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There was always something transparently cynical about Obama’s lofty promise to “go after employers” instead of undocumented workers themselves, as if making it impossible for immigrants to find decent jobs were something other than persecution. But why, in the search for someone of whom to make an example, would the Obama administration decide on American Apparel? If you’re trying to convince us that you’re “protecting immigrants from exploitation,” wouldn’t it be more intelligent to go after a place that doesn’t specifically market itself as a socially conscious “anti-sweatshop”? A place that doesn’t provide healthcare benefits and pay well over minimum wage? Or offer free English classes? Why not, I don't know, find a factory that doesn't provide its workers with free bikes and on-site bike mechanics? There are plenty of sketchy, example-ready slaughterhouses here in the Midwest, and you can bet they don’t provide their undocumented workers with in-factory massages. Julia Preston’s New York Times report is heartbreaking:
“I learned how to think here,” said Jesús, who would not reveal his last name because of his illegal status.
The company provides health and life insurance, he said, and he earns about $900 a week, with taxes deducted from his paycheck.
Like many others, Jesús said his next move was to hunt for work in Los Angeles. He will not return to Mexico, he said, because he is gay and fears discrimination.
“Being realistic,” he said, “I guess I’m going to have to go to one of those sweatshop companies where I’m going to get paid under the table.”
About 1,800 people are about to lose their jobs not because the economy is bad, their performance is weak, or their employer is struggling. They’re losing their jobs because they happen to be without documentation in a country where it is near-impossible for poor Mexicans and Central Americans without family already here to obtain permission to stay. Obama has spent the past few weeks talking up the millions of people without access to health care in this country. His adminstration just added a few hundred to that number.
Photograph of Dov Charney by Stephen Shugerman/Getty Images.
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The Hills premiered last night on MTV with a new “character” narrating the dull goings-on of pretty blondes I can’t actually tell apart: Kristin Cavallari, last seen during her halcyon Laguna Beach days of youth (or maybe frolicking with C-list celebrities in the tabloids), has moved to Los Angeles. But don’t expect any welcome parties. I mean, the episode is called “It’s On, Bitch.” And the immediate, compulsory frenemyship on last night's show is more brutally staged than a Michael Vick dog fight.
So it begins: Lo, Audrina, and Stephanie are sitting and talking (what?!) about Kristin’s impending introduction to their show, which is sort of amazingly meta and also sort of whatever. Stephanie comments that Kristin has the reputation of being a “maneater” which she defines peculiarly, evidencing her statement with the fact that “Brody bought her a dog!” (GASPS all around.) She also points out that Kristin has slapped a girl. The scene ends with Lo asking, dreadfully, “Is she going to be our friend now?” And how good of her to ask! Because friendship on the show isn’t really a choice one female individual makes when confronted with another female individual she feels warmly toward; it’s a production decision. So yes, Lo, you will be friends with her. And yes, you will fear her and then talk behind her back. Because that’s the way friendship on TV is engineered.
Of course, that’s nothing new for The Hills, and probably 50 percent of its viewers watch it ironically, while the other 50 percent watch guiltily. But what got my goat during this episode was just how blatant and over-the-top the manufacturing of the conflict was. Kristin walks into Spencer and Heidi’s barbeque and says “Hello” to Justin Bobby, Audrina’s on-and-off-again loser Beatnik of a boyfriend. Suddenly Stephanie is yelling at Kristin about “not respecting Audrina.” This, of course, devolves into the the episode’s namesake “It’s ON, bitch” retort. And there you have it—two girls who already hate each other over a simple misdirected salutation. Fighting would be more likely over a stolen hot dog, but despite this, the episode ends with Stephanie cautioning everyone about Kristin. Doing her best Men’s Warehouse impression, she tells her clan to treat their new addition cautiously: “She’s the girl who's going to stab us in the back, I guarantee it.”
Which is likely true, because the producers will command it. I mean, how would The Hills stay interesting without constant overly scripted cat fighting among friends? I guess they’d all have to get jobs or something. BORING.
Photograph of Kristin Cavallari on The Hills by MTV.
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Sen. Olympia Snowe cast her lot with pro-choicers today, in helping to vote down the amendment to the health care bill that would have barred payment for abortions. Tim Noah explains:
The health reform bill already prohibits the government from including abortion coverage among the benefits that insurers must include in health plans sold on the newly created government health insurance exchange. The worry is that government subsidies to private insurance premiums might somehow end up paying for abortions because participating private insurers may have decided on their own to cover abortions. (About half of all employer-provided policies do.) Even this dire possibility is prohibited under the bill's current language, because insurers are required to segregate public subsidies from the money they use to pay for abortions.
