Roe v. Wade

[ Roe's 35th anniversary was this week. So...]

This is why I'm pro-choice:

One of the biologically defining features of the human species is neoteny - the fact that our rate of development has been slowed relative to that of our closest kin. Long childhood, long babyhood, and long fetushood. Some events of late gestation that for other primates occur inside the uterus, take place for humans in the first year of independent life. That is, human embryonic development has stretched out so long that bits of it now actually occur after birth. Dramatic changes have been selected for in our recent evolution to accommodate this slowed development. For example, female hips have widened in the effort to keep up with ever-larger babies (particularly their heads) - and sadly without complete success, as the phenomenon of death during childbirth attests. Moreover, humans are born with unfused skull plates so the brain can continue its explosive rate of growth after birth.

That's on the hardware side of things. Growing to be a fully socialized and participatory human can be viewed as its own evolutionary process, and absorbs years of training. Consciousness is no lightswitch flipped on at conception, or at the second trimester, or at birth, or on the first birthday. There's no moment. It is a gradual process of coming into an intentional and reciprocative relationship with one's environment (particularly the social environment) as based on an ever-refined mental model which a child builds of world-and-self.

It's my belief that consciousness lay in the process of building and maintaining a model of the world - and then of course pursuing one's intentions within it. As social primates, the models we build intimately involve our interactions and transactions with other social primates (which, tangentially, is why most of us are so religious: we find it natural to extrapolate the idea of a social hierarchy all the way on up). And I believe it is no terrible oversimplification to say that this process of becoming conscious, indeed of becoming fully human, maps closely onto the process of acquiring language. They're not one and the same, but they're powerfully correlative.

So if you catch the implications of this - of my emphasis on the great duration involved in the development of consciousness - you can see how my personal pro-choice view may even be considered extreme. People want to find a pat answer in this debate and stick with it: life starts here, or life starts there. I say that life - conscious life - comes gradually, meaning that it comes late. And so I strongly believe abortion is not and cannot be murder. Which doesn't make it particularly laudable, nor goes to deny the difficult feelings it entails for any woman choosing it. But for all that, it is morally unobjectionable.


Now, that was a tough argument to make. Not because the argument is baseless, shabby, or uncompelling - I obviously happen to think it's none of those things - but because nobody wants to find themselves in a political debate saying, "I shall now explain why my position is not pro-murder." Because that's a tough rhetorical spot to be in, the pro-choice movement as a whole has gravitated toward other framings. Understandably, they'd like to spend their time talking about something else. Heck, look at that name: pro-choice. What does that mean? Of what sort of choice are we pro-, here? Pro-choice-of-bunnies? Pro-choice-of-peaches? The movement can't even address its own position in its own moniker.

And watch out, because if the pro-choice movement won't argue that abortion is not murder, they've abandoned the field for the pro-life movement to hold that debate all by themselves. Which is why rhetorically I think the pro-choice side has slowly been losing this fight over the past couple of decades.

Consider:

Pro-Life Person: "Help! There is a murder taking place!"

Pro-Choice Person: "Butt out! Everyone has a right to privacy!"

And that's why the pro-choice argument must strongly articulate that there is no murder taking place. The pro-lifers are simply pressing a prior claim.

[Here's a stoned-in-the-dorm-room thought experiment: suppose a woman and a man are into extreme infantilistic fetishism. And suppose the woman is morbidly obese. Okay, the woman has her abdomen surgically opened, is liposuctioned to clear space - the grown man is thoroughly disinfected, fitted with a snorkel, and insinuated in her belly where he is sewn cozily into place. I guess the snorkel is left poking out of the woman's navel. Now, does the woman have the right to block the man's snorkel - or by another means kill him - because he happens to be inside her body, and she has a right to privacy?]

The awkward terms of this national debate - "murder" versus "privacy" - were in no small measure set by Roe v. Wade. Unlike many other western democracies (Britain, France, Italy) America did not establish a right to abortion through a publicly-debated legislative process. The right to abortion was given by judicial decree, and it happened to be handed down on this specious basis of privacy rights. To that extent, perhaps the pro-choice movement hasn't found itself in its awkward debating posture out of the rhetorical cowardice we're so accustomed to from the Democratic Party. Perhaps it's more because they've been making the case they need to make in consonance with the legal defenses of Roe they've been pressing for 3.5 decades now.

But rather than defend Roe - that is, rather than make the privacy argument - a better idea may be to take the offensive - and also abandon a double-negative for a positive - in fighting for a legislative guarantee of reproductive rights: something which would be independently assured in the case Roe were ever to go away as a piece of legal reasoning protecting abortion. The Republicans have had an anti-abortion amendment in their plank since 1980: why not pre-emptively push for a reproductive-rights amendment from the other side?

