The Three Musketeers, Part II: Dumas and Misogyny

So, sadly, there is more to write about the charming little French novel I recommended to readers a few days ago.  It turns out, this funny little comedy has a rather gruesome ending, with an administration of state-sanctioned capital punishment the ultimate expression of justice and a free France.  Of course, French style, the capital punishment is a beheading, though not with a guillotine, yet, obviously.

This, however, is not the reason why the 'serious' portion of the comedia merited a second post so soon after the first.  The justice is unfortunately served against a woman, whose original crime, the thing which set her off on a feedback loop of growing ostracization and criminalization, is that at age fourteen or sixteen or so she, a young, whip-smart, bombshell French blonde, 'placed' in a Catholic convent as a novice, fucked a seminary student.  That's her ultimate crime, the thing which caused Athos to attempt to hang her; that, rightly or wrongly, prejudiced her English husband's brother toward thinking she'd poisoned the English husband; that puts her in a position where only ruthless obedience to Cardinal Richelieu buys her the privacy to live the life a bombshell twenty-five-year-old, widowed French noblewoman could normally expect to have, assuming she'd escaped convent life.

Here's the story, and remember, that enough of the children's movie is from the book to keep you current with the plot.  Milady de Winter was not actually tried for the theft that led to her branding, it was her lover, who, apparently, took it upon himself to steal valuables from the church of the convent they were trying to escape who was caught, tried and branded for the theft.  The lover's brother, who happens to be the local executioner, and charged with such punishments as branding a fleur de lis on thieves' shoulders, finds her, ties her up and brands her vigilante style, as revenge for having corrupted his brother.

What's a little repulsive about the whole thing--and remember, judging Dumas, while forgetting that he's a Catholic, during the counter-reformation, who's affirming his Catholic faith all the while declaring his political independence from its church, is what's called 'anachronistic' in the study of history, meaning that it's not exactly fair.  What's a little repulsive anyways, is that this is taken to justify all of the other crimes that are heaped upon her in what is, after all, because she's a spy and they have to try her by the old laws of chivalry and execute the beheading before the cardinal can get wind of it and reverse the gears of French justice, a kangaroo court.

Now, keep in mind, this woman has poisoned D'Artagnan's mistress not two days before, and that with the dying woman's word for testimony, which even an American court, today, would accept into evidence.  She's guilty and dead to rights on a capital crime, and she's the only villain in the book who's not an historical figure that Dumas can kill off whenever it pleases him.  But its makes the boring part of the novel that much more difficult to read that this woman, who might honestly be called more a victim than a perpetrator of crimes up, at least, until her marriage to the Count de Winter, gets piled up with these misogynistic, male-sexual-insecurity-rooted accusations for the commission of a crime natural to animal behavior.

Athos, especially, who has persecuted her for six or seven years, based on this brand, which has no legal basis, for a crime that she, herself, did not actually commit, however much the author makes it clear that, for the purposes of the actual character, she would believably have been encouraging the seminarian, even manipulating him into it, falls deeply in your esteem as he presides over her capital punishment for a second time.

I guess I still give the book an over all positive recommendation, I mean, anachrony and all, but its sad about how Athos comes out looking...

Alexandre Dumas and Nationalism

So, I've been reading the three musketeers on my phone, lately, and its awesome, hilarious, fun, a little raunchy and very French. The funniest thing about the whole book is that, although its about an affaire d'honneur that becomes a oneupsmanship race between the cardinal and this young, upstart Gascon boy, with the Gascon winning (forgetting the boy). All along however, if you already know the story, which of course, everyone misknows in the movie generation, you realize that in the original story, pre-children's movie adaptations, the honor involved is the Queen's, but in a very French, marry-for-money-love-a-lover sort of way, so that all of these tit-for-tat, public rivalries, some of them deadly, and all of which make up the very real fight that is going on just then over Nationalism, are set against a background of a life or death battle to get the Queen of France LAID! Ahhhhhhhhhhhh! Shaft of light, choir of angels, the whole nine yards.

