A couple of hours ago.

The politics of the increasingly popular far-right aims to tap into fears and hatred of difference and migrants. In the race to ban the niqab, which has come to symbolise all that the far right hate, the French government, and now European Court of Human Rights, are leading the charge to give away the rights that were born out of the wars that were the ultimate manifestation of the hatred of the other.

This comment, a response to the latest legal confirmation of a country’s burqa ban, touches on a couple of the big mistakes and elisions to which one has become familiar in this important cultural debate.

The most important elision involves the writer’s suggestion that burqa bans are about political and legal institutions forcing it on countries (“the French government, and now European Court of Human Rights”). Shelina Janmohamed fails to mention strong to overwhelming popular support for burqa bans in several European countries:

82 percent of [French] people polled approved of a ban, while 17 percent disapproved… Clear majorities also backed burqa bans in Germany, Britain and Spain..

Current details here.

The latest from one country, Norway, here. A detail from Norway:

Labour has previously been split down the middle on the issue. The Progress and Labour parties have a combined total of 84 representatives in Norway’s parliament and are thus missing one vote in order to secure a majority for a possible ban.

Janmohamed casts opposition to the burqa as a far right phenomenon. It is not. Certainly right-wingers tend to like the idea; but as the poll numbers suggest, it is a position attractive across the spectrum. For details, go here, here, and here. Discussion here.

Finally, related to that last point: The primary reason many on the left favor burqa bans in most if not all of the public realm is that, as Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2010:

[W]e have no assurance that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice. A huge amount of evidence goes the other way.

That is, many people seem to see their position opposing the burqa having to do with protecting the rights of the women wearing them, not with responding in a panicky bigoted way to fear of the other. When I see a little girl in a burqa I don’t run off screaming with hatred and fear of difference. I feel solidarity with her as a young woman who deserves but isn’t getting the same democratic rights my daughter enjoys. As for adult women in burqas: My reading over many years about the response of people to fully veiled women reveals that the main response, rather than hatred or fear, is pity.

… football is also one of the world’s highest-profile Catholic universities: Notre Dame. ND has long been a very scandalous university sports location. I’m not talking only about several players being under arrest or investigation at any given time – that’s routine. I mean that people there positively worship not only coaches but the very grass their coaches walk upon. This is strange and unsettling behavior.

As was the behavior of one of their football players last month. He was arrested for “head butting and punching vehicles” and then threatening to kill the police who were called to the scene.

Beating up cars, using your head to butt cars… more strange and unsettling behavior at a university that’s really gone over the top in terms of the bizarre and the dangerous.

We’ve all been there.

The University of Florida’s finest.

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‘killer calendar, bro’

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Sing it with me. (The number of arrests cited in the song is too low. Here’s an update. Hard to keep up.)

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Deadspin has the best comment stream so far.

Last year, the waiver meant $3.3 million in subsidies went to UW athletics, even though the department made an overall profit of $8.9 million.

Just keep it coming, kiddies. Keep it coming.

UD is not surprised. She is, however, very happy to see this confirmation of a decision by France (and growing numbers of other countries, all of whom will be encouraged in the right direction by this decision) to ban the burqa.

If you click on this post’s category – democracy – you’ll find UD‘s many posts about the burqa.

Here is a longer piece she wrote about it, for Inside Higher Education, in 2010.

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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.

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?

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.

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UPDATE: Reactions to the court ruling:

I

French politicians in favor of the ban have continued to argue that the government is acting to “protect gender equality” and the “dignity of women.” Some have even referred to it as a “walking coffin, a muzzle.”

Calling a burqa a muzzle! Imagine that!

II

“Shocked… shocked… shocked…”

And yet how can that be? Are these people and organizations unaware of the broad support for the burqa ban in France? Unaware that the law passed “by overwhelming margins,” and that

82 percent of [French] people polled approved of a ban, while 17 percent disapproved… Clear majorities also backed burqa bans in Germany, Britain and Spain…

This has been known for years.

Defenders of the burqa are in the awkward position of believing their position to be morally obvious and unassailable, while at the same time having to deal with the fact that huge majorities of populations do not agree with them. Given this awkwardness, their choices are few. They can condemn much of the world – citizens, courts – as morally degenerate. They can – by expressing shock at outcomes like this latest one – pretend that right-thinking people agree with them and these little blips – 82% of the French population, increasing numbers of court decisions – are just … little blips.

These do not strike UD as winning strategies.

Here’s my earlier post about students there protesting her $225,000 fee for giving a speech on campus. (Or, as Ruth Marcus lowballs it in the Washington Post, “flying by private jet to pick up a check for $200,000 to stand at a podium for an hour.”)

And here, from an article you should read in its entirety, is an excellent statement of what I’m calling the Spending Down problem:

There can never be enough super-rich Americans to power a great economy. I earn about 1,000 times the median American annually, but I don’t buy thousands of times more stuff. My family purchased three cars over the past few years, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. I bought two pairs of the fancy wool pants I am wearing as I write, what my partner Mike calls my “manager pants.” I guess I could have bought 1,000 pairs. But why would I? Instead, I sock my extra money away in savings, where it doesn’t do the country much good.

American university students will stop being shocked by politicians and other celebrities being paid $300,000 to give a speech at UCLA when they can be made to understand the Why would I? problem. This guy solves it by pointlessly stashing it away. Imelda Marcos solved it by buying up all the shoes in the world. Our universities’ foundations solve it by paying $300,000 for a dinner speaker.

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UPDATE: Noam Scheiber calls it “the plutocracy problem.”

