Ms. Collins says “Jon and Kate Begin to Grate,” and that the reality series about the Gosselins, who used fertility treatments to conceive twins and then sextuplets, is on the list for the new millennium’s 10 worst ideas. To which I say who gives a crap? It is possible to ignore shit like that, you know. Mr. Blow, in “Rogues, Robes and Racists,” says the Republicans who wielded the hot blade of racial divisiveness for years are now calling Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court nominee, a racist. Oh, the hypocrisy! Mr. Herbert, in “Holding On to Our Humanity,” says the tendency to draw an impenetrable psychic curtain across the worst that the world has to offer is understandable. But it’s a tendency that must be fought. Here’s Ms. Collins’ exercise in trivia:
Back before the turn of the millennium, my husband and I wrote a book that contained a lot of lists of the best and worst of the last thousand years. Our friend Alfred Gingold contributed “Ten Worst Ideas of the Millennium,” which included flagellants, foot binding, wine in a box, trench warfare and French mime.
I was thinking about that list the other day when I was reading about the crisis on the set of “Jon & Kate Plus Eight.” This is, of course, the reality series about the Gosselins, who used fertility treatments to conceive twins, and then sextuplets. After four televised years of birthday parties and projectile vomiting during flu season, Jon & Kate’s marriage appears to have hit the rocks of tabloid hell.
And in the process, although we are only nine years into the 21st century, I believe we have already discovered two of the new millennium’s 10 worst ideas:
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Fertility treatments that produce enough babies to field an entire team for any sport except tennis.
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Reality shows about the day-to-day lives of any family that is not headed by an aging rock star.
“One day my kids are gonna Google me,” moaned Jon, who was caught frolicking with a 23-year-old teacher while Kate was off on a book tour. After weeks of headlines in supermarket magazines, the Gosselins were back on TV this week for the opening of Season Five (Theme: Sextuplets Turn 5, Jon and Kate Aren’t Speaking). It drew a stratospheric cable audience of 9.8 million viewers — approximately five times the ratings for “Mad Men.”
This is a tradition that stretches back to 1971, when Bill and Pat Loud agreed to let PBS film 300 hours in the life of their “fun family.” By the time the cameras left, the Louds were en route to the cover of Newsweek and Pat had filed for divorce. But Americans have no sense of history and now people are practically begging to be turned into a TV series. A number of the current ones involve very large families — one terrifyingly named “18 Kids and Counting.”
Once science made it so much easier for people to have six, seven, eight babies at a time, it seems right that the world would come up with some occupation that would allow the parents to make a living without leaving the nursery. The Gosselins were reportedly paid at least $50,000 an episode, and the family has moved into a $1.1 million house on 24 acres in Pennsylvania.
I can’t help suspecting that the audience for “Jon & Kate” was initially drawn to the show by the same fascination that compels cable TV to keep producing documentaries about people who weigh 800 pounds. Wow, how does that work out, practically speaking? But reality shows, like any kind of institutionalized gossip, also offer the occasional useful life lessons.
One of the most important is that people who embrace 21st-century public life, whether it is lived on Twitter or TLC, aren’t allowed to complain about the downside. (“I did not sign up for public scrutiny of everything and neither did Kate,” Jon told the TV cameras grumpily and inaccurately.)
Recently, as the marriage continued to fray, Kate’s brother and sister-in-law appeared on CBS’s “The Early Show” to denounce the Gosselins and call for a law against children on reality shows. The kids actually seem well cared for and happy, although you can already imagine how the sextuplets will be tortured in the future by reruns of the potty-training episode. The relatives mainly seemed distressed by a family feud and compelled to work out their angst by going on national TV to denounce people going on national TV.
My favorite angle is the feminist one. When the world first met the Gosselins, Kate was a more-than-full-time-mother and Jon was going off to work every day as an “I.T. analyst.” (This is a position which is actually a very common occupation for men on reality series. Women tend more toward “Pilates instructor.”)
Then Jon, who appears laid back to the point of being comatose, lost his job. Kate, who was a tad obsessive in the house (she once berated her husband for breathing too loud), produced several best-selling books and made so many promotional tours that her husband found himself in the role of the major caregiver.
