Two books, Ten Minutes

Jim: We're doing another book review and we've got two books. We're short on time so we'll be moving quickly. These aren't reviews, these are points that stood out. Participating are The Third Estate Sunday Review's Dona, Jess, Ty, Ava and me, Jim; Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude; Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man; C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review; Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills); Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix; Mike of Mikey Likes It!; Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz; and Wally of The Daily Jot. First book is Katha Pollitt's Virginity or Death! and Wally will do the overview.

Wally: Katha Pollitt write a column for The Nation. This is a collection of her columns from February 2001 to February 2006. She's written an introduction for the book, which is priced at $13,95, reasonable as she noted a few weeks back on RadioNation with Laura Flanders. The book is titled Virginity or Death! And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time. The front cover includes praise from Barbara Ehrenreich and the back cover includes praise from Victor Navasky and Anne Lamott. It's 265 pages.

Jim: Well done, Wally. Cedric has the first comment.

Cedric: I only knew of Katha Pollitt's writing and that's from working on these editions and usually she'll be mentioned at some point or Ava and C.I. will note her in a review. There were at least two columns that I know I'd seen excerpts of at The Common Ills. I heard interviewed by Laura Flanders that Sunday and I respect her for noting that she may have mispoken during the interview. A lot of people would stay with a comment but she obviously thinks things through and that comes off the page when you read. That's my praise. I enjoyed the book. The reason I'm first up is I had a serious problem with one essay. "Summer Follies." In it, she takes then NAACP president Kweisi Mfume to task for addressing the issue of, quote: "the absence of black faces on television." Representation does matter and it's been a backward slide for African-Americans for some time now. I took offense at that and thought that before she next contemplates whether or not representation is important to African-Americans, she might want to think a little more.

Betty: I had a huge problem with that as well. I'm not really sure that I need that sort of talk, I hate to say it, but I will, "from a White woman." She has at least one daughter. I'm glad that her daughter, at that time, could see herself reflected on TV in Friends, Will & Grace and Dawson's Creek, the shows she lists. I've got three small children and, as I've noted before, I've tried to pass off a character on Arthur as mixed and was successful until my oldest got wise. I frankly don't think she knows what she's talking about on this. Along with my three children, I have young nieces and nephews. Representation is an issue. It's an important issue. She may not feel that TV matters and that's her right. It isn't her right to think she comes off informed dismissing an issue that's very important. She likens it to a number of summer scandals in the summer of 2001. This wasn't a summer phase, it has not blown over. Blacks are not represented on TV and that was true then and it's true now. When we are represented it's either as crooks or shuck and jive artists. We've gone back to the previous portrayals and it's not a non-issue. It matters. Our children watch these shows, even if it's Arthur, and they wonder where they are. That's reality. I've got three children, they're Black just like I am and I'm so tired of having to explain to them why there are bunnies and bears and there are yuppies and office workers and you name it, but none of them are Black. To use Thursday nights on NBC, the night Cosby built, last year featured one Black, the idiot Darnell on My Name Is Earl. It doesn't cut it and it is an issue. I know we're trying to hurry but that actually wasn't the only thing that bothered me in the article.

Jim: Go for it.

Betty: I live in the Atlanta area. To make her case, Pollitt cites Cynthia Tucker. For the record, for every White person out there, quit thinking she speaks for Blacks. My preacher says Tucker didn't forget she was Black, she never wanted to be it in the first place. She is one of the most loathed people in the area, whether you're at the supermarket or at church, at day care or in the park, mention her name and expect the boos and hisses. She's achieved some level of 'fame' as a progressive. It's bad enough when the right-wing embraces an Uncle Tom but the left certainly shouldn't. She's made her name off attacking Blacks. Her attacks on Cynthia McKinney will never be forgotten. She is not a progressive. She's not a friend of Black people. The joke about her hair, locally, is that it looks like she bought the weave in a dollar store. But the point is, from the printed text to her physical appearance, she has no interest in being mistaken for Black. Whenever it's time for the media to launch a lynching, we always know that Cynthia Tucker will show up with the rope. If including her is a form of "represenation," don't do us any favors. Bad representation may be worse than no representation at all.

Ty: Let me back Betty up on that. I would agree with everything she said except I would have said "African-American" because that's how I self-identify. Otherwise, word for word, I'm with Betty and with Cedric as well. If people were listening, they'd know Betty sounded nervous which is why I jumped in to back her up.

