Americans’ unhappy birthday: ‘Too much wrong right now’, by Pauline Arrillaga, AP via Yahoo! News.

. . . talk turns to the state of the Union, and the [Gilbert, Ariz., chapter of the Optimist Club] become decidedly bleak.

They use words such as “terrified,” “disgusted” and “scary” to describe what one calls “this mess” we Americans find ourselves in. Then comes the list of problems constituting the mess: a protracted war, $4-a-gallon gas, soaring food prices, uncertainty about jobs, an erratic stock market, a tougher housing market, and so on and so forth.

One member’s son is serving his second tour in Iraq. Another speaks of a daughter who’s lost her job in the mortgage industry and a son in construction whose salary was slashed. Still another mentions a friend who can barely afford gas.

Joanne Kontak, 60, an elementary school lunch aide inducted just this day as an Optimist, sums things up like this: “There’s just entirely too much wrong right now.”

Happy birthday, America? This year, we’re not so sure.

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Interesting how one can write an entire op/ed about the anniversary of Israel’s creation and not mention the word “Palestinian” once. “Palestine” gets one mention, in a quote from someone else — but there’s no indication that there were ever people who actually lived (or continue to live) in Palestine. They’re simply invisible.

The Nation does a better job in pointing out that this is indeed a somber anniversary, and that, like American society, the people of Israel remain deeply divided about their country’s leadership and the choices that leadership has made. They also remain deeply divided and conflicted about their own identities. There’s no question that the history (and ongoing reality) of persecution of and discrimination against Jews makes a strong moral case for the creation of a Jewish state. And the fact that Israel is home to 41 percent of the world’s Jews suggests that many Jewish people have themselves decided that such a state was needed.

But the creation of that state came at great expense, and its conservative leadership continues to place major roadblocks in the way of any sort of peace. The unwillingness to grapple with history — a history of moving onto someone else’s land, which Americans too share — leaves many wounds wide open. And the refusal to allow Palestinians to pick their own leadership and to define their own existence makes it impossible to accomplish anything. There are certainly huge numbers of extremists on both sides, and I’m often tempted to say “a pox on both their houses.” But there are enough people invested in some sort of equitable and human rights affirming solution that we shouldn’t give up hope quite yet — true justice may be impossible (and I’m not even sure what that would look like at this point), but an acceptable solution isn’t. Of course, that’s going to require some representations and voices other than the “Greater Israel” religious right-wingers and the Suicide Bomber stereotypes.

So I’m glad to see publications like The Nation highlighting the voices of people from the Palestinian diaspora. One thing Edward Said highlights in The Question of Palestine — and something that probably feels familiar to a lot of people in marginalized groups — is the media’s decisions to constantly talk about the Palestinian people instead of talking to them, or listening to them. So entire articles will be written about Israel/Palestine without a Palestinian voice. It’s nice to see The Nation countering that. Maybe one day the New York Times will follow suit.

Update: there is growing mainstream recognition of the problem. Via Rawstory.

This is a global distributional issue. This is about getting enough to eat. (I make no claim to originality here: several women* are writing on this issue right now.)

Women are roughly 50% of the world’s population, do two thirds of the work, but earn 10% of the income and control just 1% of the world’s wealth.

The price of food everywhere is going up. The major rises in agricultural yield came about because of mechanization and petrochemical fertilizers, both of which become more expensive when energy prices go up. Worse, politically attractive but resource-stupid forays into ethanol have pushed the prices of some food crops higher.

The New York Times this week said that in Peru, women urge action on food prices:

More than 1,000 women protested outside Peru’s Congress on Wednesday, banging empty pots and pans to demand that the government do more to counter rising food prices, which are squeezing the poor worldwide.

The women, some toting small children on their hips, run food kitchens, known as eating halls, for the poor.

… the women say they are struggling to provide enough food and want the government to increase financial aid so they can cover their costs.

Hundreds of thousands of people rely on the eating halls each day in Peru, where about 12 million people, or 42 percent of the population, live in poverty.

The rising cost for basic foods sank President Alan García’s approval rating to 26 percent this month, the lowest level since he took office in 2006.

***

“Food prices keep on rising, and the government doesn’t pay attention to the eating halls,” said María Bozeta, director of one of three associations that represent eating halls in Lima.

