The Burqa and the Thong

It's popped up yet again. These days you can't look at any news medium without finding an instance of the Western obsession with what Muslim women wear, whether they are coerced and how do we, in the West, handle the notion of veiled women.

The real question, of course, is what any veil means as a symbol, and to whom. Symbols are cultural expressions of social conventions. As such, they do not have fixed and absolute meanings or values.

There is no greater reason than custom and historical happenstance that a blue, white and red cloth should represent France; one could represent France with a boar's head on a stick or a bottle of Beaujolais or a photo of Brigitte Bardot.

So what is a burqa, other than a dress that covers the wearer from head to toe? Why is it more demeaning to women than, say, the miniskirt or the thong?

Just as some people argue that the burqa shows women's submission to men, others argue that the miniskirt and thong show the objectification of women as bodies made to please men.

As for the in-between costume, a veil or headscarf, the cri de guerre in French schools, I am told that it is an teenage girls' fashion. Daughters of immigrants rebel against assimilation, or simply to shock or break a rule.

Apparently, in France one can see girls with expensive, fashionable clothes, makeup, and a veil that is also as luxurious.

Isn't the headscarf a reverse miniskirt, just like the reverse of a burqa is a thong?

Snowing ... again!

Having spent my youth in Montreal, I never thought I would get tired of snow in what is usually snow-starved Washington, D.C. But, honestly, as I write it's coming down like nobody's business.

So, in lieu of one coherent post, here go a few ideas:

• The storm and its closing down of the city reminds me of the very fragility of life as we know it in what one school principal called "urban cities" (as opposed to the rural ones, I imagine). I blogged about that fragility in my very first post, before I knew about blogger, when I decided to post essays on a free website I had. Read In Isabel's Wake, still current by my lights.
• Which reminds me ... this storm has no name! What's with that, Weather Service?
• Of course, people in normally snowbound areas are writing to thank me for taking their snow and even sending me pictures of snowblowers. Funny, funny, funnn-ee! I'm not going out until spring.

Nonstorm Items:

• Here I was happy as a clam that the dollar was dropping, making our exports cheaper than theirs and wham ... there goes the euro!
• Are we all terrible slimy people, or is it that as you become aware, the human, fallible condition becomes unavoidably obvious? (Just a general, philosophizing comment based on nothing.)

And, oh, OK, I'll turn comments back on. But moderated.

Haiti: the event

Woke up to an e-mail from iTunes offering an album of songs from the "one of the biggest events in broadcast history," which iTunes says was brought about by "the tragic events in Haiti." Who'd a thunk it?

The poorest, most miserable land in the Western Hemisphere -- the first black-majority independent republic in the world ... coincidence? -- had an annihilating earthquake just so Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and friends in New York, Los Angeles, and London could have a star-studded telethon.

So get yer tunes for only 8 buckeroos.

Oh, sure, "100% of proceeds from the sale" go to the the Clinton-Bush (or should it be Clinton-Bush-Bush?) Haiti Fund, the UN and several other nongovernment charities, including a token Haitian group, named last because no one has ever heard of it.

What are they gonna say: "This is the greatest, cheapest, career boosting promo for managers, producers, singers and distributors ever to come our way and we're doing our darndest to get our share of the limelight"?

Wait!

There's even a book out -- written before the fact -- about "disaster capitalism." Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism spells out how disaster-shocked people and countries faces with wars, coups and natural catastrophes are rapaciously picked clean and reordered into "free" market economies by corporate reingeneering.

It's happening now in Haiti.