These foundations are great. They find $300,000 that somehow couldn’t be found for scholarships and give it to politicians who visit campus for a few hours to hawk a ghosted book and give a speech. Their 30,343-capacity football stadium can’t attract half that, so money that could go to scholarships or something vaguely academic instead goes to buy seats – empty seats, but they’re paid for – in a football stadium.

This – as this post’s category puts it – is where the simulacrum ends. It’s the way simulacral culture eventually ends up infecting even our universities.

The endless academic benefits of the forty million dollar university coach.

From Andrew Sullivan.

Penn State University’s football program has the distinction of having nurtured – well, lionized – a man whose last name has now become shorthand for horror.

… in which student leaders at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (a school that’s a perennial source of ridicule on this blog, by the way) object to the – everyone’s trotting out the usual adjectives – obscene, outrageous, grotesque – payment she’s getting to give a speech at the school. The students, who attend a university constantly and, uh, outrageously raising tuition and fees, a school about to build a billion dollar football stadium, are shocked that anyone would be handed $225,000 to read an hour’s worth of platitudes (an hour? maybe less) written by someone else. (UD will enthusiastically vote for Hillary when she runs, so look elsewhere for an anti-Clinton screed.) (And don’t get me started on the mystery of who wrote her memoir.)

Not long ago, Clinton got $300,000 to do the same thing at UCLA.

UD ran the give a speech for $300,000 thing by Mr UD, and though far from a populist, he too was shocked. For him too something in this transaction – you fly me out, put me up in a nice place, watch while I read a speech, have one of your fund-raising arms give me $300,000, and fly me home – seemed very wrong.

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The dustup has me thinking about John Edwards, a presidential candidate with … call them money problems. Remember? This is a from a long profile in Esquire:

Edwards was taking a beating in the press. The two $400 Beverly Hills haircuts that were mistakenly charged to the campaign, his yearlong employment at a New York hedge fund, the revelation that he took large fees for speaking engagements — all of it has been drowning out his message.

“They’re calling you a hypocrite,” I said.

Edwards looked at me, kind of annoyed, kind of resigned. “The truth about me is that I come from a very normal background. Early in our marriage, Elizabeth and I had very normal lives. We got financially successful because I won a bunch of cases. So we had money far beyond what we would ever have expected to have. And I think that part of our life, the financial life, is pretty privileged. You know, that house you went to is a really nice house. But I don’t think either one of us has believed that anything’s changed about us.

“Yes, of course, having money, having people around me, being able to buy a nicer shirt or whatever without having to worry about it, or going to dinner and not having to worry about it, that’s all true, that has changed. But I don’t think it changes anything about me as a person. The people who are critical, well, they don’t know me, they’ve never been around me. They don’t know me personally. That’s what I really believe is the truth.

“Because of the background I come from, I always feel a personal connection with people who are struggling…”

Large fees for speaking engagements… though back then they were probably a piddling amount, like $100,000… Not long after he was president of Harvard, Larry Summers made $135,000 for one speech at Goldman Sachs… That’s nothing…

And what was Edwards’ defense? That despite the absolutely enormous house he’d built himself, despite all of the other gazillion dollar expenditures, he wasn’t a hypocrite because his essential ordinary humble self was unchanged.

Beyond the on-the-face-of-it unpersuasive nature of this argument – unimaginable sums of money clearly had changed him, as such a staggering life transformation would change anyone – there’s the deeper but even more obvious truth that how you use your wealth reflects your morality. Edwards used his in a profligate and narcissistic way; and to add insult to injury he did this while lecturing the nation on the shame of there being Two Americas.

And sure, there are two Americas, which is the heart of what Hillary’s up against. I mean, there are several Americas, but for the purpose of addressing this problem, her problem, there are two. There’s middle-class America, represented by the shocked UNLV students; and there’s Tom “Kristallnacht” Perkins’ America, represented by Brown University’s Steven Cohen (personal wealth $9 billion) and Harvard University’s endowment (approaching $35 billion). And the real problem, ironically enough, since UNLV is a university, is ignorance. The student leaders do not know about, let alone understand, this other America, the America whose one big daily existential issue is what to do with all of its money. People are always bothering Harvard about spending more of its endowment, but Harvard is kind of at a loss. They spend and spend – they’re building an entire other campus, for god’s sake – and it’s still around 35 billion. Cohen is constantly purchasing palazzos and Picassos, but, like some character in Alice in Wonderland, the more he spends the more he makes. This is The Spending Down Problem, the one problem that continues to bedevil our rich country’s large number of super-rich people and institutions. What the hell do we do with it all?

If you understand the problem from this angle, you’re not surprised when people come to your university, read some lines, and get a check for $225,000. The country is bulging with people desperate to dispense their money somehow, somewhere.

Since UD believes the students’ problem is essentially one of education, she has a proposal to make. Our universities should offer – perhaps in the business school – a History of Personal and Institutional Wealth in America, with an emphasis on the last ten years or so, when so much wealth has accumulated in private hands that most observers have trouble believing the numbers, much less the Spending Down Problem. (Review of required text here.) This course would allow America’s university students to look at $300,000 for a speech at their school (not to mention prepare them for the eventual escalation of these fees into the millions) without blinking.

An observer struggles to formulate the urgency of the situation for America’s historically black colleges.

A review of The Athletic Trap: How College Sports Corrupted the Academy restates the obvious.

… crowd.

He’s having a busy day. Picked up his renewed passport (which now says on its cover European Union/Poland), at the Polish embassy; is now wading through the soccer crowd; will in an hour or so meet an old friend for coffee on upper Connecticut Avenue…