All modern famines are failures of entitlement, not of food production. There’s enough food, but some people due to poverty or other barriers cannot get it. That’s the conclusion of Bengali genius and Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, and the subject of his 1981 book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation — but the conclusion will not be surprising to anyone who knows the history of the Irish potato famine, when due to English policies, Ireland was a net exporter of food, keeping food prices high, while its poor starved to death because their own potato crops failed and they could not afford to buy food.

If, as seems inevitable, energy prices continue to rise, the result will not just be an increased cost to drive or transport goods. The result will be that women with dependent children living in poverty around the world cannot afford to eat. This world, taken as a whole, is wealthy enough to apply a number of solutions to that. But history suggests that women are and remain so disempowered globally that nothing much will be done.

The interplay between energy, food and poverty is complex (for example, food charity can depress local farmers’ income, preventing some hard working folks from moving up out of poverty by their own hard work); and a book-length treatment is both beyond my expertise and beyond the scope of this medium. So I’ll leave it like this: when talking about energy policy, let’s not just talk about how and where folks in wealthy countries drive, or power our televisions. Let’s remember that the policy choices that affect these things also affect whether a mother of four young children living on $300 a year, or even less, can feed herself and her kids, and let’s insist that the policy issue be framed to include her.

*The simplicity of the title is powerful, and I picked it before I found ABW’s post, where she apparently came to the same conclusion.

On Memorial Day weekend, I will watch the Indianapolis 500. Motorsports can be divided into a lot of types and series; Indy is the senior and signature race of the Indy Racing League series. Indy is an oval, the cars are open-wheel. I love open-wheel racing, but I much prefer road courses. I follow Formula One much more closely. More about that later. So Indy is not my favorite series or kind of racing, but I will watch anyway — because of Indy’s place in history, and because of Danica Patrick’s.

There have been pioneering women at the high levels of many forms of racing, but especially at Indy, I think because of its symbolic importance. First, there was Guthrie. She started out as an aerospace engineer who went racing full-time. She raced around the Sports Car Club of America for a while and turned to Nascar, where she was the first woman to race in their top series, then the Winston Cup. She drove the Daytona 500 and was Rookie of the Year, and she competed in 33 Winston Cup events, finishing as high as sixth. Starting in 1977 she raced in open-wheels at Indy, too. She qualified in 1977, ‘78 and ‘79. The first time, the car had problems and she did poorly. The last time, same thing. But in between, in 1978, she had a really good run, finishing in the top ten: ninth, after starting 15th. With a good car, she could drive with the best in the sport. (Guthrie has a well-regarded autobiography, “A Life at Full Throttle.”)

I have a soft spot for Lyn St. James because, while I was too young to remember Guthrie, I watched St. James’ debut with rapt attention. She was already a road-racing veteran when I first saw her, and in her career she drove twice at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, won the 24 Hours of Daytona twice, and won the 12 Hours of Sebring once. I saw her qualify at the back of the pack in 1992 for Indy. The cars were powerful and twitchy and the track was slick that year; the polesitter crashed on the formation lap! Lyn St. James finished a heroic eleventh, keeping the car on the track when thirteen cars crashed and most of the field did not finish, and was Rookie of the Year — the only rookie to even finish a nerve-shattering 500 miles. Lyn made seven trips to the Brickyard (As Indy is called for the three-foot strip of bricks at the start-finish line), but never again had a really competetive car and never managed a top-ten finish. With a lifetime of top-flight racing, she has not retired to catch up on her reading. Instead, she now runs the nonprofit Winner’s Circle Foundation.

Sarah Fisher started at Indy at just nineteen years of age. When she and St. James started together, it was the first Indy with two women racing. The traditional “Gentlemen, Start your Engines!” has been “Lady and Gentlemen …,” at least since St. James (I don’t recall if they acknowledged Guthrie) but that year, for the first time and not the last, it was “Ladies and Gentlemen …” Sarah Fisher has her own team now, but she’s never had a very good ride. In a half-dozen trips, she has crashed several times and never finished better than 18th. However, elsewhere in the series she managed a pole position, the first woman to start an Indy race from the pole.

Everyone who followed racing and some who don’t saw Patrick coming. She moved to Europe at 16, alone, to race in the brutally competetive Formula Ford series there. She was second at the English Formula Ford festival, the best ever finish by an American. Motorsports journalists started reporting on her after that, seeing her move through the Formula Atlantics towards the big show.

