The Queerness of Queerness

Even before coming to Bard I observed with growing concern what it means to be a “man” or a “woman” today at home or abroad. Whenever I went out I was struck by how masculine women conduct themselves and how feminine guys behave. While girls, deep in their hearts long for some good old romance; on the part of guys, gallantry, good manners and chivalry is passé. Out with the roses and prose, in with Facebook poke-ing and agrammatical text messages. (Who needs sophistication in a loud bar or jam-packed lounge when both parties are sufficiently intoxicated to resort to more primitive forms of communication, anyway?)
On our arrival to campus in August, the first thing we were told during one of our “intro to Bard life” sessions was that we should prepare for a substantial amount of “gender queer” students. That was the point where I gave up: I was used to manly girls, girly guys, Paris acculturated me to all forms of homosexuality, but “gender queerness” was quite a novel jargon on the list. In my conservative mind, Greek mythology apart, one is either a man or a woman. Not in Annandale-on-Queer.
The college’s support for “gender exploration” has got to a point where students started calling for “gender neutral” locker rooms, bathrooms and toilets. I could not stop wondering what the signs on the doors would look like. “Men’s”, “Ladies”, “To Be Defined”? As much as I learned to acknowledge the importance of the freedom of self-exploration and self-expression, this recent initiative made me wonder. Where exactly is the border between liberal education and institutionalized promotion of certain pseudo-categories that do not happen to exist in Real Life, i.e. outside of the Bard bubble? I hold the (by local standards) extremely unmodern view that gender is not a trial-error thing and that playing around with such categories confuses people. What would really happen to a gender queer Bardian out there in the “neutral”-locker-less world? Well, at some point, Reality would happen....seasoned with the inner stress of non-compliance to social norms that he or she will have to live by in the next ca. 50 years.
I am skeptical that excessive liberalism and tolerance makes people actually happier on the long run. From teenage outcasts they would only grow to be adult outcasts and I do not think it makes them happier.
Simone de Beauvoir, who argued that no woman is born woman, as independent and confident a feminist as she was, from time to time burst out in hysterical crying on Sartre, realizing that deep inside she longed for a normal, traditional relationship. The kind most women instinctively long for. One with roses and prose.

Hey, Big Spender!

Suffering from severe war-fatigue, as every decent American and non-American, a lecture on the costs of the war in Iraq would not necessarily be on my to-do list on a sunny and warm spring afternoon. But since I rarely have the opportunity to listen to Noble prize winning economists in the comfortable proximity of my campus cinema, I opted for Joseph Stiglitz today. The title, “Three Trillion Dollar War” sounded politically provocative enough.
Democrats have been wining about the war costs ever since they realized it’s not precisely a G.H.W. Bush-style hundred-hour military project in Iraq, but in our terror-ridden world, no decent liberal candidate would actually cut back the US military budget, of course. The evil is still out there, as we know. But for some reason or another even with no defense spending cuts on the horizon, it became a daily duty of every respectable Democrat to waive the Iraq check and show how much those wild Republicans hawks are spending. Nota bene, it remains to be a Congressional responsibility to approve military spending every fiscal year and Democrats happens to have the majority of the seats since 2004. Minor detail.
Nevertheless, three trillion dollars remains a particularly supersize number even by American standards. Yes, that is exactly twelve zeros after the number 3: take Hungary’s GDP twenty times, and you got it. Or do you? The main narrative of Stiglitz was to make the econ illiterate, liberal arts audience realize the opportunity costs of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Take Health Care (long live Democratic primaries) and imagine just how much money the Federal government would have to pump into the system to cover those 60 million who are left out of the rain. Well, take one sixth of the war’s costs and you would solve the problem not only for this generation but for the next one as well. But of course not everyone agrees with universal health care, and all Americans have the right not to put a price tag on the sacred cause of democracy promotion. In the end, what conscientious parent would complain about the high tuition fee of their child’s education? Parsimony is out when it comes to educating the world and national security, magnanimity is in. The bulk of the problem, however is that financing Iraq in itself becomes a national security problem when the money lender happens to be not so democratic, not so allied China.
The real trouble with financing Iraq is that the US has not been able to finance it from the beginning. It simply did not have the bucks to back it. So as most reputable American citizens that now find themselves in the middle of an ugly housing crisis, it started to spend money that it didn’t have and hoped for better days.
Stiglitz argued that it is an urban myth that wars are good for the economy. They’re not. At least not in the long run. They create a false sense of growth that is all but sustainable. So, here they are now: living on borrowed money and borrowed time, facing a depression that is deeper and probably longer than most Americans would want to think.
America is yet to see a war to be ended due to financial concerns. To pullout because of the cash problems would be the least romantic and most un-American ending of the Freedom fairy tale. It just won’t happen. Democrats will have to find better reasons than that.