in the news for the excommunication of the adults involved in providing an abortion to a nine-year-old child who had been raped by her stepfather. Today, Jodi, a writer from Jamaica and one of the directors of WHAN, shares her thoughts on the incident from a religious and philosophical perspective. Welcome, Jodi and take it away:
_______________________________________________________________

“Practical Wisdom is the combination of moral will and moral skill.” – Aristotle

Tonight I read that a nine year old girl had an abortion and as a result a Brazilian archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church, Father Sobrinho, excommunicated her mother and the medical doctors who carried out the abortion. Apart from the fact that the girl is nine, the medical doctors decided to carry out the abortion because:

1. The child was going to die because she only weighs 80 pounds and can’t support two foetuses. The little girl was pregnant with twins. (Attention Father Sobrinho supporters: if the child was going to die, chances are the foetuses weren’t going to make it either.)
2. The child was raped by her step-father.
3. The child is nine years old.
4. Nine.
5. Years.
6. Old.

The fact that the child’s life was in danger is enough for a logical person to feel that the abortion was a sensible decision taken by the adults in her life in order to save her life. Without even knowing it, we automatically apply Aristotle’s definition of Practical Wisdom in order to come to these decisions. Moral skill allows us to know what is right and moral will allows us to do what is right, often in spite of what the rule book, society or our family says we should do. Rather than apply practical wisdom, however, the Catholic Church has chosen stupidity and hatred in the form of excommunication.

Excommunication in every practical sense of the word means nothing to a non-religious person such as myself. In the Roman Catholic Church, it is merely a formal announcement (not usually made public) that someone is no longer allowed to receive sacraments other than reconciliation. Reconciliation is the act of asking a priest for forgiveness and paying penance. Penance is usually the recital of a few well-rehearsed prayers such as the Hail Mary and the Our Father. If you’ve been really, really bad you can only be reconciled by the Pope himself. Otherwise, you can more than likely be reconciled by the local archbishop. Hallelujah!

Though excommunication may seem like a silly consequence to people like me, to someone who is religious and who relies on the Catholic Church as their community and a major source of support in times of difficulty, I can imagine that excommunication is a cause of great shame and may create a sense of hopelessness and confusion as well as loss of self esteem. For them, excommunication from the Church is the same as being sentenced to hell.

I know all of this because I am a Roman Catholic. I should say that though I am not a practicing Catholic, I have not yet been excommunicated. Apparently, I am in good company; other non-practicing, non-ex-communicated Roman Catholics were Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Augusto Pinochet who each managed to avoid being excommunicated from the Church while they were alive.

I can’t argue this from a biblical standpoint. I am not a Christian and I can’t even pretend to know the bible. In my own opinion, religion has been and continues to be a tool used by men for centuries to carry out atrocities upon groups of people they hate. Unfortunately, women have always fallen into that category. Some will argue that just as religion has been used to carry out atrocities, it has also been used to carry out good. Well, I am sorry, but I do not believe that the end justifies the means. I’m sure that Hitler, Mussolini and Pinochet did nice things for people they liked on the same day as they were ordering the murder and torture of others. I also believe that the people who do good in the name of religion would do good without the existence of religion. However, some people who carry out evil in the name of religion would think twice about doing so without the support of their religious leaders and followers.

This is not a rant against religion, and I apologise if it seems that way; it is a rant against this ugly act against this family and a plea for humanity to apply a little practical wisdom each day in spite of rules of law, religion or society.

Action on Haiti for International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day (IWD). It's not simply a day for us to look in the mirror and say "gee I'm great", although I highly recommend this as an activity; it was intended by Clara Zetkin, when she first launched it in 1911, as a day for women all over the world to simultaneously advocate their demands for equality. And this year, as in previous years, women and our allies are meeting in various fora to mark the day and to assess plans of action for redressing the issues that affect us. You can pay a visit to the IWD website for activities in your area.

On this day, as someone who has worked with women's issues in international organizations and with national governments, I'm considering to what extent international conventions on the rights of women - to which most countries are signatories - are in any measure effective, especially in countries where civil society is not able to monitor governments' adherence to these conventions.

I'm also off to sign Amnesty International's petition of protest at Haiti's high incidence of rape, often of young girls by armed gangs. The Guardian reports that "the government, which only made rape a crime in 2005, has taken little or no action to hunt down the offenders, among whom are said to be police officers."