So this fight, Nationalism, for those who don't know the whole story, at the time, was about whether one was going to be loyal to one's ethnic, supreme ruler, or one's own ethnic nation alone and independent, which is essentially the way to look at the reformation, as an ethnic split in Europe, with Protestants, ironically, more loyal to English interests than Spain or France ever were to Roman power. Nationhood, however, was the epic battle of the day, and if you're going to write the great French novel, you write it about one man, fighting the odds and the power of Rome. The marriage between the French king and a very desirable Spanish Habsburg princess was a tense one, but it was an important source of independent cooperation between Spain, Austria and France against Italy, and a direct line of succession is the best way to keep the sovereignty stable enough for all of the little moves that make up a grassroots struggle against an authority as far-reaching as the Catholic church.  Fights like those that D'Artagnan fights, the little punk Bernajoux, who is responsible for picking many of the fights between Cardinalists and King's men (i.e. Musketeers) in Paris, the haughty Count, who works for the cardinal in a capacity to have permission to cross the channel when a port is sealed, even the greedy, relatively rich commoner, his landlord. So if the French king cannot, in fact, be induced to conceive a child with the queen, and since all of the nobility of Europe is a single, extended family at the time anyways, it is no matter to nationalists who the crown prince's father is, so long as the world never truly knows, and the child is raised to think of France as his country, his birthright.

In The Man in the Iron Mask, Dumas underlines this exact point again, by taking for a king a man who has been imprisoned by the prior King of France all his life, but in France, by Frenchmen. In the end, like the dirt poor Gascon, who has nothing but his title and his father's hideous, barely marketable horse, he naturally sides with his homeland, and his people, which give the Gascon a much greater chance of social mobility, and represents the freedom so long denied to the new king, who knows little of religion, only has thoughts on right and wrong. It does not matter who is King of France, Dumas is saying, so long as he is French, first of all, and more or less just, second of all.

So it's funny every time D'Artagnan sets off on another super secret undercover mission.  This is when he's most like the don Quijote that Dumas compares him to, the farcical figure who imagines windmills on a distant hill to be giants and charges headlong, but in the end, he is actually doing something productive for the Nationalist cause.  It's funny and so very French, and if you're nerd enough to appreciate the irony, and remember all along that D'Artagnan is a ridiculous figure, it's a laugh aloud read.

No Peas

The last affordable grocery store between the Oakland border and the North Berkeley BART, excepting the Grocery Outlet on University two blocks from the freeway, closed for the last time 20 minutes ago. I know they just rebuilt the north Berkeley Safeway, and maybe they're planning to do the same thing down here, but until such time, only rich people (Whole Foods and Berkeley Bowl customers) are able to shop for a full selection of dairy, fresh produce, frozen foods and meats (especially pork products) in south Berkeley.

