On the side of our house, early morning.

“Let’s embrace diversity on every level!” tweets a British influencer who photographs herself in full burqa.

Excellent timing. History has really caught up with the burqa this week! UD, who has been writing about burqas forever, couldn’t be more thrilled. Soon the streets of Afghanistan (and London!) will ring out with beautiful blue diversity.

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UD thanks John, a reader, for linking her to this au courant tweet.

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Ten years ago UD wrote this essay in Inside Higher Education. Seems like a good time to reprint it.

THE BURQA, AND BEING IN THE WORLD

Cesare Pavese, the Italian writer who killed himself in 1950, when he was 41, once wrote: “Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in the world.”

One of the strange blessings of the burqa – the black robe that entirely hides a woman, even her face – is the way its presence among us reminds us of this truth. Existence, we remember when we pass blank sheaths on our streets, is a luxury – a brief, beautiful luxury, a flash of light before darkness. We should not extinguish that light.

The darkness of the burqa, the blindness, constriction, anonymity, and silence within it, intend to annihilate a person’s existence, to make her invisible, expressionless, lifeless. Yet far from accomplishing this erasure, the burqa has done no less than rivet the eyes of Europe. It has become one of the most expressive artifacts of the modern urban setting. It has drawn from people and governments such strong responses that, by overwhelming majorities, one European nation after another is banning them.

Why is the burqa so riveting? Why is it generating such intense responses?

I think it has to do with the way it parades total darkness, total rejection of life – a woman’s life. It parades self-nullification for oneself — and also for one’s daughters, small children just beginning their lives. And there is no way around it — however complex personal motivation on the part of the mother might be — and of course there can be no volition on the part of a seven-year-old — this sight is, for most free people, and certainly for most free women, terrible. It is generally terrible in the totality of darkness it expresses, and it is particularly terrible in its suppression of the existence of women.

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Western literature features a few symbolically burqa’ed characters, whose total rejection of life with other human beings, whose refusal to have an identity, profoundly disturbs the people around them. Non-beings like Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener and Kafka’s hunger artist draw fascinated crowds to the spectacle of their dissolved being; their absence from the human story is so complete as to be ostentatious.

Certainly there’s a morbid curiosity about the sort of people who exhibit the possibility open to any of us to say no to existence while still maintaining a shadowy silent aspect on the street. But like the lost-to-public-existence woman in the burqa, these fictional characters also tend to make the people around them more aware than they were before of the luxury of being in the world. By showing us what it looks like when you stop the world from happening to you, when you elaborately outfit yourself to arrest the slightest overture from the human realm, these people sharpen our awareness – an awareness we usually don’t have, because almost everyone we know is letting the world happen to them – of what it means, of how precious it is, to be an existent human being in the world.

The burqa, in fact, is at once the most inexpressive and most expressive object in the city. The appareled energy it brings to the policing of every digit of a woman, its elaborate abolition of a self, tells us precisely how much some people have to pay for the luxury of being in the world. It tells us that being is indeed a luxury, for which some of us must pay very dearly.

That is what it says to us. This is what the burqa says to the woman – or child – inside it:

Yes, you may exist. If you insist. But in order to be allowed to exist, you will have to pay the ultimate price – non-existence. No one may see who you are. You may never exchange a smile on a street corner. Your thoughts you may keep. To yourself. The burqa covers your mouth, conveying to you, and to the world, your muteness.

Our response to the burqa is a variant of horror vacui; appalled at the nullification it represents, we attempt to dress it up, give it features, somehow animate it into a person. Indeed one defense of the burqa you sometimes read among Europeans and Americans has it that the burqa really makes no difference: If you look closely, you can discern a woman’s smiling or frowning eyes behind the mesh; and if you talk to her, and she talks back, you’ll begin to realize she’s just like everyone else. If her seven-year-old daughter is also in a burqa, you should make the same effort to treat her as you would any other child.

The enormously strong opposition to the burqa in much of Europe suggests that efforts like these to regard it, and the women and children inside of it, as part of normal multicultural human life have failed. Again, why?

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More often than not, when women who wear the burqa are interviewed, they say little or nothing about religion. Typically, they speak of their fear of male harassment. The burqa, they say, protects them from men.

Outside of countries like Afghanistan, it is abnormal to harbor so extreme a fear of public interaction with men that you feel you must wear a burqa. Women this traumatized, this imprisoningly beset by distorted perceptions of the world, should be helped to overcome their distortions and rejoin the human race. It’s bizarre, and inhumane, to respond to women who say these things by nodding your head understandingly and keeping them in their sacks.

