Ms. Collins looks at “The S. C. Firecracker” and says the public can look past a politician’s plain-vanilla affair. The problem comes when so much is piled on to what started out as a little treat that it begins to look unnerving. Mr. Blow, in “The Prurient Trap,” says conservatives used sexual morality as a weapon and now it’s shooting them in the foot. Mr. Herbert sees “No Recovery in Sight,” and says economists say that the recession may end sometime this year, but the unemployment rate will continue to climb. That’s not a recovery. That’s mumbo jumbo. From Tehran Mr. Cohen tells of “Iran’s Second Sex,” and says Iran’s women stand in the vanguard against the state and the men who have accepted their discrimination. Here’s Ms. Collins:
The only good news this week for Gov. Mark (“I love your tan lines”) Sanford is that all those celebrity deaths have knocked him off the top of the news cycle.
For the rest of us, the whole vanishing-governor-sneaks-off-to-visit-Argentine-squeeze has had a number of side benefits. The Appalachian Trail has certainly gotten a well-deserved shot of publicity. And I have to believe that business is booming for call-forwarding services.
Another big plus is that Governor Sanford has provided us with a chance to revisit little-remembered historical precedents for scandals involving American politicians and Argentine women.
O.K., I can only think of one. It was, of course, the evening in 1974 when Fanne Foxe, “The Argentine Firecracker,” took a hysterical leap into the Tidal Basin after a fight with her inebriated escort, the House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas.
Foxe was a stripper at the Silver Slipper nightclub in Washington, and the married Mills began escorting her around during a period of major-league alcoholism. They were speeding past the Jefferson Memorial when they were stopped by police. Foxe jumped out, took a dive into the Tidal Basin, and pretty soon Mills was in the headlines and in disgrace.
Years later, after he had retired, dried out and returned to Washington as a tax lawyer, Mills told a Times reporter that during his Firecracker days, he was drinking a half-gallon of vodka a night and had hallucinations that buzzards were chasing him. As a result, he said, he lost control of his committee and failed to report out a bill in which he had a great interest.
“I had President Ford convinced on national health,” Mills said. “I could have passed it on the floor. But hell, I couldn’t get the damned committee to go with me. They had never failed to do that before, and I know now it was because of my drinking that they didn’t.”
Whether or not Mills was overestimating his pre-buzzard ability to move legislation, this story brings up two important points, only one of which is that we were already failing to pass national health care in 1974.
The other is that sex was the least of his problems.
The public will almost always look past a politician’s plain-vanilla affair. The problem comes when he piles on icing and sprinkles and coconut and then kumquats and zucchini and sardines until what started out as a little treat begins to look really unnerving.
New Jersey would have been ready to accept the news that its married governor, James McGreevey, was in love with a male Israeli poet. But not a male Israeli poet whom he had convinced to hang around with a job as head of state homeland security. New York could definitely have handled the fact that Gov. Eliot Spitzer cheated on his wife if it had not been for all that detail about Client 9 at Emperor’s Club V.I.P. escort service. And even Mills’s fellow House members, many of whom were undoubtedly sexual sinners themselves, decided it was probably not a good idea to have the nation’s tax policy being written by a guy who thinks there’s a buzzard on his desk.
Now South Carolinians will have to decide if they want their state run by a man who can’t remember to leave a forwarding number when he scampers off to make whoopee in a different hemisphere.
While most people in the state seem to feel as if it would be swell if Sanford just resigned, the governor isn’t showing any signs that he intends to quit. It isn’t entirely clear why he wants to hang on. He’s term limited. And whatever presidential ambitions he harbored were pretty much quashed when he vanished and aides started explaining that he took a hike (well, not really) because he was emotionally exhausted from his fight over the state budget. You had to ask what he’d have to do to get over North Korea.
So far, it appears that Sanford is going to devote his career to apologizing. On Wednesday, he held a press conference and apologized to everyone from his father-in-law to American Christianity. On Thursday, he was closeted with his wife, which undoubtedly involved heavy-duty apology time. Friday, he called his staff together for more apologies, including one to the leader of the Commerce Department, to whom the governor conveyed his regrets for having undermined the dignity of a state trade mission by having sex on the Buenos Aires stop.
It was right about then that Sanford compared himself to King David, who “fell mightily, he fell in very significant ways, but was able to pick up the pieces.” I will end here so we can all ask ourselves whether the entire course of the Old Testament would have been different if David and Bathsheba had had access to e-mail.
Here’s Mr. Blow:
“Hiking the Appalachian Trail.” Is that what we’re calling it these days? That’s what Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina told his staff that he was going to do when he absconded to Argentina to be with his “sweetest” Maria of the “magnificently gentle kisses.”