Because of Snowe's vote, the amendment, introduced by Sen. Orrin Hatch, went down 10-13 (Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad voted for it.) But that doesnt mean, of course, that abortion isn't still a thorn in health reform's side. Will Saletan argues that the pro-choice side is meeting its libertarian maker. "Keep your hands off my body" translates straight to "Keep the bureaucrats off my health care." In other words, the right is using the libertarian argument to bolster the case for private insurance. I don't really buy it: I see the connection, but it seems attenuated and abstract to me. If abortion torpedos health care reform, it will be because of old-fashioned abortion politics, it seems to me. Conservatives will have found the wedge they need to peel off the votes. In the end, you gotta think this will fail, since some of those pro-life votes are Democrats, and losing on health care is supposed to be party suicide. But we'll see. In the meantime, today's vote has to be a comfort for the White House.
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Lauren, you make good points about the victim-blaming in the Roman Polanski documentary. What’s equally galling is the excuse-making by his defenders in Hollywood. Such intellectual dishonesty should not be surprising, coming as it does from people who make their living creating fantasy for mass consumption. I found myself burning with outrage while sitting in my car yesterday listening to a story about Polanski on NPR. Until his recent arrest I never really knew the full extent of his crime: that his victim was a 13-year-old child, that he’d given her liquor and a mind-altering drug, and that he raped her anally and vaginally while she pleaded with him to stop.
What was particularly infuriating in the NPR piece was this exchange between reporter Karen Grigsby Bates and former movie studio head Mike Medavoy:
MEDAVOY: I think it's, you know, everybody knows that this is a man who's made some great movies, you know, I think they are sympathetic to him.
BATES: Medavoy is hoping if or when Polanski returns, the judge will say something like this.
MEDAVOY: He's suffered enough and he should move on and the rest of the world should move on.
It's telling that many of those lamenting Polanski’s supposed persecution are men and other Hollywood elites. This goes to directly to the points Jessica made in her piece about Polanksi’s celebrity earning him a pass in public opinion. This other NPR piece also addresses how our celebrity culture can skew our judgment of criminally-minded stars.
That Medavoy, 68, and Polanski, 76, are generational peers is not surprising. What is surprising is the reaction of Polanksi’s victim, Samantha Gailey, now Samantha Geimer, a 45-year-old wife and mother of three. She wishes the whole thing would go away. She doesn’t think Polanski should be prosecuted. She has forgiven him and moved on with her life.
Forgiveness is one thing. Punishment is a different matter and Polanski richly deserves to be punished. Susan Estrich, a law professor at the University of Southern California and a rape victim herself, made this very point in the NPR piece.
“My heart goes out to this woman and her desire to make this all go away,” she said. “As a matter of fact, most of us who've been raped in one way or another want to close our eyes and make it go away.” But Estrich lost me when she added: "But rape isn't a crime against the victim. It's a crime against the state.”
Really? The state is more aggrieved by rape than the actual victim?
To me, Polanski’s reprehensible actions are unforgivable. If he at least owned up to them without excuses, publicly apologized to his victim, and did some jail time, then he could argue that he’d accepted punishment, paid his debt to society, and should now be left alone to attend to his art.
When Geimer weighed in on Polanski in a 2003 Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times, she said she understood why he fled, facing as he was a 50-year sentence by an allegedly biased judge.
“My attitude surprises many people,” she wrote. “That's because they didn't go through it all; they don't know everything that I know ... The media made that year a living hell, and I've been trying to put it behind me ever since.”
All very true, I’m sure. Still, I can’t help but wonder what if some horrible man did to Geimer’s children what Polanski did to her? Even 32 years later would she not want justice for them? I don’t mean to judge her—after all she, not I, did suffer “a living hell” in the aftermath of her rape. If it were me, though,I’d still be calling for Polanski’s head.
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So, Rep. Patrick Kennedy thinks that people should be able to keep information about STDs and abortions out of their electronic health records, which are mandated for every American by 2014 under the stimulus law that was enacted in February.
Why? I get that there are privacy concerns regarding electronic health records. It skeeves me out a little that the government will have access to them “when authorized.” (Guess I’ll have to read the half-dozen HIPAA forms I fill out every year a little more closely.) But if we’re going to have them, why is abortion special? And STDs? STDs can lead to cervical cancer and infertility. Isn’t that kind of important for a doctor to know?