So until 2005, in Haiti, which is just across the road from Barbados and the neighbour of the Dominican Republic where I lived for some time, it was perfectly legal to rape a woman. US aid to help stop the spread of HIV, which occurs largely through sexual violence, has been primarily directed to programmes that promote abstinence and faithfulness within marriage, rather than on protecting women from forced sex.

Come with me to sign the petition if you'd like, and do share what else you'll be doing or thinking on this International Women's Day.

Across Africa

I'm passing through in a flurry of colons and stage directions (writing a theater performance piece that is at the moment dangerously close to being pure suckage, so am performing last-minute CPR) to highlight Chioma and Oluchi Ogwuegbu, two Nigerian sisters who "are hoping to reverse the trend of bad news out of Africa by touring the continent documenting its good news stories."

Their journey so far has seen them visit Ghana, Burkina Faso, Gambia, Mali, Senegal, Guinea Bissau, Cameroun, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.

And what they have discovered is a land of friendly people, beautiful landscapes, unusual dishes, and unexpected hospitality and kindness.

Their website features photos, information about their route and my favourite part - a blog (not recently updated but still interesting) with little stories from their travel. Give it a gander.


The photo at right, of a carved tree in Senegal, is taken from the sisters' website.

'Post-racial' is not a word

So President Obama is in the White House, and ever since he won the election, people have been throwing around the word 'post-racial' in reference not only to what is envisioned as a new era in the US, but to the times in which we all find ourselves as part of a global community. The notion is, of course, ridiculous, since the race issue is not simply one of dark skin vs. white skin, but is also inextricably bound to the class issue. For many, yes Obama is black, but he is very easily separated from that 'other kind' of black person - the gang-banging, baby-mama-having, crack-smoking, perpetually on welfare kind; or from the dark-skinned immigrant who - as against Obama's eloquence - doesn't even speak Englsih, and even if he speaks English, he sure as heck doesn't speak American.

There's no denying that Obama's presidency can change some things: it can represent possiblity to young, black people who are on the path to disillusionment, and it can help remove this notion that if someone happens to have black skin, he is doubly tasked with proving to others not only that he can perform, but that he can perform in spite of whatever shortcomings they envision he has in their bigoted minds (although I tend to think that the true bigots are likely to see Obama as the exception to the rule and carry on in their bigoted ways).

But the fact that this presidency exists, that there is a black man in the White House, cannot in itself automatically lead to a post-racial society. The mere mention of the word gives me hives. It is in many ways a cop-out. A way for people to say 'Well, we voted for the black guy. Job's done.' In fact, morons are still emailing racist watermelon jokes, drawing cartoons of gangsterized presidents or slaughtered chimps in reference to the stimulus package, and increasing their enrolment in the Klan. Yep - that's post-racial right there. It is painfully apparent to many of us, but not to Maureen Dowd (excerpted below), that the Obama administration, therefore - and the mandate of his AG Eric Holder - cannot, as Mr. Holder acknowledged, rest simply on being; it has to do.

Eric Holder, who showed precious little bravery in standing up to Clinton on a pardon for the scoundrel Marc Rich, is wrong. We have just inaugurated a black president who installed a black attorney general.

We need leaders to help us through our crises, not provide us with crude evaluations of our character. And we don’t need sermons from liberal virtuecrats, anymore than from conservative virtuecrats.

In the middle of all the Heimlich maneuvers required now — for the economy, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, health care, the environment and education — we don’t need a Jackson/Sharpton-style lecture on race. Barack Obama’s election was supposed to get us past that.

Besides, the president has other issues that demand his passion.

In short: you've got your black President and some other dark-skinned dudes in there. Now enough with the civil rights ballyhoo. We've got real issues to address.

Ms. Dowd is unwittingly the very evidence for why 'post-racial' does not exist.

Further, the issue of tolerance doesn't begin and end with the white/black divide. Anti-immigrant sentiment (forgive the incessant linking but I had to find a way to tie in the obervations of Melissa at Shakesville because they are so true) is perhaps stronger now than ever before. The Obama administration was last month set to deport 30 000 Haitians to their storm-ravaged country, dismissing a letter from the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center (FIAC) appealing for a stay in the "inhumane deportations". The letter noted that:

"The four storms [in Haiti] destroyed 15 percent of Haiti’s fragile economy, the equivalent of 8 to 10 Hurricane Katrinas hitting the United States in one month.”

