TheAgitator.com
Get Over Yourself
Monday, December 8th, 2003Andrew Sullivan has his “Poseur Alert” running feature, in which he casts some light on people who take themselves far too seriously. The Washington Post Magazine has a feature called “First Person Singular,” in which they ask someone to write a Cliff’s Notes bio of themselves. This week’s feature was Martha Burk, she of “Augusta is this generation’s Selma” fame.
Burk has a serious martyr complex. I’d nominate her for poseur of the week.
My job is righting wrong. I like it. The earliest I remember is in sixth grade. Somebody in the class was having a party and they invited everybody in the class but two or three kids. I was invited but I was outraged on the part of other kids who weren’t invited. It would have been different had it been a group or something. But these kids were clearly being left out in a malicious way. I complained to the teacher, who then tipped off the parents. I got it straightened out.The next time I remember [righting a wrong] was in college. An acquaintance, not even a good friend, was told by an apartment complex that they didn’t have any vacant apartments, and I knew they did. So, she and I went to the mayor’s office and had a two-person sit-in until a mysterious call came in that, yes, there were some vacant apartments. We never got to see the mayor, but we got our desired result.
There’s always a consequence to rocking the boat, but I’ve never been fired from a job, or something like that. Most of the consequences I’ve suffered have been things like getting called bad names, getting vilified publicly, having my life threatened. There have been times that I have been scared. When we were doing the protests at Augusta [National Golf Club], I hired bodyguards because I had had some very explicit threats on my life. That’s the reason to go on. As long as there’s that kind of hatred in the world, and that kind of prejudice, then that’s every bit of reason to go on — not a reason to stop.
I think it’s a little bit sad that some women are not aware of what the women’s movement in general does for them, and some of the ways they’re experiencing discrimination. They’ve become so used to it that they don’t even notice it anymore. It’s my job to make them notice.
You can’t just be a hired gun in a job like this. You have to feel it, because it’s hard. I get tired, but I don’t get discouraged.
Observations:
1) Do you think those kids who weren’t given party invites were even more embarassed when Martha got involved, forced the party-throwers to include them, and thus further publicized the fact that they weren’t invited in the first place? Do you think they felt welcome at the party?
The overwhelming evidence from playground history says the answers to those questions are yes and no, respectively.
2) The apartment story is curiously coy. Why was Burk’s acquaintance not allowed to rent? She hints that this was a race thing, but I wonder why she wouldn’t come out and say so if it was. Does Burk feel that a landlord should be required to rent to anyone, at any time? Are landlords allowed any discretion at all?
3) The second to last paragraph is the kicker. Burk has decided it is her duty to let women know they’re still victims. Even those women who don’t particularly feel like victims. This is a pretty consistent line of thought for Burk. During a debate on ESPN at the height of the Masters imbroglio, a female professional golfer who supported Augusta (her name escapes me) told Burk that she speaks for only a small group of people. Burk responded, “I wouldn’t call 51% of the population a small group of people.”
In Burk’s mind, she speaks for all women. If you disagree with her, you aren’t a free-thinking woman with her own opinions, you’re a misguided soul who doesn’t realize she’s being oppressed.
If the front lines for gender equity these days involve fighting for the right of rich southern women to hit golf balls at clubs with rich southern men who don’t particularly want them there, I’d say we’re doing pretty darned well.
In my opinion, it seems Burke is the one who has the bad attitude toward women. She is not empowering them, she’s victimizing them.
Martha Burk: I think it’s a little bit sad that some women are not aware of what the women’s movement in general does for them â?¦
http://www.debunker.com/patriarchy.html
Check out http://emeagwali.com for another prospective poseur. This guy had a modest award for parallel computing in the 80′s and now claims to be “A father of the Internet.” Why I’m picking on him: he’s apparently a commie, as he self-promotes on and owns http://www.cheguevara.info, http://maozedong.info and http://vladimir-ilyich-lenin.info.
