Call it minstrelsy or blackface, just don’t call it history. Donning black makeup and acting out a racial stereotype—a Jamaican drug dealer, a shackled slave, a black celebrity—is as enduringly American as apple pie (slathered in chocolate ice cream). Recent examples include college campuses recoiling at blackface charades enacted by their students. And government employees dabbling in bronzer. These days, however, troupes of blackface performers no longer tour the country, and blackfaced actors no longer appear in big-budget Hollywood films. Right? Wait a minute, what about this summer’s Tropic Thunder?

Yes, that’s Robert Downey Jr. in black makeup, and, of course, we all love Robert Downey Jr. Almost as much as we love black makeup. But let’s look for nuance.

First, Downey’s character in Tropic Thunder: He plays a white actor who undergoes a sort of blackfacing surgery to play a black character in a war movie within the action comedy. I suppose this set-up satirizes movie roles that project black stereotypes to begin with—a brush of parody over Downey’s blackface—but... Really? They couldn’t come up with any other jokes? I know mainstream comedy recycles past yucks over and over again, but haven't we gone down this road enough?

Then again, the Tropic Thunder trailer made me laugh, even Downey’s racial mugging, which seems sly and knowing (might it be a case of having your cake and eating it, too?). What’s more, the movie has that patina of respectable Hollywood artistry, in no small part because hard-edged absurdity-guru Ethan Cohen shares credit for the screenplay, which was cowritten by the film's director, Ben Stiller. So, there’s likely some wit and intelligence nestled in between the action and broad comedy. The question of whether or not the movie is offensive will have to wait until we fork over nine bucks to see it. In other words, it looks like money in the bank. And isn’t that what blackface is really all about?

Microcredit may not work miracles, say two economists for Wilson Quarterly, but it does a damn good job in the face of deeply entrenched poverty. Rather than being a poverty-ending panacea, microcredit is laudable for the small advances it allows borrowers to make. Using microcredit money to pay for education and medical care for their children helps some borrowers stay afloat, which is important, even it doesn’t lead them to become wealthy entrepreneurs. “The more modest truth is that microcredit may help some people earning $2 a day, to earn something like $2.50 a day,” the authors write. “That may not sound dramatic, but when you are earning $2 a day it is a big step forward.”

 —Lisa Gulya

If you spend much time in office meetings or college classrooms, you’ve likely run into Gender Guy. He’s an alpha male and a liberal, and he likes to talk about gender issues—in the workplace, in society, in the book you’re reading, wherever. He pontificates and patronizes; he interrupts and shouts down. He makes the rest of the room endure his pissing matches with men less enlightened, or with those who share his general opinions but oblige his desire to quibble over details, loudly and at length.

Gender Guy’s assumed expertise might come from overly simplified connections he makes between gender and race, or class, or sexual identity, or religion. It might be based on the fact that, as an intelligent and well-spoken man, he’s by definition an expert on everything. Or perhaps he thinks he understands gender because the word—unlike, say, “women”—suggests a subject that deals not with one gender’s concrete realities so much as, more abstractly, with the relationship between two.

This last point in particular interests historian Alice Kessler-Harris. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kessler-Harris considers the consequences for her own discipline when, starting in the early 1990s, gender history began to take over the ground previously held by women’s history (subscription required). She allows that “gender is a tempting and powerful framework”:

Far more inclusive than the category of women, [gender] raises questions not so much about what women did or did not do, but about how the organization or relationships between men and women established priorities and motivates social and political action. While the history of women can be accused of lacking objectivity—of having a feminist purpose—that of gender suggests a more distanced stance… The idea of “gender” frees young scholars (male and female) to seek out the ways that historical change is related to the shape and deployment of male/female relations.

And yet, something is lost:

Gender obscures as much as it reveals… [I suspect] that in seeing the experiences of men and women as relational, we overlook the particular ways in which women—immigrants, African-Americans, Asians, Chicanas—engaged their worlds… We lose the power of the individual to shed a different light—sometimes a liminal light—on historical processes.