Betty: And I appreciate that, Ty. I would hope that, having shared my feelings, we won't link to her at any of our sites. I spoke to C.I. about this a year ago. We were just talking about something on the phone and I'd been meaning to make a request for some time. So as we were winding down, I spat out, "Cynthia Tucker." C.I. said, "Betty, if you're asking for a link, I really don't care for her. I don't mind discussing why but she's never been linked to and she never will be." C.I. thought I was going to ask in a "Give a home girl a break" kind of way. I was relieved to know that she was not someone that had been mistaken of as left. She attacks Blacks repeatedly and that is her designated role in the media. I know that Ben & Jerry's [Working For Change] links to her and I'd guess they were trying to find a "Black voice." But she's offensive and I don't know any [Black people], besides those trying to pretend they're White, who find anything of use in her writing.

Jim: Well, Ty and C.I. are two of the six behind this site and you know Ava and C.I. vote the same, so I don't think that's a problem here. Anyone else have a problem with it? No? Okay, you'll never see a link to Cynthia Tucker from any of the community sites.

Dona: Just to add to that, Betty is from the area, she knows the woman's writing, she knows the woman's reputation. That's really all anyone needs, or should need, to make the call not to link in this community.

Jim: So it is spoken, so it is done. C.I. you had a point.

C.I.: I like Pollitt, by the way, I do agree with the points made by Betty, Ty and Cedric. I like Pollitt's writing. I hadn't read the book yet --

Jim: When you gifted us all with copies.

C.I.: Right. And we're trying to get four books ready, we're doing two this morning, for a book discussion so I knew it would be awhile before we were ready. So I passed it on to an activist friend in college and she had a point about a column I hadn't read in the magazine so I paid attention when I got around to the book. For at least one of her columns, Pollitt's done an update or a note. If she hadn't done that, I wouldn't make a point of it. She's using what was known when she writes her column. However, having updated at least once, her column "Mourn" requires an update. She's going by the media myth that there was no difference in young voter turnout in 2004. That was the myth and I belive Cokie Roberts was one of the first to feed it on Morning Edition, which Pollitt listens to, the day after the election. A myth isn't reality and, for my friend and all the young activists I know who worked so hard to turn out that vote, let me say that the myth is wrong and putting it into a collection without noting that it's wrong was a mistake.

Jim: Ava?

Ava: I'll tackle Fraudan. By the way, I like that name for her. Pollitt ends the book with her column on Fraudan. Yes, I'm younger than Fraudan, younger than Pollitt for that matter, however, it doesn't matter.

C.I.: To clarify that, Pollitt's writing of how young people she teaches don't get Fraudan without a whole history lesson. That's what Ava's saying doesn't matter, the fact that she's younger and didn't live through the fifties.

Ava: Right. As a Latina, I don't exist in Fraudan's world. That was obvious from the book, it was obvious in a wonderful confrontation that Third World women had with Fraudan which WBAI's Deepa Fernandes replayed on Wakeup Call after Fraudan's death. She wanted to lecture and tell them what life was. I say 'Way to go!' to those women who refused to let her. She also wanted to smear Gloria Steinem, yet again. That wasn't a one time incident, it was repeated over and over. And it was key to the way she was and the way she lived. For so obvious a phoney to question someone else's legitimacy was laughable. But you didn't read about that in the glowing tributes. C.I. had a phrase that got pulled even though Kat, Jess and I were saying, "Include it!" [Pulled from an entry.] I'll include it, with permission, now: "Fraudan is finally underground -- the closest she's ever gotten to it." She wasn't the mother of us all, she was the mother of an upper-class, highly educated, White, Anglo group of women. Her death, like her life, is meaningless to me and I won't abandon Third World Women and let it seem like their very real problem with the works and words of Fraudan were their personal problems.

Jim: Did anybody like Pollitt's book?

Rebecca: It's not that we didn't like the book. We did. I think everyone who's spoken would recommend it. But you're talking about politics and there are thousands of issues tackled in this book. Cedric called to speak C.I., I've been a house guest at C.I.'s, and C.I. wasn't there so we were talking. Cedric outlined the problem he outlined here and I told him he should bring it up. This is a book by a thinker worth discussing. I'm not going to call her a writer, not because she can't write, she writes wonderfully. I'm calling her a thinker because she's putting thought into it when most people just slide. I told Cedric the highest compliment that could be paid to her work was to treat it with critical-thought.

Jim: Kat, should I ask you or did everyone work out their feelings on the West coast?

