rattlewind

Take the veil, Mr. Straw

I have just come across the following info in an Associated Press article

[Comments] by Jack Straw, a former foreign secretary who now is leader of the House of Commons, [have] plunged Britain into a debate over Islamic integration.

Straw said in a newspaper column published Thursday that he believes the veils favored by some Muslim women inhibit communication and are a sign of division in society. At his constituency office, Straw said he asks that veiled women reveal their faces, adding that the women have always complied, and a female assistant is always present.

On Friday, British media quoted Straw as going further, saying that he would prefer that Muslim women not wear veils at all. "I just find it uncomfortable if I'm trying to have a conversation with someone whose face I can't see," Straw told the BBC.

I am not at all a fan of religious rituals, but neither am I a fan of western male arrogance. Straw is not arguing that the women are forced to wear veils against their will (he says "favored by some Muslim women"). He is arguing that they should defer to his taste for seeing the faces of the people he is talking to. But, in fact, they are visiting him as his constituents in his district office. He is the one who should be deferential to them (or is that too much of an American idea of representatives being the servants of the people). Why can he not look into the women's eyes and speak to them? Perhaps it is too important to him as a politician and manipulator of people to see how they respond to his words (and the theater of his body and facial language). Is he worried their lips are curling up in a snicker or down in disappointment that his political language is fluffy and misleading? This little vignette of Mr. Straw's displeasure wonderfully exposes the byplay in political language: that it is not the content of what is being said but rather the reading of people's emotional responses for clues to appropriate theatrical tricks that is important to a politician. That there are so many books teaching us to "read" people suggests that today content is less important than the subtleties of non-verbal persauasion.

I suggest that politicians (male as well as female) don veils so that we are more likely to pay attention to the content of their words rather than their toothy smiles and the false sincerity got up by square jaws and paternal wrinkles more likely acquired at late night cocktail parties than sleeplessness over the wars, poverty and environmental destruction for which they are responsible.

Da Bomb

Now that North Korea has exploded even a spindly nuclear bomb one sees a glimpse of a scary future where every little, fearful country wastes its lunch money on such paranoid fireworks. One glimpses the future too in the effect of science to make the at first difficult technologies as easy and common as hamburgers. Down the road we are coming to quantum and robotic technologies, immensely difficult now but eventually to be made easy and routine. Monstrous super computers will track populations and robots will do the work of killing, like a beastly terra cotta army. If N. Korea can starve its people to leap its rulers into the 21st century, then Pakistan (which already has the bomb) is primed to go forward to more horrible things using its opium money, and so with all the gang-run nations of the world. What's to prevent the drug lords of Colombia from getting the bomb for a menace to guarantee their capitalistic independence--or robot planes to deliver their products?

There are three great forces of terror in the world today: greed (as always), religion (as always) and technology (the relative newcomer). Clearly, the only good force in the world today is the will to survive and the evidence (to which most are blind) that survival of the self depends on the survival of the other. What an interesting horse race: to see if the human survival instinct will outperform the above three horses of the apocalypse. I think someone should try his or her hand at some speculative fiction: writing up some putative newspapers from the future--say a hundred years from now. Even if it were fiction, it would give an interesting perspective of someone looking back on the pot about to boil over and what happened to it.

Another excellent comment on this topic can be found at:

http://www.dailyawesome.com/2006/10/oh_crap

PEACE?

Friday the Thirteenth of this month the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced. Do I believe in omens? No. Well, a little. Enough to make me squeamish about this date. But then again, what is the outlook for peace, anyway. On the one hand, the peace thermometer seems to be rising (a good sign) in Uganda and Sudan (but not Darfur) but it's frozen since the nuclear test in N. Korea. To mix my metaphor, you push war down in one place and it pops up in another.

The headline that struck me today was "US unwilling to ban guns despite plague of school shootings" (AFP Press service). Perhaps we could re-word that to read "World unwilling to ban guns despite plague of everywhere shootings." What a dream, banning guns worldwide....

More blogs about rattlewind.