In short, Kessler-Harris worries that abstracting “women” into “gender” can have the effect of silencing the voices of actual women—a danger not limited to the rarefied world of historians. The tension between analyzing gender relations and highlighting female voices is an old one, and it’s as broadly relevant as ever. While Gender Guy’s opinions may be impeccably feminist, how helpful is this if the abstraction “gender” gives him cover to go on and on, preventing the women in the room from getting a word in?

—Steve Thorngate 

You might call them "unpledged delegates" or "superdelegates," or perhaps you prefer "automatic delegates" or "democracy spoilers."

At any rate, if you're interested in lobbying the 800 or so people poised to determine the Democratic nominee for president, this map based on the superdelegates.org wiki can help you find them.

(Thanks, Marc Ambinder.)

— Steve Thorngate  

Image by Lokal_Profil, licensed under Creative Commons.

Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines have compiled their second list of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals, and they want you to pick your favorite five. There’s a little public intellectual for everyone, whether you prefer “pop sociologists” like Malcolm Gladwell or “aid skeptics” like William Easterly.

(Thanks, Bookforum.)

—Danielle Maestretti

Baghdad plays host to many currencies: dinars, petrol, guns, and now blood. The new issue of Colors (pdf) reports on the black market that has sprung up to address the city’s blood shortage. In the al-Sadr City neighborhood, the illicit trade is coordinated by Shia leaders.

People rarely go to formal collection centers to donate blood because they are afraid of both the bombs and the dreadful hygienic conditions. If they or their family need blood, they are forced to purchase it on the black market.

In al-Andalus, one blood-runner has identified a steady source.

“In emergencies, I ask the ambulance driver to find junkies and drunks and drive them in to donate their blood,” he admits. He pays the addicts with loose change and, without any health checks, sells blood to wounded people.

The wounded go home with the bad blood, the addicts go home with bruises, and Kadòm, the drivers and lab technicians go home with the blood money.

—Danielle Maestretti

Image by montuno, licensed under Creative Commons.

The Project Vote Smart is a non-partisan clearinghouse of information on almost every major elected official in the United States. Their Presidential Political Courage Test is a four page questionnaire covering everything from budget issues to social issues to legislative priorities. It’s designed to inform the electorate on what’s important to presidential candidates, but none of the three major candidates have filled it out. Jim Nintzel reports for the Tuscon Weekly that John McCain was even on the board of Project Vote Smart until April 9, when he was kicked off for not filling out the test.

The reason why everyone is running away from the test is because it’s a veritable treasure trove of source material for attack ads. In an electoral climate when spinmeisters have been known to rifle through candidates 3rd grade papers, information on real issues can be toxic. The folks at Project Vote Smart aren’t that worried, though. The Presidential Courage Test—once known as the National Political Awareness Test before scared politicians started hiding from it—is just one weapon in their arsenal, bringing accurate information to the public. Founder and president of the organization Richard Kimball said, “We've become so good at this stuff that we don't need (politicians') cooperation to get the goods on them.”

—Bennett Gordon

Reuters reports that senators are trying to strong-arm the Bush administration into strong-arming OPEC nations that buy U.S. arms. The idea is that Congress would hold up any arms deals until folks like Saudi Arabia loosen the tap on oil.

“The Saudis have to understand this is a two-way street,” New York Senator Charles Schumer told reporters. “We provide them weapons, our troops provide them protection, and then they rake us over the coals when it comes to oil.”

Added Schumer: OPEC, Do me this favor. I won't forget it. Capisce?

(Thanks, TPM.)

—Hannah Lobel

Every year, somewhere between February and mid-April, sweet thoughts of indulgent write-offs and sneaky loopholes tickle the American taxpayer’s fancy. For most of us, these thoughts have their root in a Jeffersonian disdain for federal governance, or plain old-fashioned greed. But for some, tax resistance is a way of making a political statement, a way as old as taxation itself. 

The War Resisters League has been advocating war tax resistance and other forms of pacifist action since 1923. The nonprofit has an extensive section dedicated to tax resistance on its website, and has published a handbook on the subject. While it may be too late this year for most of us to make a statement on the war in Iraq by withholding tax dollars, there’s always next year. And perhaps many years to come, depending on the upcoming presidential election.

