We’ll never know how many children in the world have bled to death because their local village butcher, cheered on by their mother, slashed so deeply at their genitalia with a shard of glass that the butcher, instead of just destroying their lives, killed them.

A handful of people have ever cared about this outcome… Have ever allowed themselves to imagine the agonizing death of a six-year-old without access to painkillers, let alone medical care, as she bleeds out…

And after all, if these children hadn’t been witches they wouldn’t have died.

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As the latest FGM deaths in Somalia actually manage to make the world news, people are allowing themselves to wonder whether this country, where 98% of little girls are slashed, might actually start protecting its children from this practice. But:

1. Somalia has no law against FGM and isn’t in the business of getting one.
2. Even if there were a law, people would ignore it.
3. The government of Somalia claims it’s going to find and prosecute the people who created the three latest child corpses, but go ahead and ask UD if she thinks that that spectacularly failed state will find and prosecute anyone.
4. The butchers are people in high standing in the community, with a serious financial investment in FGM. (When you’re finished imagining the children’s deaths, imagine an impoverished local family working themselves to the bone to scrape up enough money to pay for their daughter to be eviscerated.) No one will go against them.

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And 5.: What’s the problem here? Cutters have been at it in England for decades, and everyone knows it, and there’s a law against it, and not one prosecution has been successful. In America there’s a bunch of cutters on trial in Detroit as we speak, and no less a figure than Alan Dershowitz has come to their defense.

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UPDATE:

“I believe that the [Somali Attorney General] was [speaking harshly about the practice] for press. When the cameras are not there, I doubt there is much interest in [this] case or any others,” [a British Somali activist] says.

Was Julia Kristeva a spy for the Bulgarian communists?

Who cares. This is what we should care about – that a serious intellectual, in an early version of similar defenses today of the burqa, was capable of writing that forced female foot-binding in China was, you know, fine for them, and even empowering.

Reflecting on [the radical journal] Tel Quel’s delusional infatuation with Cultural Revolutionary China, the French-American essayist Guy Sorman faults them for having succumbed to the temptations of a “boundless amoralism”: an “amoralism” that is inseparable from a distinctively French tradition of “revolutionary romanticism.” He continues: “What links the French intelligentsia to tyrants such as Stalin, Mao, Castro has very little to do with the quest for liberty, justice, and democracy. Such values were dismissed as suitable for dopes and stooges. … Our intelligentsia adored revolutionary violence and the aesthetics of violence. Was it not this spectacle of revolution that attracted Sartre, Barthes, and company?”

Anyone who has read Richard Rorty’s shattering attacks on radical theorists knows what happened next for Kristeva. Richard Wolin writes:

Kristeva … responded to her [earlier] political excesses by renouncing politics in toto — including feminism — as inherently totalitarian: as a sphere that perpetually sacrifices individuals to the injustices and repressions of the “collective superego.” As she explained in a 1989 interview: “We must try not to propose global models. I think that we, then, risk making politics into a sort of religion. … Of the political there is already too much.” Instead of striving for political solutions, Kristeva recommended that everyone who could afford it should enter into psychoanalysis — her new field of professional expertise.

Rorty spent his life preaching against radically transformative “global models” and in favor of pragmatic incremental change within particular countries. Even with the catastrophe of Bulgaria and other revolutionary states in front of her, Kristeva opted to go global — until she didn’t. Until in a kind of reverse-thrust globalism – one of absolute withdrawal rather than absolute embrace – she took her toys and went home.

Are you braced?

Then let’s go.

[One of dozens of lawsuits against MSU] contends that [now-jailed MSU athletics physician Larry] Nassar raped someone — a former MSU field-hockey player who was 18 years old at the time — in 1992 and filmed the act while doing so. [I]t alleges that MSU — and, specifically, George Perles, a current member of MSU’s board of trustees who served as the university’s athletic director at the time of the rape — went “to great lengths to conceal this conduct.”

The article cites ESPN’s extensive reporting on a university-wide culture that for years enabled Nassar’s student-rapes.

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Ask yourself. Why is Perles on a university board of trustees? What sort of a university puts an AD/football coach on their board?

The sort of university that believes its athletics program is the most important thing about it, and wants the hushing up of the program’s many scandals to take place at the highest levels. MSU chose to give an AD/coach who already had a record of significant infractions a position as a trustee. Think about that.