Yes, there are stigmas associated with abortion, and maybe some women are embarrassed. But doesn’t that apply to other health issues? I was a little embarrassed about my high cholesterol score last year. And it resulted from a personal failing: I was eating too much! Can I keep that out? Can men keep out their erectile dysfunction? Any argument for keeping abortion and STD info private is an argument against electronic health records as a whole.
Maybe I’m a little worked up because I have been hearing, in regards to the Penelope Trunk Twitter kerfuffle, that women shouldn’t have to hide their abortions. Is Amanda right that “the uterus just another organ”? Some women want to scream loud and proud about their abortion and not be criticized. But when it is time to include such information on medical records, all of a sudden it becomes private and none of anyone’s business. You can’t have it both ways.
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There is a complicated old joke, not worth telling, but to partially paraphrase the punch line: The difference between heaven and hell is that in hell, the Swiss are the lovers and the French run everything, and in heaven, the French are the lovers and the Swiss run everything.
Obviously, this conclusion has been thrown into question by the botched Polanski pick-up, proving that the Swiss are not really the best stewards of swift order and that the French have some very odd ideas about the art of love, or whatever you want to call it. The joke does not make mention of the United States, but I have a suggestion: In heaven, the Americans are the keepers of justice, and in hell, the Americans are ... the keepers of justice. Because if you are hauled into court in this country, as the Polanski brouhaha displays, it is both the best of times and the worst of times. Right now I cannot even imagine how it will all turn out, but since justice is meted out so unevenly anyway, I wonder if inherent in Scorsese et al.’s defense of Polanski isn’t the suggestion that there ought to be a genius exception to the rule of law—that is, if you are a great artist, what’s a little rape on the side?
Notwithstanding the due process concerns that the Polanski case raises—which are for legal scholars, not Hollywood directors, to quibble with—if we excuse Polanski from punishment, aren’t we really saying that his life is more valuable than the life of a 13-year-old girl’s just because he happened to direct Rosemary’s Baby? Taking that to its logical extreme, we have to assume that Bob Dylan can never go to jail, even if he rapes a teenager or two, and that Picasso could not have served time for whatever felonies he might have committed in his brazen lifetime, and—well, I could go on. Where would we draw the line? Does Leonard Cohen qualify? Neil Diamond?
In fairness, comparing apples to apples, as they say, the life of a great director is probably more valuable than that of a 13-year-old girl—young ladies that age are really irritating. But if we follow this modest proposal to its logical conclusion and valorize some life over other life, then we are creating a society that was last tried out on a large and (highly) organized scale by the Nazis, who are the bogeymen in Polanski’s closet. After all, to say that Aryans are better than everyone else is not much different than saying talented people are better than everyone else. And if we make this ruling for Roman Polanski, we pretty much have to do it for everybody.
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KJ, I agree that the idea of having adults hover around playing kids to make sure their games are on track seems a touch overbearing—not for teachers, necessarily, but certainly for parents. But the part of Paul Tough’s New York Times Magazine article on the “Tools of the Mind” program that stood out to me wasn’t the image of micromanaging adults but the question of how, exactly, they’re supposed to regulate the kids given the rules of the program. In the “Tools of the Mind” classrooms, Tough writes:
There are no gold stars, no telling the class that they are all going to have to wait until Jimmy is quiet; even timeouts are discouraged. When there is a conflict—when, say, Billy grabs a toy from Jamal—the Tools of the Mind teacher’s first questions are supposed to be: What was it in the classroom that made it hard for Billy to control himself? And what mediators could help him do better next time?
But what’s wrong with gold stars? I understand the premise that kindergarteners should be trained to value self-control for its own sake, rather than seeking extrinsic rewards. That was the explanation my parents usually gave when I asked why, unlike all my friends’ parents, they didn’t give me money or a fancy meal out when I got a good report card. But a gold star is hardly a $20 bill. When students work toward earning one, it’s not the star itself they seek. It’s the approval from an adult figure; the recognition that they’ve done well. Still extrinsic, yes, but not such a bad thing to encourage. After all, we spend our adult lives working to please the powerful people above us; why not train kids to do the same?