Wave Again

So, a few days ago, as I was writing the cover letter for that East Bay Express job, I overheard a woman talking to her friend, apparently about her son or daughter (the story that follows makes me think son) as if they were just a lazy good-for-nothing freeloader who was not in school because his mother told him it was what he must do, and did not have the slightest understanding of the meaning of hard work. This, as students on their summer break work feverishly around her at 1 o'clock on a Friday and she sips coffee and bitches to a friend. She caught my attention with a tone of righteous mockery, saying something like, "...and he goes, that sounds like third wave feminism..." clearly skeptical of the very existence or certainly the accuracy of such a categorization. I get it. I'd never heard of "third wave feminism" growing up raised by a third wave feminist (and her Suffrage/Women's Lib mother), and in point of fact, the very term itself is confusing and obfuscating, because if the third wave is essentially the elderstateswomen of the women's lib era and their proteges of the eighties and nineties (and that, to the best of my understanding is what merits the name), then it's really the fourth wave. Right? I mean, I'm a dude, but Seneca Falls is a wave of its own, Suffrage is a generation later, lumped with the depression, and Women's Lib is after the war and into Vietnam. Right? I mean, can we get it straight, please? I can understand how "third wavers" would rather not be pinned down, it's been their modus for thirty years now, "that's not what I said," "who are you to ask that question," and so forth, but unfortunately their children have been hearing those lines for thirty years. If "third" is the first word a substantial number of women scholars have ever voluntarily used to self-label, then we'll take third regardless of the reason you want to obfuscate the uniqueness of your ideology. Because that's really what this was about, that lady's denial of categorization, the misnomer label, used to cause confusion about just what constitutes a "third wave feminist," its about not wanting to be distinguished from earlier, successful movements because the inevitability of women gaining suffrage and thence moving into the workforce in a federated republic felt like momentum that should be tapped, that the image of inevitability would go a long way in creating the inevitability of a world according to Gloria Steinem. It was the Hillary Clinton strategy for winning the presidency. But here's the thing. Gloria Steinem did a couple of wonderful things, half a century ago. But Gloria Steinem is a bitch. And contrary to a recent Tina Fey meme I've seen going around, bitches do not get shit done, bitches get one or two things done, then everyone around them is too alienated to work with, for, or even in charge of them. Which makes "third wave" sort of ironic, really, since its the third thing, the third goal, the one that, whatever it should have been, won't get accomplished because the feminist movement turned into the Bitch Movement for the eighties and nineties. Its no coincidence that the label that "third wave" is meant to substitute for, academically, is "femme nazi," women who didn't want to be labeled certainly did not want to be labeled with that moniker for eternity, and 'we,' the academy, that good old boys club, accommodated with the first thing that was even slightly acceptable. And that's the real thing, that nothing substantial does distinguish the third wave strategically or tactically except for the bitchy attitude, and as some idiot trying to "take back the word" on Political Animals, that shitty send up of Clinton family drama that I watched hoping it would be another West Wing, said, "Never call a bitch a bitch, us bitches hate that." But here's the thing, those bitches are just a bunch of bitches, they don't have a point, you don't have to listen to their idiocy, because somewhere (I just know it) there is a rational woman, and you can always count on at least, like, twenty percent of all women to be in lucid windows of rationality at any given moment (that's a joke, get it?). No, you don't have to listen to their shit because no one else wants to hear their shit. Don't tell the bitch she's a bitch, tell the fucking world, and the world will respond "right on! You're right, man, fuck that bitch," and then she'll really hate that, because she'll be as powerless as she's always felt. Ok, I'm just gonna start spit-balling names for a new "wave" here, now, if I don't come up with many now I'll edit them in later or do another post: Fivers, um...Environmental Feminism, Gender Fusion, I don't know, I'm getting off topic. Bitch, is not the only thing worthy of critique about their ideology, its just the only real reason they've been shrinking instead of growing for the first time in a century. These are the assumptions that, of course, no group wishes to examine, and which the "third wavers" have successfully used to escape scrutiny by never publishing a crystallizing ideological manifesto. We all know the mantras however. I've already discussed the one about "All men think about is sex," (cliffsnotes: the reality is that sex is something that men are always thinking about, but even the human male's mind can hold more than that single, simple thought, at one time) Another, which I have to deal with in my thesis, is the refusal to accept anthropological explanations for social behaviors, the refusal to believe that discipline of mind and training from birth cannot overcome all inborn instincts, and the ridiculous belief that we would even want to do such a thing to our kids. Of course, with my thesis, the problem is a, you guessed it, third wave feminist, objecting to my application of this assumption to feminists broadly. I told him, I have worked through a simple argument, premise by premise with a woman my own age of a decidedly third-wave outlook, got buy in, at great effort, having to change the subject back to my argument, multiple times, but finally had buy in on every single minor and major premise, in sequence, without interruption. When I proposed the inevitable logical conclusion, this young woman flatly refused to acknowledge it, having no refutation, no rational argument at all. You're telling me that a student who is that adamantly irrational regarding a single point, who was intelligent enough for me to work through the logic piece by piece, knowing she could follow it, is not doing so according to an ideological belief? What about the scholar from my own literature. I did not have to depart my own literature to find an almost verbatim reprise of the point I refute in the thesis, and this from a scholar I agree with on every assertion she makes, I just disagree with her on this philosophical assertion she makes in the introduction to her article. The one female scholar after 1950 I agree with, I think. Of course, there's only one before 1950, and none before 1985 on my part of Africa. I'll end the post with a book recommendation, especially for women aspiring to be anthropologists or archaeology. Gertrude Caton-Thompson, with a woman photographer and a woman ethnologist, excavated The Great Zimbabwe in the 1930's, and was the first person to confirm beyond doubt the sequence of exclusively indigenous builders. Her report is the most professional, informative and straightforward example of the archaeologist's trade I have ever read (although my experience is limited to Africa, that's not insubstantial), and she's a BADASS. Not a bitch, but a fucking badass.