 —Morgan Winters 

First, let’s get the night’s creepiest moment out of the way. Viewer discretion is advised (for those prone to nausea):

Now, onto parsing Pennsylvania. Herewith, some of the best bits from the blogosphere.

Lots of spin coming from both campaigns tonight. I’d say the real story is that this leaves us basically where we were.
—Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo

In the world of media narratives, how the press will talk about the primary campaign, it's true we're at the status quo. But in terms of who is actually going to win this thing, last night was actually a bad night for Clinton. Somehow she has to win a lot of delegates, and opportunities to do so lessen with each contest.
—Atrios, Eschaton

A fascinating wrinkle buried in the Pennsylvania exit polls is that Democratic voters do not appear to believe that Obama’s nomination is a foregone conclusion. Given Obama’s purportedly unassailable delegate lead, it was stunning that 43 percent of Pennsylvania voters said they believed that Clinton would be the Democratic nominee. Clearly, we have identified that proportion of the Pennsylvania electorate who never, ever turn on a cable TV news show.
—Walter Shapiro, Salon

But what is striking in the exit polls is the polarization on three lines: gender, race and age. It was dead even with men; but a massive advantage for Clinton among women. The racial difference is obvious as well. But what really leaps out is age. Obama lost every cohort over 40; Clinton lost every cohort under 40. Race also affects the generations in turn: 67 percent of whites over 60 voted for Clinton—a massive 24 point advantage. Among the younger generation, there is much less racial polarization: under 30, whites split evenly. This is a fascinating result. It appears to me as the future struggling to overcome the past.
—Andrew Sullivan, the Atlantic’s Daily Dish 

Indeed, if you look at Obama’s vote in Pennsylvania, you begin to see the outlines of the old George McGovern coalition that haunted the Democrats during the ’70s and ’80s, led by college students and minorities.
—John B. Judis, the New Republic

There seems to be an ever-expanding list of rationales why the delegate counts in front of our faces don't actually matter, or don't actually exist, or are terribly misleading. There seems to be an ever-expanding list of supposedly devastating Obama faults, such as the supposed elitism of the black guy from Chicago (seriously?), and there is a cynical and mocking dismissal of political eloquence from a campaign that once counted the political eloquence of their former president as one of their greatest assets. People have muttered over the negative tone of the campaign of late: hell, go negative. It's about time the Democrats figured out how to competently go negative, even though so far they have only bothered to practice it against each other. More irritating is that the negative attacks presented are, well, stupid, and seem increasingly to be predicated on the notion that voters, the press, the pundits, and we political hangers-on are all idiots seeking to cling to the most shallow of accusations. The press and the pundits? OK, I'll give you that one. The rest of us, however, weren't born yesterday.
—Hunter, Daily Kos

Forget delegates and the popular vote for the Democratic presidential nomination. The most important thing Hillary Clinton gained by winning the Pennsylvania primary yesterday was a better argument—indeed, a much better argument.
—Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard

There’s a saturation level that has been reached. We know the strengths and weaknesses of these candidates. We know what demographics they win against one another and what demos they lose. About half the Democrats in the country like Clinton and about half like Obama. She’s from the Northeast and he's from the Midwest, and they get a tilt in their favor in each of those regions. He can't knock her out because she's really good at campaigning, and she was swamped by him early because he's really good at campaigning. The level of competition is far higher here than it will be in the fall against John McCain, actually. So the superdelegates can make their choice. They could make it today.
—dday, Hullabaloo

The longer Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama get bloodied and bruised, the more superdelegates argue they want the fighting to end. If so, it’s within their power to intervene. So why don’t they?
—Alex Koppelman, Salon’s War Room

There is no doubt this contest is hurtful to the Democratic Party. But it might actually be helpful toward bringing Americans together. I know that sounds odd. But I think that this is actually helping bring Republicans and Democrats together... I personally find myself respecting Hillary more than ever in the past. My guess is, other conservatives feel the same way. Sure, she may be a socialist, but she is at least tough and doesn’t give up.... Is this the Hillary that liberals have always admired—but I was blind to because of philosophical differences?
—Matt Lewis, Townhall