When I read the rules about the types of discipline “Tools of the Mind” bans, I was reminded of a video of my cousin from his Montessori school days. My cousin, all dark curls and dimples, was filmed at each of the work stations in school, where teachers sat beside him as he completed tasks. The instructors weren’t supposed to tell him he was right or wrong, but just ask questions to nudge him along. Sort of like how “Tools of the Mind” teachers should ask why a student is misbehaving rather than punish him for it. You can see the teachers occasionally struggle with this verbal gymnastics. One asked him to spell “fox.” He did, then added, with glee, “Did you know a fox is a coyote?” Since she couldn’t shoot back that it wasn’t, she instead said “You know that a fox is like a coyote.” Grinning, he explained, “It is a coyote.” And that was that.
In my family, we still coo “It is a coyote” whenever someone is being needlessly obstinate. But the thing is, a fox is not a coyote. And my cousin’s school’s teaching philosophy prohibited the teacher from saying as much, just as it sounds like the rules of “Tools of the Mind” strip teachers of some authority to reward good behavior and punish bad. Elena Bodrova, a child development scholar who helped build the “Tools of the Mind” curriculum, explains the thinking behind the no timeouts rule: “These kids are not born criminals. Even if they do something that is completely out of bounds, they do it because they can’t stop themselves.” I appreciate that sentiment, and the encouragement for teachers to understand why kids are acting out. But sometimes you need to lay down the law—to punish repeated bad behavior or say that no, a fox is not a coyote.
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Last night on the Good Wife, the new CBS drama about a political wife that we discussed on last week’s podcast, a very timely plot played out. A stripper and former hooker accused a rich guy of rape and sued him. With his flop of hair, he was a dead ringer for Michael Kennedy and we were sure he’d be guilty. But then the judge in the civil case ruled in his favor. Amazing, I thought, Here is a show so brave, so sensitive to the changing political climate, that they risk having this jerk of a defendant be innocent. Did they consult a medium who told them how the Hofstra case would play out?
But no. The last few moments brought yet another twist, where the accused was led off in handcuffs for his criminal trial. Which leads to another less surprising point, about the tedious, endless loop of the legal drama, on which the rich white man is always guilty and the hooker is not only beautiful but always has a heart of gold.
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There's a CNN article today about increasingly popular iPhone apps that track sex offenders and other convicts. The story starts off with Tracy Rodriguez, a mother in Houston, who uses her iPhone to get "information revealing the sex offenders who live within a 10-mile radius of where her children practice sports or watch movies." Apparently this mom feels that the app makes her make more informed choices, and she checks it several times daily. I thought this was just a punch line in the movie Knocked Up, not an actual trend.
Does this strike anyone else as absurd? It's good to be concerned about the health and well-being of your children, but restricting your movements, hour by hour, based on an exaggerated perceived threat, sounds like a personal prison. It also sounds like a terrible lesson for kids. These apps will teach them to be afraid all the time. What's more, there are the privacy issues implicit in this sort of thing, since,as the article points out, the public records the app is based on could be out of date or incorrect. But Rodriquez is not alone in her fear, as the Offender Locator app has been downloaded more than a million times.
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From where I sit, Nina, I wasn’t at all surprised by the new homeless American girl doll. For the last few years, “homeless” has been the catch-all term for the less fortunate in American schools. Since preschool, my kids have been asked by various teachers about how they can “help the homeless.” Many of them live in neighborhoods where street people are nonexistent, so they understand the term only in its most literal sense, of “in between real estate deals.” I saved the answers my son’s preschool class gave to the question of how to help the homeless:
1. Give them a key.
2. They can sleep in my sister’s room!
3. My mom has a friend who sells houses. Maybe they can buy one!
Nothing wrong with a little budding compassion, of course. But the whole thing has the effect of making homelessness seem rather anodyne and confusing. Once, a homeless advocacy group gave a presentation about stereotypes. They had an African-American man in tattered clothes lie down on the stage, and a white woman in a suit walk past him. They then asked the assembly which one was homeless. Why, the white woman in the suit, of course! It’s only a tiny step from that to Gwen, the new homeless doll.
This philosophy of homelessness is a throwback to the Reagan years, when the left tried to sell the idea that homelessness can affect anyone, there but for the grace of God. Since then we have learned a lot more about chronic homelessness and the particular conditions that lead to it, beyond just economic hard times. Of course it’s difficult to talk to kids about schizophrenia, and the collapse of institutional care, and alcoholism. But there must be some better way than transmitting that homelessness looks like a cool thrift store shopper.
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