Think about the long reign of Auburn’s Bobby Lowder (background on Lowder in these posts). The model, at these and other morally catastrophic jockshops, is a virtually all-male culture of sexual entitlement, cronyism, and secrecy. It’s how you get Penn State and Baylor and the University of Kansas and too many other catastrophes to mention.

When can his glory fade?
O the wild charge he made!
All the world wondered.
Honour the charge he made!
Death to the FDA!
Noble four hundred!

Situated in Kalorama with seven bedrooms and nine-and-a-half baths, you can also find a home theater, an elevator, a wine cellar, a master suite with duel bathrooms and dressing rooms, and a backyard pool.

[September 11] very much conscripted all the things I hate: theocracy, the cult of violence, anti-Jewish paranoia, worship of a leader – a supreme sheikh … I think about it every day. Still.

… for use of passive voice above and beyond the call of duty. In response to a more than ordinarily ugly fight among players – and a coach!- at a recent football game, she wrote the following:

The incidents that occurred at the Sanderson v. Marfa football game on Friday, September 7th are unfortunate and embarrassing for both communities and school districts. There were actions by both teams that were unacceptable. The appropriate notifications have been made to UIL and TEA. The district will review the incident. Once all the facts are gathered, a decision regarding necessary actions will be taken. Until that time, and based on what is known now, we support our coaching staff.

Ya gotta admit that when it comes to failing even to touch on the subject of her statement – i.e., to use the word fight – the woman is punching above her weight. The incidents that occurred is so wondrous a phrase in its avoidance of actuality that even here, in her very first words, she sets a standard. There were actions by both teams that were unacceptable. Let’s not say what they were. And let’s use the passive voice: actions by both teams.. What actions? Don’t ask.

Notifications have been made. Who made them? What do you mean by notifications? Teams, not people, attacked other… teams. And the district will review… Do you mean you? The superintendent? Teams, district — keep it vaguely corporate and the appalling immediacy of students and their coach beating the shit out of people on a football field disappears. Once the facts are gathered, a decision will be taken. Gathered by whom? What sorts of decisions are available? Who will make them? Where are we…? What is known….? Who knows it…?

Let’s translate into English.

The fight at the Sanderson v. Marfa football game on Friday, September 7th angered and embarrassed all of us. Players on both teams attacked other players, and even a coach reportedly joined the fight. After I review footage, and talk to participants and witnesses, I’ll decide on punishments.

Note that SOS has dropped the superintendent’s last sentence. It’s dumb and unnecessary for her to pick sides when she just made clear she doesn’t know the full story.

‘Course, ‘family friendly,’ in the heart of the heart of the southland, might not be exactly what a coastal elite like UD would envision…

Truth be told, Jewish blueish UD has never, after all these years blogging about them, been able to make much sense of red-state tailgating qua tailgating; and the latest documentary evidence from Ole Miss hasn’t helped her along any.

I mean, before we go to the tape, and before we consider tailgating as such: Is it family friendly to break pretty much every NCAA rule? Repeatedly? Is the school’s last football coach, super-Christian Hugh Freeze, with his staggering lies and corruption, and his, uh, sexual issues, family friendly? Was the school’s large-scale racist rally after Obama won the presidency family-friendly?

Okay, and is an “all-out brawl” at the school’s last tailgate family friendly?

UD acknowledges that everyone in the video is well-dressed. She acknowledges a preponderance of chinos and polo shirts. This models, in a family-friendly way, good personal grooming for the next generation. But what are the children at the tailgate making of grown men, drunk out of their minds in the middle of the day in public, smashing each others’ faces bloody to the rattle of a thousand giant red plastic alcohol cups?

**************

I wonder if Ole Miss wonders why attendance at its games is tanking. Maybe this Ole Miss student can explain it.

… to Brett Kavanaugh’s now-notorious statement in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee about his having – like UD – grown up in Bethesda. (Kavanaugh’s private high school, Georgetown Prep, a Princetonian spread with its own golf course, is just down the street from UD‘s house.)

I’m a native of this area. I’m a native of an urban-suburban area. I grew up in a city plagued by gun violence and gang violence and drug violence.

Well. If you’ve read this blog with any regularity, you know UD‘s had what to say over the years about her hometown, Bethesda, Maryland, arguably the most privileged stretch of unincorporated overabundance in the world. One supposes Kavanaugh meant in a sloppy way to say that if you grow up in ‘thesda you also kinda grow up in nearby (eight miles away) DC, so that by sheer proximity you experience gangs and guns and all. But really he grew up quite safely and uber-wealthily outside a city plagued by etc. etc. And that’s why everyone’s making fun of him – especially ‘thesdans like UD.