And the Winner Is: John McCain
—Huffington Post lead headline

The Democratic candidates have been tearing each other down, but McCain has lost a little ground against Obama in the polls and is now slightly behind him. McCain has his work cut out for him, and so do conservatives.
—Editors, National Review 

Get ready for Guam.
—Joel Achenbach, the Washington Post

 —Hannah Lobel 

In America we grumble about pork in American politics, but in Israel the matter is less metaphorical. Since Jewish and Muslim dietary laws forbid eating pork, it seems obvious that shops in Israel wouldn't sell ham and bacon. Laws created in the 1950s and 1960s forbade the breeding and sale of pigs, according to Meatpaper (article not available online), but secular and immigrant Jews, along with Thai and Filipino migrant laborers, have found delis and grocery stores that increasingly flaunt those laws by selling them euphemistically labeled “white meat.” More than a culinary kerfuffle, the pork debate is what legal scholar Daphne Barak-Erez calls “a struggle to define Israel’s Jewish character.” Some don’t take the sneers of slaughtered pig heads in shop windows lightly—arsonists targeted two pork-serving delis in 2007. Nonetheless, pork’s popularity shows no sign of subsiding.

 —Lisa Gulya

The Bush Administration is known for its extreme secrecy. Reports of warantless wiretapping and secret CIA prisons have made big news, but overall, it’s hard to know how deep the government cover-ups go. In 2006, the political website Talking Points Memo started the “insanely ambitious” project to record “every significant instance of this administration stifling government information.” An excerpt of the list was published in the March-April issue of Utne Reader.

In a noisy sidewalk café in New York City, I had a chance to sit down with Paul Kiel, deputy editor of Talking Points Memo to talk about the list, the Bush Administration’s trend of secrecy, and what people are doing about it.

 UtneCast Interview with Talking Points Memo's Paul Kiel: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Everyone's piling on ABC News in the wake of last night’s debate. The Washington Post’s Tom Shales spoke for many when he skewered anchors Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos for their “shoddy, despicable performances.” More stinging (and amusing) assessments came from those live-blogging the debates.

Here’s Andrew Sullivan at 8:40 p.m. Eastern: 

Now, it’s flag-pins! I'm just pointing out that we are now almost halfway through this debate and ABC News has not asked a single policy question. It's pure Rove, sustained and hyped and sustained by Stephanopoulos and Gibson. It's what they know; it's easy; and it will generate ratings. It is not journalism. 

And Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo observes matters as they further degrade: 

9:16 PM ... Did someone tell Charlie Gibson that he knows something about economics? There are a heck of a lot of people who make over $97,000 a year? Really? I think like 12% of the population makes more than $100,000 a year. And his capital gains point is a canard. 

9:24 PM ... I was disappointed that Charlie Gibson seems to spout off right-wing bromides as established facts. I was even more disappointed that Obama didn’t seem able to knock them down.

9:29 PM ... I don't watch a lot of nightly news. Is Charlie Gibson usually this bad?

9:31 PM ... This is awful. 

Then, at 9:50: What happened to the League of Women Voters? Can we give the debates back to them?

Most telling were the comments from viewers on ABCNews.com. Here’s one:

How utterly embarrassing for ABC, Gibson, and Stephanopoulos. No matter which candidate viewers support, the real focus was the inane questions and poor behavior of two veteran “journalists”... watch out Fox News, ABC is reaching for your star.

The flogging is certainly deserved. When George Stephanopoulos asked Barack Obama, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?” bile crept up my throat. And when the debate finally turned from what Shales called “specious and gossipy trivia” to actual policy matters—51 minutes in—the person responsible for guiding the discourse to reason wasn’t even on the moderators’ panel. Thank you, Mandy Garber, resident of Pittsburg, who asked via video an astute question regarding the candidates’ Iraq policy proposals:

The real question is, I mean, do the candidates have a real plan to get us out of Iraq, or is it just real campaign propaganda? And it's really unclear. They keep saying we want to bring the troops back. But considering what's happening on the ground, how is that going to happen?