Or do these women say these things because their husbands have made them afraid of men? Because their husbands have told them that if they go outside uncovered their husbands will kill them? That if they ever look at a man in public their husbands will kill them?

If my husband told me these things, I would certainly be afraid of men. I would also be living in a situation in which the courts of my country should take an interest. But since I’m afraid to say anything because of my husband’s threats, there is no way for the state to know that I’m living with a criminal. As are my daughters.

It is also possible that there are burqa wearers who truly believe that men will rape them or harass them mercilessly if they walk outside wearing a dress rather than a sheet and a mask. I mean, these women believe this on their own; they have derived a sort of Andrea Dworkin on steroids sex philosophy in which it is literally true that the act of being a visible woman in the world is simply impossible. Can’t be done. Woman equals red flag to a bull.

When interviewed, these burqa wearers typically berate women who go outside in jeans and blouses and make men rape them. They express a complacent moral superiority to loose women who instead of parading their nothingness parade their life, their equal share of the world. Women do not get to have a world. Only men do. Good women know this.

Self-nullified women, today’s Bartleby’s, tell modern democracies that they can extend equal rights to all, but there will always be some people who disdain the hard-fought right to exist, to be part of the social world. Not for them the luxury of being; it costs too much, this business of leaving your private retreat and venturing into the world of other human beings. These women will live in horror – they will teach their daughters to live in horror – of the free world. They will parade that horror every day.

This self-nullification, imposed or embraced, is why, one after another, the countries of Europe are saying no to the burqa. The burqa is one luxury no self-respecting democracy can afford.

UD‘s pretty excited about the prospect of new and noteworthy fatwas coming from the government in Afghanistan. She’s not sure they’ll be able to surpass the famous breastfeeding fatwa:

Sheikh ‘Abd Al-Muhsin Al-‘Obikan, an advisor at the Saudi Justice Ministry, recently issued a fatwa allowing the breastfeeding of adults. The fatwa is aimed at enabling an unrelated man and woman to be secluded in the same room, a situation which Islam considers forbidden gender mixing. The rationale behind the fatwa is that breastfeeding creates a bond of kinship between the man and woman, … thus making it acceptable for them to be together in seclusion.

She is sure, though, that they’ll come up with some great stuff.

Catholic integralism has enjoyed a small renaissance on the right in recent years, taken up by prominent apologists like Adrian Vermeule, a law professor at Harvard, and Sohrab Ahmari, the op-ed editor at the New York Post.

[In this connection, a] sort of authoritarian tourism [is emerging among] a new generation of right-wingers who, alienated from the secular liberalism of America, are attracted to illiberal alternatives. The same impulses that took [Brent Bozell] to Franco’s Spain now attract the Tucker Carlsons and Rod Drehers of the world to Orbán’s Hungary. Theorists like Vermeule and Ahmari might dream of a Christian commonwealth, but Orbán is showing how it is actually done, providing a real world model to emulate…

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Afghanistan’s caliphate will no doubt be Vermeule and company’s next stop on the authoritarian theocracy tourist trail. Excise Mohammed and you’re in the same spiritual universe, with a close to identical social ethos. Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada, with his global ambitions, is a far better tourist attraction than provincial Orbán, for while integralist Hungary contents itself with its iota of irrelevant territory, Akhundzada is just getting started.

… will appear today on The Lead with Jake Tapper, to talk about Afghanistan.

I’ve been chronicling his recent activities in ISIS prisoner camps, identifying and seeking to release/repatriate some women and children.

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Here tis.

Ten minutes later, the American economy imploded, and apparently a decision was made to deal with the enormous shortfall that ensued by, in all sorts of ways, bilking patients and Medicare.

A UM med school executive blew the whistle, and last year UM had to pay the government millions and millions of dollars, and Shalala, of course, fired the naughty whistle blower.

Now the whistle blower has filed a wrongful termination suit for millions of dollars, which he’ll probably get.

When you add the Nevin Shapiro scandal to this one, Donna Shalala certainly has a lot to answer for.

Mona Eltahawy’s crucial cover essay for Foreign Policy (2012) needs rereading as an important corrective to the wishful thinking we’re starting to hear about prospects for women in Taliban Afghanistan.