I had no particular interest in rubbernecking this disaster. People make mistakes. The flesh is weak, the heart disobedient and marriages hard. According to the General Social Survey, about 10 percent of married people admit that they have cheated on their spouses. And, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll taken in March last year, 54 percent of Americans say that they know someone who has been unfaithful. ’Twas ever thus.
At the end of the day, aside from the dereliction of duty and malfeasance, this, for me, would be a private matter. That is if it were not for the appalling hypocrisy of yet another social conservative saying one thing while doing another.
There are Democratic sex scandals to be sure, but Democrats didn’t build a franchise on holier-than-thou moral rectitude. The Republicans did. They used sexual morality as a weapon and now it’s shooting them in the foot.
Sanford voted to impeach Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky saga. According to The Post and Courier of Charleston, Sanford called Clinton’s behavior “reprehensible” and said, “I think it would be much better for the country and for him personally” to resign. “I come from the business side. … If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he’d be gone.” Remember that Mr. Sanford?
And this kind of hypocrisy isn’t confined to the politicians. It permeates the electorate. While conservatives fight to “defend” marriage from gays, they can’t keep theirs together. According to the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract, states that went Republican in November accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest divorce rates in 2006.
Conservatives touted abstinence-only education, which was a flop, when real sex education was needed, most desperately in red states. According to 2006 data from the Guttmacher Institute, those red states accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest teenage birthrates.
And, a study titled “Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?” that was conducted by Benjamin Edelman, an assistant professor of business at Harvard Business School and published earlier this year in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that subscriptions to online pornography sites were “more prevalent in states where surveys indicate conservative positions on religion, gender roles, and sexuality” and in states where “more people agree that ‘I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage.’ ”
They could avoid this hypocrisy by focusing more on what happens in their own bedrooms and avoiding the trap of judging what goes on in everyone else’s.
Now here’s Mr. Herbert:
How do you put together a consumer economy that works when the consumers are out of work?
One of the great stories you’ll be hearing over the next couple of years will be about the large number of Americans who were forced out of work in this recession and remained unable to find gainful employment after the recession ended. We’re basically in denial about this.
There are now more than five unemployed workers for every job opening in the United States. The ranks of the poor are growing, welfare rolls are rising and young American men on a broad front are falling into an abyss of joblessness.
Some months ago, the Obama administration and various mainstream economists forecast a peak unemployment rate of roughly 8 percent this year. It has already reached 9.4 percent, and most analysts now expect it to hit 10 percent or higher. Economists are currently spreading the word that the recession may end sometime this year, but the unemployment rate will continue to climb. That’s not a recovery. That’s mumbo jumbo.
Why this rampant joblessness is not viewed as a crisis and approached with the sense of urgency and commitment that a crisis warrants, is beyond me. The Obama administration has committed a great deal of money to keep the economy from collapsing entirely, but that is not enough to cope with the scope of the jobless crisis.
There were roughly seven million people officially counted as unemployed in November 2007, a month before the recession began. Now there are about 14 million. If you add to these unemployed individuals those who are working part time but would like to work full time, and those who want jobs but have become discouraged and stopped looking, you get an underutilization rate that is truly alarming.
“By May 2009,” according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, “the total number of underutilized workers had increased dramatically from 15.63 million to 29.37 million — a rise of 13.7 million, or 88 percent. Nearly 30 million working-age individuals were underutilized in May 2009, the largest number in our nation’s history. The overall labor underutilization rate in May 2009 had risen to 18.2 percent, its highest value in 26 years.”
If it were true that the recession is approaching its end and that these startlingly high numbers were about to begin a steady and substantial decline, there would be much less reason for alarm. But while there is evidence the recession is easing, hardly anyone believes a big-time employment turnaround is in the offing.
Three-quarters of the workers let go over the past year were permanently displaced, as opposed to temporarily laid off. They won’t be going back to their jobs when economic conditions improve. And many of those who were permanently displaced were in fields like construction and manufacturing in which the odds of finding work, even after a recovery takes hold, are not good.
Another startling aspect of this economic downturn is the toll it has taken on men, especially young men. Men accounted for nearly 80 percent of the loss in employment in this recession. As the labor market center reported, “The unemployment rate for males in April 2009 was 10 percent, versus only 7.2 percent for women, the largest absolute and relative gender gap in unemployment rates in the post-World War II period.”
Workers under 30 have sustained nearly half the net job losses since November 2007.
This is not a recipe for a strong economic recovery once the recession officially ends, or for a healthy society. Young males, especially, are being clobbered at an age when, typically, they would be thinking about getting married, setting up new households and starting families. Moreover, work habits and experience developed in one’s 20s often establish the foundation for decades of employment and earnings.