The inanity from Wednesday’s debate could fill a week’s worth of episodes of the Daily Show. But let’s not kid ourselves. ABC News is not an anomaly. Their display of journalism-gone-mad is just the latest egregious example of the media’s failure this election. And if it keeps up, we could be looking at a repeat of 2000. 

Remember 2000, when the liberal media harangued Al Gore for his silly lock-box and ran cheerful profiles of George W. Bush’s cheerleading days at Andover? The American public may be at fault for buying Karl Rove’s carefully constructed good ol’ boy candidate, but the folks who spoon-fed them the message were journalists.

And that gets to the fundamental misunderstanding of the liberal media slant. Reporters might skew liberal in their views, but their liberal mindset ends up serving conservatives come election season. Reporters know Democrats better; they understand their dirt and games and get wrapped up in them. They don’t understand Republicans as well. That’s why the evangelical machine’s turn out in 2000 caught reporters off guard: They weren’t running in the circles of the right’s foot soldiers. It’s an old but true cliché that the left eats itself, and part of the left doing the chomping is the media.

Here’s the other symptom plaguing liberal-minded reporters: They’re delicate and grievously susceptible to finger-wagging about fairness. Hillary Clinton knows this: When she played the skewed-coverage card reporters didn’t just bite, they wagged their tongues in obedience and upended the gains Obama was making in Ohio.

The final problem stalking reporters this year: They’ve gone lazy. I’m not talking about hours worked; those guys are running themselves ragged filing stories. I’m talking about intellectual laziness. They’ve bought into their own caricatures of the candidates. Case in point: Obama’s boneheaded remarks in San Francisco. They were immediately dubbed a “rookie” mistake revelatory of his Achilles heel in November. Meanwhile, John McCain cavorts about the Middle East calling al-Qaida a proxy of Iran. Does it count as a rookie mistake if you’ve been in the Senate more than 20 years?

That is, of course, a perennial plea to the press: Stop covering the horse-race and cover the issues. Reporters have weaseled out of that lately by noting that the two Democrats’ policy platforms are similar. In other words: There’s nothing to cover but the horse race. It’s a convenient excuse, and it’s also incredibly wrong-headed. Their job is not only to find the candidates’ differences—which do in fact exist—but to root out the issues not being discussed. In our July-August issue we highlight one such rare effort from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which urgently reminded candidates and voters that national security goes beyond the Middle East. But delving into such matters is tough. It takes time, research, and imagination. And that’s a lot harder than putting on repeat those videos of Clinton on a Bosnian tarmac. 

I’m becoming genuinely fearful that what began as a slam-dunk election year for Democrats will lumber, knee-capped, into another Republican edged-out victory. On the Democratic side, fault will most likely be hurled upon the two candidates for battling so long and so hard. The true responsibility will lie with “liberal” journalists. Not because they didn’t take one for the team and buoy the Democrats, but because they didn’t do their jobs.

—Hannah Lobel 

How do you think media coverage has impacted the election? Let us know in the Politics Salon.

If you're scrambling to get your income tax return in today, you might not have time to take a look at this short breakdown of how the federal government spends our money, courtesy of the indispensable Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Of course, your waiting-in-line-at-the-post-office experience might be more pleasant if you're not pondering just how much of your income tax will be spent on defense and security.

—Steve Thorngate

I recently sat in on a local update for Liberians living in the diaspora about the work of the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The evening left me wondering whether the work of recovering from 20-plus years of civil unrest could be accomplished in anything less than an equal length of time.

The Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established in 2005 to piece together the details of who did what to whom during two civil wars between 1979 and 2003. Beyond fact-finding, the TRC is meant to facilitate the country's healing process.

In 2006, the commission expanded its reach, partnering with the Advocates for Human Rights in Minnesota to take statements from Liberians the United States and West Africa. The effort is unique—no other commission has invited its diaspora to record their stories—and uniquely challenging.

In 2003, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported an increasing level of cynicism in U.S. Liberian communities about the work of the TRC. At the meeting I attended in St. Paul, less than a dozen Liberians and a handful of women who worked for the Advocates came to the update meeting. Liberians discussed their reluctance to dredge up painful memories when they’ve built new lives abroad. “They don’t want to relive that trauma for a show,” one man said. They question being asked repeatedly to send money to Liberia when they are denied dual citizenship and the right to vote in Liberian elections. “You’re asking them to help to rebuild the country but you won’t let them participate. We want our voices to be heard, not just our pocketbooks.”

