Angela Merkel joins the chorus.
UD is thankful for her strong statement. We’re getting there.
And by the way. The full veil is not appropriate anywhere.
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You can watch the reaction she got here.
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But Burhan Kesici, the general secretary of Germany’s Islamic Council, criticised Merkel’s comments. “The government should carefully study similar moves in France, and ask themselves if one side-effect of such a ban is that it can actually lead to women feeling more excluded from society,” he said.
Wirklich? More excluded than if they walk around completely covered in a black sack – down to their fingertips? Their mouths covered by cloth for enforced silence and difficulty breathing? Vitamin D deficiency for them and their babies because no sunlight?
If this describes, for you, any sort of “society” at all, let me know.
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A voice from the left.
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This symbol would divide humanity between those of glorious body, graced with no less glorious a face, and those whose bodies and faces are an outrage in the flesh, a scandal, a filthy thing not to be seen but hidden or neutralized.
A classic take-down of the pro-slavery position.
A Sydney woman “refused to take off her burqa in court to give evidence in a civil case, where she is suing the police over a terrorism raid at her house.” (As a result of that raid, her old man’s in jail.)
BALLA: Are you proposing that she would have her face covered while she’s giving evidence and being cross-examined?
LAWYER FOR THE WOMAN BRINGING THE SUIT: I’m afraid so. Yes. It’s not very satisfactory, your Honour, but it’s something we have to live [with].
BALLA: It’s not something I have to live [with].
Indeed, the judge has ruled that the woman cannot give evidence wearing the burqa (several accommodations were offered to the woman; she refused them all).
Yvonne, a character in Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano (1947), talks to Hugh, the brother of her alcoholic husband, about her plan to take her husband, Geoffrey, out of Mexico, and move with him to a farm in Canada. She is also hoping to escape, there, the oncoming European war.
She and her husband’s brother are riding horses together near Cuernavaca.
*********
‘Well… What’s to stop us going to Canada, for instance?’
‘… Canada?… Are you serious? Well, why not, but… ’
‘Perfectly.’
They had now reached the place where the railway took its wide leftward curve and they descended the embankment. The grove had dropped behind but there was still thick woodland to their right (above the centre of which had appeared again the almost friendly landmark of the prison watchtower) and stretching far ahead. A road showed briefly along the margin of the woods.
They approached this road slowly, following the single-minded thrumming telegraph poles and picking a difficult course through the scrub.
‘I mean why Canada more than British Honduras? Or even Tristan da Cunha? A little lonely perhaps, though an admirable place for one’s teeth, I’ve heard. Then there’s Gough Island, hard by Tristan. That’s uninhabited. Still, you might colonize it. Or Sokotra, where the frankincense and myrrh used to come from and the camels climb like chamois my favourite island in the Arabian Sea.’
But Hugh’s tone though amused was not altogether sceptical as he touched on these fantasies, half to himself, for Yvonne rode a little in front; it was as if he were after all seriously grappling with the problem of Canada while at the same time making an effort to pass off the situation as possessing any number of adventurous whimsical solutions. He caught up with her.
‘Hasn’t Geoffrey mentioned his genteel Siberia to you lately?’ she said. ‘You surely haven’t forgotten he owns an island in British Columbia?’
‘On a lake, isn’t it? Pineaus Lake. I remember. But there isn’t any house on it, is there? And you can’t graze cattle on fircones and hardpan.’
‘That’s not the point, Hugh.’
‘Or would you propose to camp on it and have your farm elsewhere?’
‘Hugh, listen – ’
‘But suppose you could only buy your farm in some place like Saskatchewan,’ Hugh objected.
An idiotic verse came into his head, keeping time with the horse’s hooves: Oh take me back to Poor Fish River, Take me back to Onion Lake, You can keep the Guadalquivir, Como you may likewise take. Take me back to dear old Horsefly, Aneroid or Gravelburg…
‘In some place with a name like Product. Or even Dumble,’ he went on. ‘There must be a Dumble. In fact I know there’s a Dumble.’
‘All right. Maybe it is ridiculous. But at least it’s better than sitting here doing nothing!’
[…] At this moment the best and easiest and most simple thing in the world seemed to be the happiness of these two people in a new country. And what counted seemed probably the swiftness with which they moved. He thought of the Ebro. Just as a long-planned offensive might be defeated in its first few days by unconsidered potentialities that have now been given time to mature, so a sudden desperate move might succeed precisely because of the number of potentialities it destroys at one fell swoop…
… He all but shook her horse with enthusiasm. ‘I can see your shack now. It’s between the forest and the sea and you’ve got a pier going down to the water over rough stones, you know, covered with barnacles and sea anemones and starfish. You’ll have to go through the woods to the store.’ Hugh saw the store in his mind’s eye. The woods will be wet. And occasionally a tree will come crashing down. And sometimes there will be a fog and that fog will freeze. Then your whole forest will become a crystal forest. The ice crystals on the twigs will grow like leaves. Then pretty soon you’ll be seeing the jack-in-the-pulpits and then it will be spring.
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Canada is the perennial place, the sanctuary which draws you into a crystal forest. Yet Point One wherever you go there you are. And Point Two
Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.
And Point Three (intimately related to Points One and Two):
There may be useful reconsiderations and redescriptions, but you really did have those parents, you really did make of it what you made of it, you really did have those siblings, really did grow up in that economic climate. These are all hard difficult facts. Redescribed, they can be modified, things can evolve. But it isn’t magic.
You’re a problem; and now your president is a problem too. Okay. But this place is where you really are. Dig your heels in and put up your dukes.
Bethesdan UD turns to our Nobel laureate, Bob Dylan, as she grapples with a new, rabidly anti-Bethesda, world.
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Stuck Inside of ‘thesda with the Memphis Blues Again
[Sing it]
Breibart tried to tell me
To stay away from the lame stream
He said that all the media
Just keeps me in the same dream
An’ I said, “Oh, I didn’t know that
And now we’ve got this president
Who just smoked my eyelids
An’ punched my cigarette.”
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of ‘thesda
With the Memphis blues again
Trump won last night
He’s got us in a lock
Now everybody talks about
How badly they were shocked
In ‘thesda, when it happened
We knew we’d lost control
So we built a fire on Main Street
And shot it full of holes
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of ‘thesda
With the Memphis blues again
Needed to get some air; needed to be somewhere other than in front of a screen. The dog was thrilled; we almost never take evening walks.
The air was cool and fresh. Nothing like a clear autumn night. All of the lights were on in my neighbors’ houses as they stared at the same screen I’d had to escape.
Would they, I wondered, drift out onto the street after the election was officially called? The way some people take a night walk at midnight on New Year’s?
I walked by the Trocki house and saw them in their living room, the television brightly shining… I felt like knocking on their door and joining them, just being sociable with them…
May you live in interesting times. An ancient Chinese curse.
“Look at it this way,” said Mr UD. “The housing market will collapse. But we just sold the Cambridge house.” Yes. Got in under the wire there.
Could it be that the United States, unlike so many other countries, is still not ready for a woman president?
After walking up and down Rokeby Avenue, my dog and I headed for the woodland paths in my backyard. But as she suddenly strained at the leash, I realized that a herd of deer had probably bedded down in the high grass, and we’d be wise to avoid them. So I headed back to the front garden, and then to the front door. How does Katherine Ann Porter’s somber story “Pale Horse Pale Rider” conclude? “Now,” the narrator bitterly announces…
there would be time for everything.