Hillary wins

As of 3 minutes ago, it looks like Hillary pulled ahead in the New Hampshire primary: 40 to Obama's 36. Thus ends a brief, shining moment - beginning last Thursday night - when it appeared for a little while that somebody other than Clinton was going to be the Democratic nominee.

But I think that's over; I think she'll go on now to sweep "Super Duper Tuesday" on February 5.

Oh, wait - I thought I wasn't posting to this blog anymore. Damn!

I don't care about politics anymore.

An exaggeration for effect? Maybe. But if you scan down to my previous post, you'll see it was several weeks back (ten already - yow). And I'm only writing today, on this first day of a new year, to announce that this experiment in political blogging is going on ice (lest one fret, I'm commencing a new blog. So you could say I'm not so much abandoning politics as taking up religion).

Oh yeah - there's another reason I'm writing today, which is to post this:

[The idea for this cartoon is actually about as old as the blog itself (six months), so I'm glad to have drawn it at last. Even though I didn't draw it very well. George Bush Sr. sure doesn't look like George Bush Sr., despite being traced from a photo. In the second panel he does look a little like Bill O'Reilly, if that helps, and it doesn't.]

But to the matter at hand: not caring about politics.

All my life I never really did care about politics, by the way. My apathy was based on the sound intuition that America is a behemoth. It's got a vast and peculiar momentum - economically, culturally, socially; and sure, doing one's piece by being an engaged voter and so forth is a wonderful thing, platitudinally speaking. But it has always been clear that the Beast is going to do whatever the Beast is going to do. And it was also clear, back in the '90s when being a political junkie meant following non-issues like Whitewater and blue-dress ejaculate, that politics was at best just a food fight, something for Rush Limbaugh to simper about. Sure, maybe stuff was at stake - will some tin-pot dictator, formerly on the CIA payroll, get bombed this year? Will we get universal health insurance someday - or will the Republicans keep your second cousin's grandfather from getting that transplant he needs? In other words, you could always consider the stuff at stake to be reasonably remote if you liked. And why not like? We all have other stuff in our lives to worry about.

So I didn't care about politics.

And then - 9-11 didn't change everything. Of course that's not what you hear from most quarters, where it's well-echoed that 9-11 changed everything. For me, no. Not that I sided with the terrorists, mind you, as I might have been accused of doing for saying such a thing in the hurricane of jingoism following the attacks. All I mean is that 9-11 didn't surprise me. In the back of my imagination I'd always figured something like it - or something much, much worse - would be coming down the pike. And, terrible though it be, things like 9-11 and things much worse than 9-11 are still coming down the pike at us today. Very little of what's gone on in the past six years has helped make that any unlikelier.

But what did change everything, as far as I was concerned, was the substantially-less-famous October 11, 2002. As it happened, I was at home in bed that day, hung-over, lying next to a radio tuned to NPR. They were running live Senate coverage of the Iraq war resolution debate, which had passed the House the day before. Now... I hadn't been paying a great deal of attention to politics in the months prior. But I knew the claim that nothing more was on the table than a "use-of-force resolution" - rather than an open declaration of war - was perfect bullshit. Bush was clearly going into Iraq, and that was clearly that.

I also knew that the arguments being adduced in favor of this resolution, with mind-numbing repetitiveness, by Senator after Senator - whether Democrat or Republican - were perfect bullshit too. "Saddam gassed his own people." Yeah, 14 years earlier, partly abetted by Reagan's de-listing of him as a supporter of terrorism. An undoubted atrocity nonetheless - but grounds for invasion? We'd gone through a Gulf War and a dozen years of sanctions since the Halabja massacre, and needed to invade his country now? While our Uzbek ally Karimov was out there boiling people in oil that very day?

(I know, Saddam had also been screwing around with the weapons inspectors. But there were some very shrewd proposals on the table for beefed-up inspection regimes: let the inspectors show up for a look-see whenever and wherever they like, and if they're turned away then the facility gets an airstrike within 15 minutes. What was Saddam going to do about it? In other words, there were options available to us shy of taking over the whole frigging country.)

So, hearing the debate that day changed something for me. Not my belief that political activism "makes a difference" (which it actually does: just a very, very, very small difference). But rather my belief that the stuff at stake - in this case, our response to 9-11 - was something I had the luxury of ignoring. Because here we were, starting a war on manifestly absurd grounds. Folks running around years later saying "Bush lied" were either disingenuous or missing the point. Not that he wasn't lying about his case for war; of course he was. But he never did lie very well, and I can attest as a casual observer of the period that it was always obvious his case for war was false. Thus, I figured - best to get that voter registration updated, spend some effort keeping abreast of the issues, and, you know, generally do my very-small piece.