—Lisa Gulya

If you saw the 2006 documentary Maxed Out, you have a sense of the extent of credit card debt in the oh-so-spendy U.S. But the problem exists worldwide, as Ronald J. Mann illustrates in a graphic feature in Foreign Policy. Since 2002, credit card spending has gone up considerably in all the world's most advanced economies. Developing countries have gotten in on the buy-now-pay-later frenzy, too, with sometimes devastating results: "Too much, too fast can sink a national economy," warns Mann, offering as examples the credit crazes in Mexico, Thailand, and South Korea.

—Steve Thorngate 

Image by  James Rintamaki , licensed under  Creative Commons .

When it comes to casting your ballot this election season, doing your homework is key. This means having a reasonable idea of where the people on the ballot get the dough to finance their campaigns. A good place to start is PriceOfOil.org. The nonprofit site's Follow the Oil Money tool traces campaign contributions from petroleum companies and their cohorts to members of the U.S. Congress and presidential candidates. In addition to following the money, the site also tracks voting records on environmental and energy issues and war legislation. Some of the biggest oil profiteers may surprise you (we’re talking to you, Senator Mary Landrieu, D-LA).

 —Morgan Winters

Thanks to Skye for the url fix.         

Last fall, the college tenure process at Barnard College turned participatory—for the worse, argue Dan Rabinowitz and Ronen Shamir for Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors. When up for tenure, Arab American anthropologist Nadia El-Haj faced both the scrutiny of the college and of the public. Online petitions were posted for and against her in an attempt to democratize the process.

The final decision remained Barnard’s, and the school ultimately granted El-Haj tenure. But the petitions intruded inappropriately into an academic decision, write Rabinowitz and Shamir. “Science is not a form of participatory democracy to be determined by majority opinion,” the Israeli scholars write. Tenure should be determined by the quality of scholarship, not by politics.

The transgression that sparked protest against El-Haj, as the Academe authors put it, was “writing on Israel while Arab.” (El-Haj's first book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, examines the relationship between archaeology and Zionist nation building.) El-Haj’s work seemed to upset American Jewry most. The uproar was symptomatic of “an intellectual climate that, at least from afar, looks increasingly oppressive." Academic institutions, Rabinowitz and Shamir insist, must not fall prey to hegemonic ideologies that manipulate or repress knowledge to suit their political agendas.

—Lisa Gulya

Image by WalkingGeek, licensed by Creative Commons.

Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie were deemed too “inappropriate” for Venezuelan children, and the popular cartoon The Simpsons has been dropped from the Caracas TV station Televen, BBC News reports. In a bit of unintentional comedy that’s too funny to make up, the show has been replaced by reruns of the 1990’s drama Baywatch. Maybe the cartoon could have been saved if the creators had included more shots of Marge in a bikini running in slow motion.

—Bennett Gordon

There’s no shortage of justifications for the wars that soil human history. In the documentary The Fog of War, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara makes the case for “just war” theory as a realistic means of reducing war's human costs. Just war, he believes, should be our goal, because war itself won’t be eliminated in this century.

A recent article in Discover gives the idea of war’s inevitability a second glance. Many scientists believe conflict between primates is a natural activity, an attempt to keep the resources-to-population ratio within reasonable bounds. Discover reports that a group of scientists and anthropologists are upending this aggression-is-destiny view with research showing that  primates are not hardwired to commit violence; rather, they do so in response to environmental and social stimuli. “War is evitable,” one scientist argues, “if conditions are such that the costs of making war are higher than the benefits.”