Help Wanted

Male human seeking female human being. Am perfectly capable of cleaning, feeding, driving and providing for my sustenance on a daily basis, as well as fixing broken things, building or assembling from poor plans, taking blame for bad ideas or missed plans, etc. Somehow can't figure out doing laundry or dishes on a consistent basis and can't find the motivation to clean my room but once a month.

On Media

So I'm writing today in honor of the East Bay Express, which posted a writing job on craigslist I'd love to get. I mentioned that I'm from SoCal, that I read the LA Times, and that I've been disappointed with both the SF Chronicle and the Oakland Trib and I wanted to write about what, as a reader, makes a newspaper worth reading, especially in print. Every time I get far enough south to catch a print copy of the LA Times, I find at least one article that impresses me with the editors' willingness to depart from traditional journalistic objectivity, not for the purpose of editorializing, as the Chronicle's journalists will happily do above the fold on the front page, but to offer deeper, sophisticated information on a complex or controversial topic, objectively, but with a serene confidence in the quantifiable truth of scientific conclusions and modern knowledge. The LA Times is not an outlet for conspiracy theorists or blowhards making more of their tiny, isolated little concern than it merits within the political movement it belongs to. Don't get me wrong, the editorial board is clearly far more conservative than its readership, and it engages in not-too-subtle, cynical attempts at mind control, like publishing in detail on every perceived gaffe by Barack Obama and giving every Hillary Clinton New Hampshire field office opening six-inches more than it deserved, while ignoring Clinton gaffes and Obama press releases alike. I wrote a letter to the editors about the coverage of the Occupy camp outside city hall, L.A. The letter lambasted politicians and newspapers alike for focusing on the $700,000 cost of replacing grass in a city park (done with one-third native growth, BTW, and looks more beautiful than before the protest) over the uncounted billions at stake to the general public if banks are allowed to continue over-leveraging and over-consolidating. I noted that the banks were a revenue stream both for the politicians themselves and for the papers, in which they advertise. When the paper printed my letter, it delivered my message faithfully, but with all idea of a media role in the narrative expertly edited out, without ellipses, as if it had never been. Hell, I don't care, I'm just glad my name got printed, and I'm still sitting here using their paper as my standard of what a print-news source should be, affordable, intelligent, objective and with enough funding to actually merit world and national news bureaus. That's the thing. There are only so many worthwhile international and national journalists in this world, apparently, and with a number of them just as good or better on camera or writing for someone on camera, there are probably only enough left over for, what, six worthwhile papers with true national stature? I doubt that many. Certainly, if you're not going to invest in the editing and journalists to compete to be one of those six, you're much better off just buying your news from the Associated Press and focusing on what a newspaper is really meant to be, the cultural touchstone, the community voice expressing the view and the concerns of the average reader, publishing their questions, concerns and divergent views when an issue really gets in their heads. Local papers should just be local papers. Just because your editorial board has pretensions that they, or their city, should be something more, does not excuse their wasting resources on terrible coverage just to say they have a Washington Bureau. Community newspapers are a necessity, the only thing print news still offers that digital media can't, physical community. It is a rare outlet that will be able to crystallize community over a large enough region today to stay funding a national print desk, LA, Chicago, New York. Atlanta, some Texas rag and Seattle are maybes, at best. San Francisco, sadly, has ceded this position to L.A. The world would have wanted San Fran, L.A. probably would not have fought it for long, but Bay Area residents are happy with their own insular, self-oriented attitudes. I say self-oriented, rather than self-centered, very deliberately, because its often very positively intended, this self-interest, it is merely personal, often extremely so. If you surrender the initiative for driving culture, however, you can't still try to have a relevant newspaper, because you've given up the very reason anyone would have to care about your voice. Just accept it that no one will want to buy your words outside your own area, win as many readers at home as you can, for being the best damn place to find out what's going on this weekend anywhere around, and don't waste your revenues on national news. Turn a profit. Survive. Your classified section, the comics and maybe a horoscope, the best Su Do Ku available, and the letters page. Focus on what people actually want. But there's still one thing, besides the fundamental rules at work, that makes the LA Times stand out, to me. On Tuesday, I was able to pick up a Times on my way to the Amtrak station. I didn't get to read it 'til I got into the city, because I was pleasantly diverted through most of the ride, but even on getting home at 8 pm I continued reading, because it was so refreshing to have. Now, Tuesday's Times had all of the regular trash that every other news outlet had that day. In depth bullshit on the Zimmerman trial, Monday morning quarterbacking of the BART strike, other in depth bullshit on that ex-spy asshole who can't stand up for the actions he calls heroic and tell the world why they are in court, sentimentalist trash on the firefighters in Arizona who just died. I skipped every one of those except the BART strike, stuff, something I usually don't have to do, but it was one of those banner days for shitty news, no matter what outlet you use. Inside the front section, next to the second half of the trite, paper-selling sentimentalist article on the dead firefighters from Southern California (bringing it home, even when its national news), was an article about what might have happened. It never says so, not directly, but the article very subtly makes it clear what seems to have happened. It begins by saying, matter-of-factly, and without undue emphasis, that at the time of the tragedy the fire was burning right through the middle of this town. The residents have been evacuated, and I'm making more of it than the paper did, but the fire was burning through people's homes. From there the article says that the team was fighting at the head of the fire, a direct confrontation strategy that is simply described as "rare," with no speculation whatsoever regarding why the decision may have been made to use it in this case. The article goes on to describe "proper" firefighting technique, always establishing a fall-back position of sufficient size, prior to attacking the fire lines, fighting with one foot "in the black," which the journalist translates for lay readers as, with one foot in burned-out space at the side of the fire. The article closes with direct quotes from agencies responsible for investigating the aftermaths of fire-related fatalities, and with opponents of universal investigations, one of whom points out that, in fire-fighting, the idea of holding a command entity responsible for a split-second decision that resulted in deaths minutes or hours down the road is not always right or fair. It becomes quite clear that what happened is nothing more or less than that these twenty men, only one of whom survived, made a reasoned decision, probably with universal consciousness of the risks, to skip the fall-back positions, to risk the fire head on, because people's homes were burning, that they sacrificed their safety and ultimately their lives, because that was their jobs, and when there was time to do the job safely, they did, but when people's lives are on fire, they were gonna put that job first. None of that hero worship comes through in the news article, not directly. It's just obvious, because the editors wanted it to be obvious, and the journalist wrote it well, exactly what happened, and exactly who these men were. So, to the East Bay Express; I am not trying to write that article for your paper, because that's national news, and your paper is rightly conscious of its geography and readership, but I want to write news about real things, that real people care about, that informs them of what really happened, so that without scandal, without baseless recriminations and without torture to the families of good men, the real story can get out right away, even if there aren't two sources, or even one, who will go on record to say it.