Bethesda is a lot of things, but hood — or even hood adjacent — isn’t one of them. White people who own yachts and drivable cars that you can plug into a socket, live in Bethesda. Good credit lives in Bethesda. Really tall skinny-ass dogs with long hair live in Bethesda. White women who get plastic surgery live in Bethesda. If Budweiser horses — those special horses that look like they are wearing Uggs — could own homes, those horses would have split-level McMansions in Bethesda.

Another ‘thesdan describes the crime-ridden horrors of a ‘thesdan upbringing:

By day, I was surrounded by drug dealers, pushing their Ritalin from their lockers and marijuana in the student parking lots. Every night, when I came home from lacrosse practice, I walked through streets flooded with white-collar criminals. On the weekends, juvenile delinquents filled the mall: Loitering, shoplifting, carousing — always unsupervised. There was no escape. You could try to call the police, but their idea of handcuffs was a slap on the wrist. The teens answered to no one.

When I got home, where I should have felt safest, I’d find my father lying on his SEC filings. My mom and I were just supposed to look the other way. He’d buy my silence with extravagant gifts. I knew something wasn’t right. But when crime is all you know, how can you ever learn right from wrong? And who was I going to tell? All the dads on my block were in on it. They were the first gang I knew, but they wouldn’t be the last.

No matter what I did, I felt like I was destined to follow in his footsteps, first by attending Georgetown Prep and then — it seemed pointless to imagine an alternative — Yale. You think it’s hard to escape a cycle of poverty? You should try escaping a cycle of illegally-acquired wealth.

******************

Let me tell you about ‘thesda. Let me tell you the truth about just that strip of ‘thesda that runs from my house (technically in the incorporated town of Garrett Park, but ‘thesdan all the way) to the Garrett Park post office and Black Market Bistro.

Looking directly left and a few feet down the street from my house, you note a large construction project going on in Wells Park – a leafy expanse adjacent to the train tracks which has always had some sort of fun playground in it. Maryland Park and Planning decided the latest playground wasn’t glorious enough, so it took the whole thing down and started over. What’s taking shape is not merely a playground; it is a narrative. It is a magic kingdom with stairways up to various glorious myths and legends and adventures. It is beautiful. It is our latest goody – and we are choked with goodies.

Continue along Rokeby Avenue, and after the charming Garrett Park train station, where quiet comfortable commuter trains, each weekday morning, whisk you to Union Station in under fifteen minutes, you catch sight of the white tents of our weekly farmers market. UD happens to have visited this market last Saturday morning, so she’ll give you a snapshot.

The produce is big and very fresh; UD collects a variety of potatoes and onions for the hash browns she’ll make for Mr UD and La Kid when they, hours later, wake up. There are immense sunflowers, and UD takes a heavy bunch of these too, to make her jolly, passerby-friendly house even jollier. While she’s doing all of this, she’s talking nonstop to her neighbor Peggy, who tells her about the Alaskan cruise she leaves for on Thursday.

Waiting in line to buy her goodies, UD is hailed by another old friend, also a professor (though at American University), in charge today of the GIVES table. “Get me up to date on your life, Margaret!” she says, but first she tells me what she’s been up to. “We just got back from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness!”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s way up north in Minnesota, and it’s just pristine and amazing…” The line moves slowly, and UD listens to her neighbor describe the rugged, challenging, no-cell-phone-service thrill of the place. “And what about you?” she asks, and UD is grateful she can – not exactly compete, because Shenandoah National Park is nearby, only moderately rugged, and has cell phone service – but at least keep the ball in the air with her talk of viewing skyrocketing perseids all night long in Big Meadow.

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Walk for ten minutes in the other direction from UD‘s house, and you are in another big meadow: The stretch of land Amazon might choose for its second headquarters (it’s one of twenty finalists). I doubt we’ll get chosen, but imagine the additional goodies that would bring!

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Plenty more fun stuff here.

… for a quieter time, when the only thing they were famous for was massive welfare fraud.

Wigged out, baby.

She drank, she hiked, she stood
in a barrel and pressed grapes.