By the time they started their current season, Jon’s life crisis was a mirror image of the feminine “problem that has no name” that Betty Friedan wrote about in 1963. He complained that he loved his kids but felt trapped. (“It’s not what I chose, you know. It was kind of chosen for me.”) Kate couldn’t understand why he seemed to resent his “duties” when she was out working to support the family. And anyway, he had lots of household help.
There’s much to mull. But at minimum, when a listmaker of the future starts compiling the Ten Worst Multiple-Birth-Reality-Show-Meltdowns-of-the-Millennium, the Gosselins will have found a place in history.
Here’s Mr. Blow:
Someone pinch me. I must be dreaming. Some of the same Republicans who have wielded the hot blade of racial divisiveness for years, are now calling Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court nominee, a racist. Oh, the hypocrisy!
The same Newt Gingrich who once said that bilingual education was like teaching “the language of living in a ghetto” tweeted that Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist.” The same Rush Limbaugh who once told a black caller to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back” called Sotomayor a “reverse racist.” The same Tom Tancredo, a former congressman, who once called Miami, which has a mostly Hispanic population, “a third world country” said that Sotomayor “appears to be a racist.”
This is rich.
Even Michael Steele, the bungling chairman of The Willie Horton Party knows that the Republicans have no standing on this issue. In an interview published in GQ magazine in March, he was asked: “Why do you think so few nonwhite Americans support the Republican Party right now?” His response: “Cause we have offered them nothing! And the impression we’ve created is that we don’t give a damn about them or we just outright don’t like them.” Ding, ding, ding, ding.
Ironically, one of the candidates who was defeated by Steele for the chairmanship sent out Christmas CDs that included a song entitled “Barack the Magic Negro.” Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.
Politically, this “racist” strategy could prove disastrous. Hispanics are the largest and the fastest-growing minority group in the country. And, in recent years, they have increasingly been the victims of racial discrimination. It will be hard to paint the victims, as personified by Sotomayor, as the offenders.
A report entitled “Under Siege: Life for Low-Income Latinos in the South” that was released last month by the Southern Poverty Law Center found “systemic discrimination against Latinos” that constituted “a civil rights crisis.”
The report noted: “And as a result of relentless vilification in the media, Latinos are targeted for harassment by racist extremist groups, some of which are directly descended from the old guardians of white supremacy. ”
This finding is borne out by the F.B.I.’s hate crimes data, which show that the number of anti-Hispanic hate crimes have increased by half since 2003, while all other hate crimes have increased by 6 percent.
Politics aside, what exactly did Sotomayor say that got everyone in a huff? In a 2001 speech she said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” She acknowledged a racial bias. That doesn’t make her a racist.
Why? Because racism exists along a spectrum. On one end is the mere existence of racial bias. Harvard’s Project Implicit, an online laboratory, has demonstrated that most of us have this bias, whether we are conscious of it or not.
Somewhere in the middle of the spectrum are the conscious expressions of that bias in the form of prejudices. On the other end, at the extreme, are deliberate acts of racial discrimination based on those prejudices. That’s where the racists dwell. Think of it this way: You know that you could cheat on your taxes; acknowledging that you are tempted to do so reveals a frailty, but only the act of cheating is a crime.
I have yet to read or hear of Sotomayor’s acts of racial discrimination. (She is nearly 55 years old. Surely if she is a racist, and a judge to boot, there has to be some proof of it in her actions, no?)
Now let’s look at a couple of the men who have ascended to the bench.
First, there’s former Chief Justice William Rehnquist. When the Supreme Court was considering Brown v. Board of Education, Rehnquist was a law clerk for Justice Robert Jackson. Rehnquist wrote Jackson a memo in which he defended separate-but-equal policies, saying, “I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by my ‘liberal’ colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.”
Furthermore, Rehnquist had been a Republican ballot protectionist in Phoenix when he was younger. As the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen correctly noted in 1986: Rehnquist “helped challenge the voting qualifications of Arizona blacks and Hispanics. He was entitled to do so. But even if he did not personally harass potential voters, as witnesses allege, he clearly was a brass-knuckle partisan, someone who would deny the ballot to fellow citizens for trivial political reasons — and who made his selection on the basis of race or ethnicity.”