“Name me an Arab country, and I’ll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt — including my mother and all but one of her six sisters — have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating ‘virginity tests’ merely for speaking out, it’s no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband “with good intentions” no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness…

Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet’s rock bottom. Poor or rich, we all hate our women…

Attempts to control by such regimes often stem from the suspicion that without it, a woman is just a few degrees short of sexual insatiability…

[W]omen are silenced by a deadly combination of men who hate them while also claiming to have God firmly on their side… The Islamist hatred of women burns brightly across the region — now more than ever…

The hatred of women goes deep in Egyptian society. Those of us who have marched and protested have had to navigate a minefield of sexual assaults by both the regime and its lackeys, and, sadly, at times by our fellow revolutionaries…”

And that was the Arab Spring, baby! Fasten your seat belt for the Ice Age.

I think it un-Christian to smirk

At the virulent Cardinal Burke.

But it wouldn’t be wrong

To quote Zappa’s old song:

“Jesus thinks you’re a jerk.”

A school that lionizes national conflict of interest icon Charles Nemeroff also thinks nothing of lionizing seedy nursing home mogul Morris Esformes…

Morris’s overwhelming preoccupation for many years has been keeping his son, Philip, out of prison for having run with the whole seedy nursing home thing and turned it into the largest health care fraud in American history.

Philip, when not taking all of the federal government’s money, was himself long preoccupied with bribing the head basketball coach at the University of Pennsylvania to put Philip’s son – named Morris after Family Crook #1 – on the team, and thereby grant his admission to that Ivy League institution.

Head-spinning, ain’t it? Flamboyantly pious religious people, too — all of them. But maintain your focus! I’m trying to update you on all of this.

So Philip got twenty years but because of a ton of flamboyantly pious friends he got DJT to pardon him! Largest health care fraud ever MEH.

But not so fast! For some reason the feds would prefer that its expensive, protracted, extremely difficult fight to put Philip in prison NOT be blithely overturned by rich corrupt people. Athough Philip has indeed been released, the Justice Department “will pursue unresolved charges from Esformes’ healthcare fraud trial in 2019.” And since there were like three million original charges against the guy, the feds have a full plate of leftovers from which to choose. He will soon go to trial again, and because the man of God is guilty as hell, he’ll soon be back in prison, and it’ll be Arrested Development all over again.

The other University of Miami medical school story? Ne quittez pas.

“All of our European sisters rallying in support of veiling are right!” exulted one young woman eyeing the onward march of the Taliban. “I can’t wait for total covering — modesty’s the ticket! Allah’s gonna love it!”

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UD devoutly hopes that watching vibrant living beings die under the vile shroud that is the burqa will strengthen Europe’s (most of Europe’s) determination to ban it among its citizens. Together, footage from ISIS prisoner camps and from pious perverted Afghanistan should be more than enough to silence the fools defending the invisibility cloak.

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Today’s [American] college students are too young to remember the utter shock of seeing a country of women wearing burqas, head-to-toe coverings with small patches of mesh in the eye area. Women who looked all the same, women who were completely hidden, women unable to see except barely and straight ahead.

It was a nightmare.

Tsk. How judgmental. How culturally non-relativist. USA Today’s opinion writer just comes right out with her Islamophobia, and this must be because she has failed to read the right books and attend the right rallies. A nightmare? Oh no. No, you can’t say that. The burqa is a beautiful expression of the piety of Muslim women. Now all Afghan women will be beautiful in the sight of God.

… of the earth. Its impossible constellations, its terrifying caves… I mean, without wanting to be a wimp about it, there’s something overwhelming about massive chambers of dripping stalactites beneath, and infinite dripping stars above; and Les UDs got that particular double helping quite intensely on their little trip.

It was deliciously cold both above and below, but now we’re back at surface heat, waiting for summer to give way.

On the winding road up Skyline Drive, I insisted we talk about this article on Lebanon in The Economist because the country it evoked seemed as impossible to me as the constellations. On the one year anniversary of the port explosion, the country the writer evoked is disgustingly corrupt, corrupt beyond belief, absolutely corrupt, and, because of that corruption, seemingly dead beyond repair. How did that happen, and how is Lebanon to survive its own death?

Certes, UD knows that corruption is part of political life, and a very significant part of political (and social) life in many countries (note Lebanon’s location on the corruption index to which I just linked). But the Economist writer seems to be announcing the protracted lurid extinction of a country because its governing and business elite is totally happy to dine on the corpse of the Lebanese people until there’s nothing left but bones … at which point they’ll all move to Monaco.

It’s pure Ubu: “I”ll make my fortune, kill the whole world, and bugger off.”

Ubu is a way over the top, hilarious, moral monster. How did Lebanon, where religious faith is the reason it looks the way it does, get an entire political class of moral monsters? Forget hypocritical; these people are evil. To paraphrase another UD favorite: They are monsters without being a myth.