When UD got to the word “amorality” in the famous anonymous op-ed, she was pleased. She loves the word amoral, its soft letters smoothly rolling out, and inside it love itself – amor, folded equally beautifully inside the famously beautiful word sycamore.

******************

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality
Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored…

******************

The long soft Os
You moored in your prose…

Although everyone knows
Amoral: poetry, moral: prose

When eye and ear encountered those
Something poetic interposed

(Moored, and the Moor himself arose
Root, The Name of the Rose)

Amid constitutional throes
Aesthetic repose

********************

When something poetic interposes, we fly above morality. For his poem, “A Spring Song,” Donald Davie chooses as epigraph a phrase from Pope:

“stooped to truth and moralized his song”

Truth is what we’re moored in; art frees us. Here’s Davie’s poem.

********************

Spring pricks a little. I get out the maps.
Time to demoralize my song, high time.
Vernal a little. Primavera. First
Green, first truth and last.
High time, high time.

High time and a long time yet, my love!
Get out that blessed map.
Ageing, you take your glasses off to read it.
Stooping to truth, we potter to Montoire.
High time, my love. High time and a long time yet.

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Spring pricks because the dude is old and way unspringlike; the whole poem is an ironic Spring Song, a sour, self-mocking meditation on the increasing failure of the yearly regreening project, and the unavoidable oncomingness of his dissolution/silence (syntax collapses; diction kit begins to fall apart).

Meanwhile – ahem! – let’s de-moralize our song – that is, let’s use poetry for what it’s always been – a way to sidestep and postpone, beautifully, sinuously, the ugly obdurate boring truth of death. “First / Green, first truth and last.” Obvious truth: We’re born; we die.

So, shit. Have a high time while you can; haul out the maps and travel the Loire Valley.

But it was precisely his wife’s act there, last summer, of getting out a map – such a simple, ordinary gesture – that shatteringly disclosed for the poet the truth of their both being very old. “Ageing, you take your glasses off to read it.”

So, fuck. I just did it. I stooped to truth.

Okay, so sometimes one stoops. But one ought not stop. Let’s not stop at truth. Let’s keep traveling and keep singing the amoral song, the song that doesn’t say anything but truthlessly, ruthlessly, ecstatically, sings.

Merrily we roll along, so where do we go tomorrow? Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow fuck I did it again, let my truthy mind creep in a petty pace to the last syllable and dusty death. James Merrill made the same point, although in the last stanza of his poem, “Santorini: Stopping the Leak,” it’s not singing but dancing:

Here, finally, music that would take Satie
Twenty-five hundred years to reinvent
Put naked immaturity through paces
Of a grave dance – as if catastrophe
Could long be lulled by slim waists and shy faces…

*****************

As if!

*****************

Shake it off! There. Back to the amoral song and dance. High time, my love. High time, and a long time yet.

Johns Hopkins med school grad Jumana Nagarwala has really done the place proud, huh? And let’s figure you and I – via our taxes, whatever – helped pay her way through one of America’s greatest schools of medicine so that she could mutilate thousands of three-year-old American girls (Nagarwala’s only 45, and if found innocent of female genital mutilation in her upcoming trial, has many more years of baby-clitoris-slashing ahead of her).

Thousands of people compete every year for a coveted place at Hopkins, and someone there reviewed her application, which I’m guessing didn’t say I want to be a doctor because I want in secret in the dead of night to force screaming little girls to have mutilated sexually pleasureless lives, and decided to put her out there in our country with certification as a medical doctor.

Nor can she be the only one.

The sect she belongs to is as we speak defending castration of the innocents most passionately in front of the Indian Supreme Court because of course they are doing God’s will… And this is why Nagarwala, if freed, will return to her butchery at once: Slashing genitals is the best, most pious, most godly thing, she does. It is a commandment from the lord and cannot, will not, be disobeyed.

Since the particular sect to which this woman belongs is high-profile and unapologetic about its barbarism, UD proposes at the very least that when a medical school in this country receives a viable application from anyone they are able to identify as a member of the sect, the admissions committee have a nice long talk with the applicant.

We must do what we can, as a country, to defend our children against attack. We must certainly do what we can to avoid educating and then letting loose in our cities another Jumana Nagarwala.

Comment from ISU’s interim AD:

“Our community has demonstrated that they love their Bengal athletics. There’s just no question. I can see that from a mile away …”

Once again, everyone gets a chance to run down the field!