We’ve seen what happens when you rely on debt and inflated assets to keep the economy afloat. The economy can’t be re-established on a sound basis without aggressive efforts to put people back to work in jobs with decent wages.
We also need to consider the suffering that is being endured by these high levels of joblessness, including the profound negative effect on the families of the unemployed. Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, warned about the consequences for children. “What does it mean,” he asked, “when kids are under stress because there is no money in the household, or people have to move more, or are combining households, or lose their health insurance? I believe this is going to leave a permanent scar on a generation of kids.”
The first step in dealing with a crisis is to recognize that it exists. This is not a problem that will evaporate when the gross domestic product finally begins to creep into positive territory.
And last but not least here’s Mr. Cohen:
From Day 1, Iran’s women stood in the vanguard. Their voices from rooftops were loudest, and their defiance in the streets boldest. “Stand, don’t run,” Nazanine told me as the baton-wielding police charged up handsome Vali Asr avenue on the day after the fraudulent election. She stood.
Images assail me: a slender woman clutching her stomach outside Tehran University after the blow; a tall woman gesticulating to the men behind her to advance on the shiny-shirted Basij militia; women shedding tears of distilled indignation; and that young woman who screamed, “We are all so angry. Will they kill us all?”
How can a revolution kill its children? The post-1979 generation has risen, not alone, but in the lead. Perhaps Iran cannot be an exception to the rule that revolutions devour themselves.
A friend told me he no longer recognizes his wife. She’d been of the reluctantly acquiescent school. Now, “She’s a revolutionary.” I followed as she led us up onto the roof. The “death to the dictator” that surged from her into the night was of rare ferocity.
Women marched in 1979, too. But when the revolution was won, women were pushed out. Their subjugation became a pillar of the Islamic state. One woman told me that she had been 20 when she fought to oust the shah. “It’s simple,” she said. “We wanted freedom then, and we don’t have it now.”
In a way it is simple: laws that can force a girl into marriage at 13; discriminatory laws on inheritance; the segregated beaches on the Caspian; the humiliation of arrest for a neck revealed or an ankle-length skirt (a gust of wind might show a forbidden flash of leg); the suffocation that leads one artist I know to raise her hands to her neck.
Yes, it’s simple. From the outset, the regime targeted women, calculating that the patriarchal culture of the country would embrace the idea of an Islamic diktat that “put women in their place.”
But then again nothing in Iran is simple. One benefit of the massive show of resistance to a stolen vote, and future, has been to awaken Americans to the civic vitality of Iranian society — a real country with real people rather than a bunch of zealous clerics posing a nuclear problem.
This is a sea change. Iran has been denuclearized, not in the sense that the problem has gone away (on the contrary), but in the sense that a rounded picture, beyond to bomb or not to bomb, has formed.
Say Iran and murdered Neda Agha-Sultan surges where a bearded mullah once stood. Young, modern, connected, Neda just wanted to live her life. She personifies a certain Iran I’ve tried to evoke since the beginning of this year.
In some senses, women of her 20-something generation have benefited from the revolution; I told you to forget simplicity. It took an ayatollah to tell traditional families to educate their daughters. Today 60 percent of university students are women, about double the figure in 1982.
Here we stand close to the tragedy of this election. The vote offered an opportunity to bridge the gap between a fast-changing society of highly educated women and the regime. Past elections have served that purpose, nudging the clerical establishment in reformist directions.
Instead, hard-liners around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad opted for schism, a historic error. The Iran of yesterday is gone, the Iran of tomorrow not yet born.
I don’t want to suggest that Iran is a nation of women thirsting to cast off their chadors. As Saeed Leylaz told me before he was thrown in jail along with most of Iran’s reformist brain trust, “Our feet are in traditionalism and our heads in modernism.” Zahra Rahnavard, the strong-willed wife of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, troubled as she inspired.
When a friend asked one Ahmadinejad supporter his reasons, the reply was brusque: because “all the whores are with Moussavi.” Cultural battle lines of great clarity have been drawn since June 12.
Women are angry with the state, of course. But they are also angry with the passive way men have accepted discrimination. Be strong! Fight harder! These are immediate messages summoned from old frustrations.
Their courage and pain haunt me. We need Delacroix to paint them. We need President Obama to put engagement — still the right medium-term objective — on hold in their name.
Islam has a lot to say about the rights of women; the mullahs of Qom have lots of training in how to say the opposite of what they said before. The revolution might have bent toward the women it fashioned. But it has stiffened against what it birthed, never wise.
I asked one woman about her fears. She said sometimes she imagines an earthquake in Tehran. She dashes out but forgets her hijab. She stands in the ruins, hair loose and paralyzed, awaiting her punishment. And she looked at me wide-eyed as if to say: do you understand, does the world understand our desperation?