So I went on to read 30-odd books, and spent a couple hours daily for the next few years inhaling the news (my knowledge of current music was an early casualty of the War on Terror). For the sheer quixotic joy of it, I went to New York during the '04 Republican National Convention and ended up carrying a flag-draped coffin past Madison Square Garden. I didn't think the world was getting particularly changed by any of this - just like it wouldn't if I took up writing summaries of political items for the online reading pleasure of a dozen or fewer friends. But I did hope that writing a blog might be entertaining, which it has been, at least until lately, when I began to realize I'm back to not caring about politics so much. This comes partly as a relief, as I appreciate getting back those two hours every day.

But mainly it's saddening, because of why politics has been losing my interest. Ironically the problem is that things have generally been going my way. But at what cost? The Republican Party has dealt itself some pretty nice blows of late. Through sheer, brilliant incompetence they've lost a war they readily could have won, and in any event should never have started. They're so damn venal and sexually repressed that they've buried themselves beneath an impressive hillock of scandals. They've undermined our economic health in ways that will continue to become clearer in the couple years ahead. They've hobbled our international power diplomatically, militarily, and economically for the foreseeable future. If this stuff is the price of being proven right, I'd like to be shamefully and embarrassedly wrong. But I'm not; they are, and each candidate the Republicans has out there running for President right now is wronger than the next (Ron Paul weirdos be damned). Which is why the Republicans will lose in November. Iraq-plus-the-bursting-of-the-housing-bubble is more than enough to do it, but their whackjob anti-immigrant nativism truly seals the deal.

But this brings us around to the Democrats, and closer to the heart of why I'm finding myself losing enthusiasm. They refuse to take the ball of their success - thrown into their hands this past year through no great fault of their own - and simply run with it. Before us now, in the looming post-Bush power vacuum, lay a politico-historical moment where a lot of stuff could get set straight. Insert your whole liberal laundry list here. Single-payer health insurance. A Manhattan-Project-esque "Apollo" program to remake our energy infrastructure. Little stuff like the restoration of civil liberties and true checks and balances in our government. And some kind of plan for Iraq, since I'm not sure what the hell we should be trying to do over there anymore. The three-state plan always sounded like a good idea to me; maybe it still is.

But there's the rub: there isn't a very imaginative debate going on around these issues. The Democrats will cobble together some kind of health program (but nothing particularly optimal or visionary). They'll toss some bucks at ethanol, and at those new lightbulbs. Maybe the rate of lobbyist control over our regulatory agencies will go down a tic. The same crap will proceed largely unaltered in Iraq, but strenuous efforts will be made to frame it differently for the press. Maybe some of the more egregiously illegal abuses of executive power - torture, surveillance, and stuff we don't yet know about - will be more or less rolled back, but not publicly repudiated to the extent that the precedent won't still be there for the next guy.

In this next, Democratic administration I just anticipate a lot of "Yeah, whatever" all around. A plethora of minimal solutions born from the deathly fear that anything bolder will lose the next election. And should that turn out true, and should nothing change too dramatically, then soon enough it'll duly be considered time to give the Republicans another shot. And there we'll all be all over again.

In short, I've been feeling pulled back toward my original intuition about politics. An attitude well-summed-up by Bill Murray's brilliant "It Just Doesn't Matter" speech from Meatballs. Things change in this great nation of ours - but slowly, annoyingly, by half-measures and rarely very decisively. Consider civil rights: have things gotten better for African Americans in this country in the past fifty years? Sure. But that's just the point - it's been fifty years. And things may have gotten better, but there's more "better" out there for them yet to get. That Beast - the American behemoth - is going to do what it's going to do, in its own way and on its own schedule.

Hope has not escaped Pandora's box, of course. Best still to keep one's voter registration current and to stay abreast of the issues. I haven't changed my mind about that. But - to keep score on whether House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers intends to follow up on the flouted subpoenas for testimony from top administration officials regarding their roles in the US Attorney firing scandal? (to take one example out of 218) - I guess I'm not feeling like I've got two hours a day for that anymore. Because Conyers isn't going to follow up; Pelosi has made sure of it; she's scared to death of stumbling in the next election, and believes that somehow meekness will help. Sickest of all, from a market-research standpoint she is perhaps right. And impeachment? Don't make me laugh, or cry, or laugh until I cry. Impeachment of every impeachable member of the Bush Administration goes so far beyond being richly deserved as to be an exigent matter in the defense and preservation of our democracy. But no, not this time, that's not how the ball bounces. The Beast is going to do whatever the Beast is going to do.

So I figured I'd take up writing about the Bible for awhile instead.