Kat: We did exactly that and ended it with a group hug. I'm with Rebecca. No one's calling Pollitt a bad writer. We don't join in the hoopla around Fraudan. We didn't before Pollitt wrote her column and we won't now. We're not hypocrites. C.I. was excited Saturday morning, going through the e-mails, because someone had copied and pasted Pollitt. But it includes an oversimplification about Steinem and it includes Fraudan. We're not interested. None of us are.
She demonstrated, repeatedly, that a feminist can be a chauvinist. Others can applaud Fraudan but you'll never find anything at any of our sites praising that woman. It's not an off the wall opinion. When C.I. noted her death in that wonderful rebuke of Fraudan and her ego, my phone didn't stop ringing with women wanting to pass on their thank-yous. Pollitt clearly admires Fraudan. We clearly don't. We'll never agree on that. That's life. Ava stepped around the smear and I know why, we hate to repeat it because it gets traction all over again, but what she tried to do Gloria Steinem wasn't something minor. She tried to take her out. Repeatedly. She tried to destroy her credibility over and over. Don't start talking mother of us all or any other bullshit about that chauvinist because there's no one here that will stand for it. She was a lousy person. She hid who she was in her writing for 'the masses.' She was about trickery and deceit. When she went over to her 'second-stage' Reagan days, that was just another attempt to try to trick people. She didn't have faith enough in her own ideas to share them or be honest about them. If someone's offended by that, we're offended by the fact that her trashing of Gloria Steinem, which wasn't an isolated or one time, or one year, incident but a repeated thing with her that went on year after year, was supposed to be forgotten so we could all celebrate in the so-called mother of us all. This may be a West Coast feminist thing, but she never played all that well in my area. There's a conversation I fear we, as feminists, are loathe to have. Fine. Don't have it, but don't whitewash her either. I'll never praise Fraudan, I will praise Pollitt's book. We did discuss it, on "the West Coast," Rebecca, C.I., Ava, Jess, Ty and myself. I also discussed it with Betty. I think the only one I didn't discuss it with was Elaine.

Elaine: Yeah, what was up with that? My phone never rang once this week. Was it party, party, party all week for you?

Rebecca: Everyone was trying to make sure I was okay. As noted before, I had a miscarriage and this was the week that I got the word back from the doctor on future pregnancies. So I think I was everyone's focus. I didn't call, and I wrote about this, because I kept forgetting the time zone. I'm used to calling you at seven. Usually with my TV on and some dopey show just starting. But we were in a different time zone and I kept forgetting that.

Jim: So what did you think of the book?

Elaine: It's a strong collection of think pieces. Not in a wonky sort of way. There's actual thought poured into these pieces and humor as well. Did I agree with everyone of them one-hundred-percent? No. Would I expect to? No. Pollitt's not striking a pose which is why her work can be laid out in the manner that it is, five years worth, and you're not seeing a print version of Madonna. Others could learn from that consistancy of conviction. There are strong pieces. I loved her piece on Jim Wallis. I loved it when I read it in the magazine. I remember calling C.I. and, I buy the magazine, C.I. subscribes, asking if it had arrived yet? When I was told it hadn't, I read the entire column over the phone. It was, and is, that important to me. Feminsim, and I would love to have a roundtable on this, is not a monolythic, group-think venture. What Pollitt sees as important, I may not. What matters most to me, may not mean anything to C.I. But, as a movement, I think we recognize that and we try to respect it. There are differences of opinion. Right now, I'm ready to go after Naomi Wolf. In the magazine, I must have missed Pollitt's column where she mentioned Wolf gushing on how she's was writing against late-term abortions. I don't take Wolf seriously as a feminist. That's where I draw the line. I can disagree with Pollitt, and I agreed with her far more than I disagreed with her, but I can't stomach a woman who has already bored us with a tale of how tough it is for upper-class women, who give up their jobs, to be taken seriously by their husbands -- not one of the big issues of most people's day -- and is now writing about the need to stop late-term abortions. If we were having a discussion on feminism right now, I'd note that, like C.I., I used to disagree with Rebecca about the need to have more guidelines on feminism. I thought, once, that the more people who used the term to self-identify with, the better. I no longer think that way. Rebecca's right. Feminists for Life, for instance, that's not feminism. Trying to take away rights from women isn't feminism. You can be opposed to abortion, and I believe Pollitt makes this point as well, I read her first and then the other three books so I may be confused --

C.I.: No, she makes the point you're about to.

Elaine: Good. You can be against abortion and be a feminist. But when you're working to outlaw abortion, then you're not a feminist. My opinion. I'll add that I enjoyed Laura Flanders' interview with her and I hope she'll be on again.

Jim: Okay, so we did like the book? Alright then. We have limited time, Dona's pinching me, so we'll move quickly to Antonio Juhasz's The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time. Ty's going to do the overview.

Ty: Antonia Juhasz is a wonderful speaker. A number of us went to one of her book signings and if she comes to your area, you should go as well. She's funny and insightful. That comes across on the 343 pages of text. The book is priced at 26.95. You should be able to find it at your bookstores and libraries. What you'll find in the book is an indepth look at how the Bush agenda started, where it went and what we can do to stop it.

Jim: Jess, Mike and Wally haven't weighed in with an opinion yet so they'll be the ones we go to. In addition, we have a few announcements at the end. So we're looking at roughly two minutes before Dona brusies my arm with the next pinch. Jess.

Jess: As much as I enjoy hearing you scream like a little girl when Dona pinches you hard, I'm going to take a pass except to say I enjoy the book and recommend it. I know Wally and Mike both have some points they want to make.