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Consider the language of the Economist piece: Lebanon is an “abyss,” there is “no bottom” in its “bottomless collapse.” Its “shambolic politicians cannot agree on a new government.” The police, grossly underpaid “agents of a bankrupt state,” cannot be expected to cooperate with the authorities forever. A year after the blast, “things are indeed worse, almost immeasurably so.”

The blast was not a nadir, just another twist on Lebanon’s long downward spiral. There has been no accountability for the disaster. Nor is there a government empowered to tackle an economic crisis that, according to the World Bank, may rank as the third worst anywhere in the world since the 1850’s...

[The country] tipped into economic crisis in 2019, the result of a years-long Ponzi scheme overseen by the central bank, which borrowed billions from an outsized banking industry to sustain a currency peg. The scheme unraveled when banks no longer took in enough fresh deposits to keep it going. [An observer] estimates that there was an $83bn hole in their balance-sheets last year.

Half the country now lives below the poverty line. [There are] only a few hours of electricity each day… A young girl died from a scorpion sting that could not be treated for lack of antivenom in depleted hospitals and pharmacies… Beirutis wander the streets glassy-eyed: no one is sleeping well, without even a fan to cut the heat and humidity. Everyone seems to have caught a stomach bug this summer from food spoiled by power cuts… [T]he… days are a brew of rage and despair.

The World Bank calls this a “deliberate depression,” a man-made crisis – and the men who made it are still in power, with no plan to fix it.

Lebanon is not a failed state; it’s a zombie state. In order to have a free hand to steal all the country’s money, its governing elite has reduced the population to automata unable to act on their own behalf. The closest analogy UD can think of is North Korea.

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So, nu, Mr UD, what to do?

Here are some of his comments.

1.) The Economist writer exaggerates, focuses only on the very worst aspects of the situation. “Spoken like a Pole,” replied UD. “Not every country conjures Solidarność, you know.”

2.) One solution might be The Appointment of the Respected, Legitimate Person/People. Here, as in Italy calling the non-corrupt, brilliant technocrat Mario Draghi out of private life at an advanced age in order to deal with Italy’s ridiculous economy, Lebanon would search for a small group of morally serious people with relevant expertise, people respected by all because of their above-the-fray gravitas, and ask them to save the country. Even better – bring together organizations that have independent legitimacy, have them constitute themselves as, say, The National Salvation Congress, and wait while their moral and intellectual legitimacy endows them with meaningful power.

3.) If/when things deteriorate into actual civil war, call in the UN.

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UPDATE: A personal view of the end of the world.

Not a huge number, but you had to be there. The bowl of the heavens, at Big Meadow, shone everywhere – not just in white clusters overhead, but along the tree and hill line. An eerie little breeze deepened the darkness as UD groped the ground for her binoculars and – when it grew chilly – her sweater.

Chilly – she thought of hellish, thunderish, DC while she lay back, somewhat shivering, in her beach chair.

The barred owls hoot all night here, a cosmic chorale. Last evening a distant storm made bright flashes across the field. We talked about lightyears of distance (one lightyear = about six trillion miles) and parsecs and made obvious remarks about our incapacity to grasp astronomical realities. Also, though, about how remarkably much we know (Mr UD reads a lot of astronomy/physics) about the massive black canvas. Galactic Hubble images came to me as I scanned the stars.

The Denial of Death in Shenandoah National Park

Cold air, barred owls, and the smell of smoke:

Only a little data here, to evoke

The August woods off the balcony.

Woods that always prompt philosophy.

As when I read, in Becker, a phrase like

“Immunity bath,’ meaning cultic rites

That cleanse the cultist of the dread of death

(Page 12) and sometimes even of its sight.

Or anti-vaxers who, with dying breath,

Admit they thought their breath would never end.

“Consciousness of death is the primary

Repression, not sexuality.” Mend

Your dread by bacchanal, or by fairy

Story, and you’ll still get badly scarred.

A death-accepter, say Kierkegaard,

Knows this is merely where the fun begins:

The wisest owls unbarred spin and spin

Out of smoke mythic immortality.

Take, among those I love, N., P., and D.

N. strode in to save Detroit, then broke down

At the vastness of it. P. circles round

The earth’s atrocities, repairing souls.

D., who must perceive the very world, stole

His life through abstraction. Hard led

By dread, N. is struggling, D. dead.

From the balcony again the smell of smoke —

Of our own ashy end an easy token.