 —Morgan Winters

Image by Rob, licensed under Creative Commons 

If you’re looking for gay-friendly living, consider ditching the coasts. That’s according to the Advocate’s April 8, 2008 issue (article not available online). The magazine tapped Gary Gates, a senior research fellow at UCLA’s Williams Institute, to crunch the Census numbers and home in on where same-sex couples are settling. With Gates, the Advocate came up with these five unlikely emerging gay meccas where culture, creativity, family-friendly communities, and business are thriving:

Fort Worth , Texas: affordable upscale real estate, good schools, and big corporations that offer domestic-partner benefits

Fort Wayne , Indiana: diversity, decent cost of living, good jobs, access to nearby big cities like Chicago and Detroit, and a well-read population (“in terms of its libraries’ usage and books owned”)

Tulsa , Oklahoma: diversity, lots of museums and theaters, tasty foodie scene, and a low cost of living with “big-city benefits,” says one resident

Anchorage , Alaska: parks, recreation, wildlife, museums, a thriving restaurant scene, a hip Pacific Northwest vibe, and a diverse, educated population

Jacksonville , Florida: 80,000 acres of urban park, diversity, beaches, museums, and good business opportunities

Meanwhile, over at Out, a handy little map in the March issue (not available online) highlights several southern towns that should be gay meccas, if names were any indication. My favorites: Daddy Hole Lake, Florida; Bear Town, Mississippi; Lake Cock, Louisiana; Big Bottom Township, Arkansas; and the simple but effective Gay, North Carolina.

Not on either list is our nation’s venerable capital. That may come as no surprise, given the homophobic cronies currently holding court on Capitol Hill. But, Richard Florida—the cultural pulse taker and author of The Rise of the Creative Class and most recently Who’s Your City?—tells the Advocate (April 22 issue) that the Beltway is the best pick for a twenty-something gay grad looking to commit to a career: “I’d have to say Washington, D.C., if I were gay.”

What do you consider the gay-friendliest towns? Let us know in the Politics Salon.

—Hannah Lobel

Image by barcoder96, licensed under Creative Commons.

Make/shift is a most welcome addition to our library: a feminist magazine that reaches beyond DIY crafting tips and media deconstructions. Feminist discussion is best when it’s fresh, feisty, and includes diverse voices, and make/shift goes into enough depth to bridge the gap between the predictable coverage of established magazines and the relentless pace and sometimes cursory coverage of the feminist blogosphere. 

In its third issue, the 2007 Utne Independent Press Award nominee for best new publication highlights feminist activism ranging from doulas working in a Washington state women’s prison to Men Can Stop Rape discussion groups in Washington, D.C. Of particular note is an elucidating interview with Mia Mingus (article not available online). As codirector of Georgians for Choice, Mingus speaks convincingly of the need to expand the discussion about reproductive choice beyond the divisive battle over abortion.  For Mingus, reproductive justice is about “reproductive health, bringing sex education to the table, talking about prenatal care. Right now for us, adoption is really important.” 

At first, Mingus’ concerns seem far flung. But it makes sense that Mingus—a queer, disabled, Korean transracial adoptee—thinks about reproductive justice in broad terms. She urges us to examine the global inequalities—“ableism, racism, capitalism, and a legacy of white supremacy”—that create the circumstances in which women feel obligated or compelled to give up children. Throughout the magazine, make/shift devotes much needed space to such complex and underrepresented feminist voices.

—Lisa Gulya

Thousands gathered in Memphis today for a rainy tribute to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., assassinated 40 years ago today. But the King the country largely remembers—the one revered by Americans of all political stripes and honored by a national holiday—is from not 1968 but 1963.

Writing for Religion Dispatches, Jonathan L. Walton observes that our cultural memory tends to put us retroactively on the right side of things, to assert that “we were on [King’s] side. We shared his Dream”—the refrain of his most beloved speech from 1963. But, by the time he was killed, King had in fact fallen out of favor with most Americans. His increasingly broad activism and sharp rhetoric “undermined his reputation as a moderate Negro ‘voice of reason,’” costing him a great deal in terms of financial donations and general popularity, writes Walton. 

Our cultural memory of King also de-radicalizes the man himself, as Kai Wright argues in the American Prospect. “Our efforts to look back on [King’s] life too often say more about our own racial fantasies and avoidances than they do about his much-discussed dream,” says Wright. “And they obscure a deeply radical worldview that remains urgently important to Americans' lives.”