Jim: Okay, Mike, we'll start with you.

Mike: Start with Wally.

Jim: Okay. We'll start with Wally.

Wally: Great book. It's intense. But when it would start to feel too heavy, there would be a quip or a joke and they seem to be placed where they are most needed. It reads like someone who really knows her stuff but is making it easy to follow. It's not a humor book like Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse often is, that had me laughing page after page, but it's not cut and ry the way you might worry from the book jacket. For me, the best part was the rundown of the corporations. Both the backgrounds on how Bechtel, for instance, started out and then the explanations of how they ended up in Iraq, repeatedly. This is history and I hate to say that because I said it to a friend who thought the title was interesting and he kind of sneered. So searching for another word, this is the how-to. It's a how-to book. It's how they sold this war, pre-testing it elsewhere and it's how-to about how they'll keep selling it, long after Bully Boy is gone, unless we get wise to what has been going on. Did I leave time for Mike?

Jim: We're making time. Mike.

Mike: I knew what part Wally was going to focus on because we were talking on the phone when we were both reading the book and when he got to the section on Bechtel and the oil companies, that was his big thing. I wanted to focus on the end. None of us are fond of those books that say here's the problem and then slap "The End" on it. This book doesn't do that. It has answers and I'll now go over each one. Kidding! Want to know the answers, read the book. But her point, whether she's writing about the war or the profiteering, is that people do matter and we can make a difference. I want to quote page 340 . . .

Dona: We don't have time for a full page.

Mike: One sentence. "I have learned one very important lesson in my years of work on public policy and in social movements: Change is slow, but it does happen everywhere all of the time." That's really the key to this book. Juhasz started out in Congress and she saw the stumbling blocks, like not getting to see a report when she was working for John Conyers because she was told it didn't exist and then she was told that it did exist but Conyers wasn't on the committee and she shouldn't "worry your pretty little head" over it. She could have gone along with that thinking or she could have said, "Screw this, I'm going home and focusing on my own life." Instead, she saw a roadblock and found a way around it. It's never "Oh, this can't be done." It's always, "Okay, if it can't be done that way, then let's figure out how it can be done." There are so many examples in the book and it's a really important one.

Jim: It is and I think you and Wally summed it up very well. Announcements quickly. Rebecca and Elaine both head for the tropics July 5th. For Elaine it will be one week and then she'll be back. While she's gone her assistant Sunny will blog at least once at her site. Rebecca's open-ended as always. While she's gone Betty will be filling in and, at Rebecca and Rebecca's readers request, the first post will be about Betty's online novel Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man. Neither Elaine nor Rebecca will be participating in the edition next week. We're announcing that for a reason. People need to take time off when they need it. We appreacite everyone's help but they need time for themselves. We may bring Rebecca in while she's on vacation, if she offers, if it turns into another vacation that goes more than a month. The last time someone didn't participate, Ty read e-mails about how there must be a personality conflict or the person isn't dedicated. Dona will address the latter.

Dona: We put these things together as quickly as possible. Even with that, you're looking at more than an all nighter. The print edition gets everything, even the ones not fit to print. What goes up here is the best or what we judge the best that week. People are putting in hours on these things. We started at 6:00 pm EST on Saturday and it is now 6:31 am on Sunday. If someone wasn't dedicated, they wouldn't take part. Those who have church, Betty and Cedric for instance, often have to leave at a certain point. We understand and don't question their dedication. Ty will address the first part.

Ty: Jim's big on letting it all hang out as is Rebecca. There is a soap opera nature to the lives of those particiapting. Call it The Nightmares of Our Lives, if you want --

Jess: Interrupting to say Fleetwood Mac's Rumors.

Ty: The Mac's Rumors. Others are less inclined to let it all hang out like Jim and Rebecca because they anticipate the reaction of some such as Tommy who wrote in to say that we must want "to take a tire iron" to someone who didn't participate a few weeks back. No. That's not the case. We all enjoy working with one another or we wouldn't do it. But the fear that someone might think there is a problem if we're not all participating does make some rearrange their schedules. That's not necessary. The core six, the ones behind this website, include Ava, Dona and myself who have each taken a week off. A kind-of a week off in Ava's case because at Christmas she did work early in the week with C.I. on their TV commentary. We wanted to make this announcement so that if someone does take time off the automatic assumption is not that they don't get along or we don't get along. We also wanted to make it to be sure that no one felt they had to participate when they didn't have time out of fear that the assumption would be made.

Jim: Those are the announcements. Katha Pollitt's Virginity or Death recommended strongly and obviously a book that will lead to passionate discussions and debates. Antonia Juhasz' The Bush Agenda, just as strongly recommended, that will explain how we ended up in Iraq and how the hell we're going to get out.