Temporary, skilled immigrants though, do get to possibly die in Iraq or Afghanistan in exchange for US citizenship. So there's that.

Across the pond, although They would have us believe that all the touchy-feely goodness of Obama's America is spreading our way, evidence suggests otherwise, what with all the apartheid in the police force here in London, and higher stop and search rates for African-Caribbean Britons than for white Britons.

In the words of the esteemed White Goodman (this pun is too juicy to ignore), let me hit you with some knowledge: Obama is great in many ways that you have seen and will see discussed here in these pages, but he has not created a post-racial America - much less a post-racial global society - simply by being black in the White House. The direction in which we go with respect to race relations will rely on the upholding of civil and human rights by his administration and all others, and on our own willingness to acknowledge and participate in the many steps left to be taken in eliminating negative discrimination of all types.

We rule, you drool

I used to be a fitness instructor. I was doing a first degree, teaching Spanish and English at my old school and doing group exercise and personal training sessions here, there and yonder all at the same time. But I rarely felt overextended - in part because i loved it all, especially the group exercise. I had some clients who were trying to lose weight, some who were training for competitions, others who were trying to help control health conditions, and some who were just there for a laugh and a hobby. But i took it all very seriously, because these people considered me an authority. They would come to me with questions and, quite frankly, take my word as truth. I answered to the extent that my knowledge would allow, and always advised them to read further, if they were so inclined.

So these days, even though I no longer teach at gyms, I still get a little annoyed when I see what looks like misleading information being perpetuated by those who are supposed to know better. To be fair, the diet and fitness industry tends not to know whether it's on foot or horseback on any given day. That is to be expected when research is always being done not only by 'independent parties', but also by people who are trying to deduce findings that will suit their own ends. But there are some things we should all know by now if we aim to educate people in diet and exercise.

Recently, I noticed that a gym where I used to work out, which has always prioritized wellness and functional strength above just looking hot (which they focus on too, of course; they're a gym - not a commune) has a points system based on hours of exercise per month. They then post the points as part of a Top 10, indicating who's at the top, who's at the bottom, and clearly by elimination, who's just sitting on their asses not doing enough. I think this is a less than ideal approach for a number of reasons.

First let me say that I don't know whether you have to submit yourself to this 'competition'. I would imagine that you do, unless there are fitness police with whistles and clipboards tromping around logging everyone's minutes on the treadmill or counting beads of sweat as they fall off. I don't know the procedure for having your workout hours logged, but the fact that there is some agency involved, that you're not being judged against your will, makes it less bad, though not good.

And here's why: prizing time exercised above other aspects of fitness is sending the wrong message to the people who exercise there, some of whom I would think are just looking for a treadmill and a shower and not to be unwitting participants in a special gym edition of Survivor. It implies that there is some virtue in submitting to hours of exercise, when we all know that there is a certain number of minutes after which there are diminishing returns for both cardiovascular and strength training, assuming you're not training for a marathon or other endurance activity. Put simply, training long does not mean training effectively. In fact, it can often work against you. Again I have to make the disclaimer that I don't know whether this is a special club of athletes, which is in any case irrelevant if they're posting the results for all to see: the message that lots of exercise is always good is being transmitted to other gym members, and that message on its own can potentially lead to overtraining and compulsive patterns of exercise.

Apart from bad information, there's also the issue of plain bad feelings. Most people I know exercise to feel better, if not in the short term, at least in the medium term when they start to see results related to their goals. Who wants to see a list of all the people 'better' than you (at least according to some definition implicit in this Top 10 list) as the weight of your ass is dragging you back off the treadmill? Even among the most body-accepting, this is a bit much. And just unnecessary. And for those of us who haven't yet learnt to love said ass at any size, it's daunting, to say that least.

I know that this particular gym encourages competition. They have a great community spirit among very active members and participate in or organize various events. But we're not all universal soldiers, and we already carry our own inadequacies without needing to have them enabled by the people who should be helping us feel empowered.

Mongoose genitalia!

Ok, not exactly. But I've just made my first guest post over at BelowTheBelt, so you see what I was trying to do in the title there.

BELOW THE BELT is a multi-faceted genderblog designed to provide a space for informed, critical commentary about gender, sex, sexuality, and the many other aspects of gender facing people around the world.

So follow the mongoose on over there, and while you're at it, stay and check out the other posts. It's a cool bunch of people saying probing things in clever ways. And we always like that.