The point is not to downplay the consensus we’ve at some level reached around “I Have a Dream”—itself no small feat. But King himself ultimately chose truth-telling over popularity. When, anxious to praise him, we sanitize his later years and gloss over the difficult truth he told—about economic inequality, about our destructive foreign policy, about the fact that white racism is not just a phenomenon of the South—we do little to honor him. Instead, we reveal that, 40 years later, we still don’t want to hear everything King has to say.

—Steve Thorngate   

World-Telegram photo by Walter Albertin.

Shelters for the homeless, lacking sufficient space and funding, are starting to look like overcrowded prisons. As a result, administrators now screen applicants in the interest of efficiency, and turn away those who aren’t sober, won’t take their meds, or have histories of violent behavior. This literally leaves the most vulnerable out in the cold, where they’ll end up arrested, institutionalized, or worse.

Enter Pathways to Housing, a nonprofit in New York City that finds rentals for people with a psychiatric disability. According to Commonweal (subscription required), Pathways currently provides furnished apartments to more than 500 high-risk residents and has been so effective that there are 40 more similar programs being developed around the country. The key element is that clients get to choose their own apartment, giving them a sense of ownership, hope, and much-needed stability. Buying fair-market real estate is still cheaper than building new facilities and, instead of hiring on-site staff, Pathways also saves money by providing 24-hour access to off-site psychiatric, medical, and legal resources. Given that a bed at a New York State psychiatric ward costs $175,000 a year, spending just $22,500 per person at Pathways isn’t only the right thing to do, it’s also a wise investment.

—Sarah Pumroy

With the tired call for “compassionate conservatism” still leaking out of the right, perhaps some liberals are attempting to separate themselves from the progressive ethos they once espoused. Perhaps empathy and compassion no longer hold the value they once did on the left. This seems to be the case with a Nation cover story earlier this year, in which Sarah Blustain examined Post-Abortion Syndrome (PAS)—the mental anguish and suffering that can follow an abortion—in men. Not only does Blustain point out that the antichoice movement has begun using these men as poster boys for its agenda—which should come as no surprise, given the nature of politics—she questions the validity of the condition itself, while implicitly accusing the men of wanting to be used.  

The conclusion drawn is that “PAS is a political strategy masquerading as a psychological crisis.” PAS is not a valid condition, Blustain argues, because a) there is little clinical evidence it exists, and b) it is being used as a political tool by the prolife movement. This sounds frighteningly similar to the reasoning behind the dismissal of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in soldiers coming back from the Vietnam War. The government perceived that acknowledging the disorder would be politically damaging, and it mysteriously went undiagnosed. This famous case of political-medical denial, of course, does not prove the existence of PAS. Yet it does show that just because science hasn’t rubber-stamped a condition, doesn’t mean people aren’t truly suffering. Nor does the political perversion of an issue invalidate the issue itself. All claims, whether they suit one’s political inclinations or not, should be taken with a healthy helping of skepticism.  

Which leaves the men themselves. The thought, unspoken but still present, in Blustain’s article is that their suffering and its use by the prolife movement is deserved, or at least self-inflicted. It’s ironic that Blustain holds these men responsible for their predicament and its usurpation by the right, when the other half of the prolife movement—the non-God half—bases their anti-abortion stance on a similar call for personal responsibility: Those attempting to overturn standing abortion laws often proclaim that adult women who willingly engage in sex that results in an unwanted pregnancy should be held accountable for their actions. Blustain applies a similar brand of reasoning in a novel way: She points out that many of these men wanted their partners to have abortions, and all of them willingly engaged in the sex that resulted in the pregnancy. Hence, it’s their fault and they should learn to deal with the emotional fallout.

Sometimes it is easy to forget that, under all the political garbage piled on by interested parties, there is a human element to every issue. And it is possible to acknowledge this element while dismissing its manipulation by those with a vested interest in its political interpretation. The heart of liberalism is empathy, and the core of empathy is a sensitivity for feelings one has never felt. It would be a shame if those of us who call ourselves liberals began dictating who may and may not suffer, thereby allowing our most noble trait to be appropriated for political gain.

—Morgan Winters