Then there’s John Roberts, who replaced Rehnquist as the chief justice in 2005. That year, Newsday reported that Roberts had made racist and sexist jokes in memos that he wrote while working in the Reagan White House. And, The New York Review of Books published a scolding article in 2005 making the case that during the same period that he was making those jokes, Roberts marshaled a crusader’s zeal in his efforts to roll back the civil rights gains of the 1960s and ’70s — everything from voting rights to women’s rights. The article began, “The most intriguing question about John Roberts is what led him as a young person whose success in life was virtually assured by family wealth and academic achievement to enlist in a political campaign designed to deny opportunities for success to those who lack his advantages.”
Gingrich tweeted that “a white man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw.” Make up your own minds about where Rehnquist’s and Roberts’s words and actions should fall on the racism spectrum, but both were overwhelmingly confirmed.
Until someone can produce proof of words and actions on the part of Sotomayor that even approach the scale of Rehnquist’s and Roberts’s, all I see is men throwing skeleton bones from class closets.
And now here’s Mr. Herbert:
Overload is a real problem. There is a danger that even the most decent of people can grow numb to the unending reports of atrocities occurring all around the globe. Mass rape. Mass murder. Torture. The institutionalized oppression of women.
There are other things in the world: a ballgame, your daughter’s graduation, the ballet. The tendency to draw an impenetrable psychic curtain across the worst that the world has to offer is understandable. But it’s a tendency, as Elie Wiesel has cautioned, that must be fought.
We have an obligation to listen, for example, when a woman from a culture foreign to our own recalls the moment when time stopped for her, when she was among a group of women attacked by soldiers:
“They said to us: ‘If you have a baby on your back, let us see it.’ The soldiers looked at the babies and if it was a boy, they killed it on the spot [by shooting him]. If it was a girl, they dropped or threw it on the ground. If the girl died, she died. If she didn’t die, the mothers were allowed to pick it up and keep it.”
The woman recalled that in that moment, the kind of throbbing moment when time is not just stopped but lost, when it ceases to have any meaning, her grandmother had a boy on her back. The grandmother refused to show the child to the soldiers, so both she and the boy were shot.
A team of female researchers, three of them physicians, traveled to Chad last fall to interview women who were refugees from the nightmare in Darfur. No one has written more compellingly about that horror than my colleague on this page, Nick Kristof. When I was alerted to the report that the team had compiled for Physicians for Human Rights, my first thought was, “What more is there to say?”
And then I thought about Mr. Wiesel, who has warned us so eloquently about the dangers inherent in indifference to the suffering of others. Stories of atrocities on the scale of those coming out of Darfur cannot be told too often.
The conflict has gone on for more than six years, and while the murders and mass rapes have diminished, this enormous human catastrophe is still very much with us. For one thing, Sudan has expelled humanitarian aid groups from Darfur, a move that Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, recently told Mr. Kristof “may well amount to genocide by other means.”
Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the conflict and the systematic sexual attacks on Darfuri women have been widely reported. Millions have been displaced and perhaps a quarter of a million Darfuris are living in conditions of the barest subsistence in refugee camps along the Chad-Sudan border.
The report by Physicians for Human Rights, to be released officially on Sunday (available at darfuriwomen.org), focuses on several dozen women in the Farchana refugee camp in Chad. The report pays special attention to the humanity of the women.
“These are real people with children, with lives that may have been quite simple, but were really rich before they were displaced,” said Susannah Sirkin, a deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights.
The conditions in the refugee camps are grim, made worse by the traumas that still grip the women, many of whom were witnesses — or the victims — of the most extreme violence.
“I don’t think I was prepared for the level of just palpable suffering that they are continuing to endure,” said Dr. Sondra Crosby, one of the four interviewers. “Women were telling me they were starving. They’re eating sorghum and oil and salt and sugar.”
Dr. Crosby and her colleagues had a few crackers or cookies on hand for the women during the interviews. “I don’t think I saw even one woman eat the crackers, even though they were hungry,” she said. “They all would hide them in their dresses so they could take them back to their children.”
The women also live with the ongoing fear of sexual assault. According to the report, rape is a pervasive problem around the refugee camps, with the women especially vulnerable when they are foraging for firewood or food.
“It is so much easier to look away from victims,” said Mr. Wiesel, in a speech at the White House in 1999. “It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes.”
But indifference to the suffering of others “is what makes the human being inhuman,” he said, adding: “The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.”