Qualifying for the 2005 Indy, her car’s rear slid in the first turn. It was a disastrous moment; most drivers would have been in the wall, and she shocked everyone by keeping it on the track and then, icewater in her veins, staying fast despite the scare to start fourth, the best starting position by a woman. She led nineteen laps (first woman to lead at Indy), overcoming two key mistakes to finish fouth, the highest by a woman, and to be named Rookie of the Year. (Two out of five women to face the Indianapolis 500 have been Rookie of the Year. That’s 40%. Just sayin’.)

She took three poles her rookie season, but did not win a race. Everyone knew she could, everyone waited to see when she would.

In 2006 at Indy, with a less competetive car and still a bit shaken by the death of teammate Paul Dana, she started and finished Eighth — two top ten finishes in two tries.

In 2007, she was in the hunt and ran as high as second, but finished eight when Scotsman of Italian descent (and Ashley Judd’s husband) Dario Franchitti won the rain-shortened race. Three top ten finishes in three consecutive years. In the season as a whole, she had three podium finishes.

As Jill reported, in late April, 2008, she won the Japan 300 at Motegi. She is the first woman to win an Indy race. That should put her head in the right place as she heads into this year’s Indianapolis 500.

There have certainly been women racers of distinction in other series. In drag racing, both dragsters and pro stock bikes have women legends in their history (Shirley Muldowney and Angelle Sampey, respectively). (Bonnie Bedelia, one of the better actors of her generation I think, played Muldowney in a now-dated but very watchable movie, Heart Like a Wheel.)

Michele Mouton very nearly won the World Rally Championship in an Audi Quattro that lacked the reliability to match her skills, and did win both one of the series events and a prestigious non-series event, the Pike’s Peak hill-climb. When the governing body decided that the “killer B” Group B rally cars were too fast and powerful, Mouton retired rather than race in less powerful Group A cars. Ha!

However, there is a lot of room for improvement at the top. NASCAR has not had much in the way of women; Formula One has had only five women drive and only one had what anyone would call a career (Lella Lombardi finished as high as Sixth, the other four women had just a handful of races each and never earned a championship point).

There are some women coming up in sports car racing; Liz Halliday does well in American Le Mans, and I think Milka Duno (the third woman, with Patrick and Fisher, in the 2007 Indy) may be less out of her depth in sports cars than she is in Indy cars. Simone De Silvestro got a win in Atlantics in April, and with Katherine Legge is the only woman to win in Atlantics. Legge also tested an F1 car, though she races the German Touring Car series for Audi now. But the groundswell of women at the lower levels of racing is not yet fairly reflected at the upper levels. There should be women in F1 cars, WRC cars, sports cars at ALMS and at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and in NASCAR’s top series every year, not just a few times a decade. I hope we’re getting there.

When my daughter is old enough to watch it with me, I hope that as the starter says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines,” eight, ten, twelve women fire the engines and pull out on the formation lap, each hoping to have her name inscribed on the Borg-Warner Trophy, and little girls in karts around the country can root for any woman, not just the woman.

I don’t pretend to have exhautive knowledge of the women in the pipeline for the top series; if anybody knows of women we should keep an eye on, leave them in comments.

I have had occasion to think a lot about the developing economic situation in the US. The more I think, the more worried I get, because this is not the short-term problem that some folks are hoping it is. This isn’t even 1991-92 again. This is a sea-change.

Robert Reich, the Bill Clinton cabinet member, agrees. In a February 13, 2008 op-ed (which I will excerpt because they keep it behind the subscription wall) he said:
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In response to Lauren’s suggestion a few days back that I write a post about something historical, I thought I would share with all of you a brief glimpse into that which supposedly occupies my day-to-day life. Namely, my dissertation.

The main focus of my dissertation concerns the activities of naturalists in the Pacific Northwest and how their work was related to the larger project of imperialism in the region in the early 19th century. In order to set the stage for this I need to spend some considerable time discussing the main economic enterprise associated with European (and, to a degree, American) imperialism in the Northwest, which in this case is the fur trade. Globalization is a term in much use these days, and while some globalizing institutions and processes are fairly recent, globalization writ large is not new. There is no way I can really do justice to the history of the fur trade here, but it has long been a topic worthy of historical consideration. (more…)