The Five Elements

It occurred to me, as I wikipedia stumbled across a debate between medieval muslim theologians and philosophers on the qur'anic verse that says the moon split, as predicted in advance by the prophet, that in a very real way, the so called five elements (*singsong* love, or really, life, being the fifth) really do describe the five things necessary to colonize another planet.

According to wikipedia, "splitting of the moon," philosophers argued that the verse could not refer to a literal splitting of the moon because, unlike the earth, the moon was not made up of all of the elements.  Now, this is not what that random ass old muslim scholar was talking about, but I got to thinking, that the reason the theory that a meteor impact had in some way made the moon look split open was not viable is because, although the moon is made up of earth, it has no fire, no molten core.  The fact that the moon also has no air or (much) water is not relevant to the splitting of the moon thing, but is absolutely true, that is what makes the moon uninhabitable, it is a rocky body, but without atmosphere, mass enough to have tectonic shifts, or liquid water.

I truly believe there is something to the idea of ancient aliens, but I do not believe in convenient space travel, so the idea of things like "the four/five elements" being an axiomatic list of the things necessary to support life on a distant planet is one of the sorts of things I credit oral traditions with being capable of preserving.

Imagine, if you will, some roughly human life somewhere in the solar system.  It is made up of DNA because DNA is such a fundamental molecule that it develops independently into the same thing instead of being built differently on every planet where life begins.  It progresses to the point where it is capable of sending small colony ships out on generations-long journeys between the stars.  When the colonists leave their own solar system they are completely on their own, without even effective means of communication, and although they propagate life in barren systems, or put humanoid colonies in "wild" systems, they inevitably would lose a lot of the social knowledge the original astronauts who lifted off from the home world would have had, especially because they would have had to devote their lives to figuring out the particularities of survival in the new world.

I don't know.  That's just my brand of crazy coming out.