I wonder if Burk realizes how stereotypically female and adolescent it is for her to resolve each of these alleged problems by running to authority figures, e.g., the teacher, the mayor, whoever. How about the gentle art of persuasion, or some subtle way to resolve things that allows people to save face. She sucks, I’ve decided.
On #2 … The landlord told her there were no vacant apartments, not that he/she wouldn’t rent to that “kind” of tenant. The landlord lied. Since housing isn’t a right in this country, we need to protect the ability of people to maximize their access to available housing.
Assuming a prospective tenant has the ability to pay rent and live in a rental unit responsibly, the landlord should be held legally accountable for denying the apartment to someone based on any other reason. The alternative is more government subsidized housing for people who can’t get housing in the “free” market.
On #3 … Free country. Free speech. Augusta wants to keep its elitist, sexist status, but also wants to keep itself in the public spotlight and earn money from advertising and sponsorship. Augusta (and Trent Lott) could easily take themselves out of the public spotlight of their own free will to preserve their philosophical leanings, but they aren’t willing to sacrifice the benefits that the masses bring them.
Although she feels she speaks for ALL women in this country, I have personally only met a couple of them that actually agree with Burk.
Most (other than my neo-Feminist and self-described Communist sister-in-law) seem to see Burk as a self-important obstacle to true progress.
Oh well, at least she’s proud of her whiny, class-snitch status.
Cartmen- “Its like, he goes around imposing his will on people”-”he’s my hero”
Seems to me that public humiliation is a perfectly appropriate punishment for behavior that is boorish but not illegal. (See: Clinton-Lewinsky.) The fellows at Augusta have a perfect right to keep girls out of their little club. Burke has a perfect right to rake them over the coals for it.
This brings to mind some thoughts on the term â??Political Correctnessâ?? which gets thrown around so much it doesnâ??t really mean anything anymore. That said, Iâ??ve noticed two popular usages:
a.) Rhetorical Self-Congratulation. Like â??frankly,â?? the phrase is often used to assure the listener/reader of oneâ??s own forthrightness and honesty, as in, â??I know it may not be â??politically correctâ?? to say so, butâ?¦â?
b.) Whining. As in â??That politically correct $%@^&* jumped down my throat just because Iâ?¦â?
But the flip side of free speech is, while I get to say any â??ole stupid thing I want, you get to tell me what an idiot I am. And if Iâ??m a big, fat, smelly stupid-head idiot, why, you can tell me that too, long as the government doesnâ??t get involved and nobody gets expelled from college.
Far as Burke goes, yeah, she seems like a bit of a prig, but my admittedly casual impression is that she was mainly pestering private companies like CBS. Now, that may have caused some nasty PR headaches, but a PR headache is not the same thing as a government mandate.
What’s more, a PR headache is only a PR headache if a significant percentage of people agree with your opponent’s arguments. That’s the marketplace of ideas. And for all the villifying of Burke, I still haven’t heard a good explanation for why Augusta doesn’t let in women, other than that they don’t have to.
Still, if that’s their position, it’s fine and dandy with me. I don’t think anybody should make them hang out with girls if they don’t want to.
But I sure think it’s stupid.
Why is it “stupid”?
If I like chocolate ice cream, and you like vanilla, then which one of us is the â??stupidâ? one?
Why is it stupid? Sometimes clubs like to be all male, all female, all jewish, or whatever. It’s not that females can’t play at Augusta, they just can’t be members. So the issue isn’t that they don’t want to “hang out with girls”, they just want it to be an all male club. I see nothing wrong with that.
I also find Burk’s account of the apartment situation highly dubious. It is rare that you find a property manager who will keep vacant property vacant and risk violating equal housing laws because of prejudice. Even if they’re prejudiced, money and business almost always win out. Something else was going on that Burk isn’t mentioning.
roach,
That’s why the first example got under my skin so badly. Unfortuntately, the feminized attitude toward authority is the very set of values being drummed into kids in the publik skools. Things like D.A.R.E., zero tolerance policies, and assorted indoctrination programs to make kids think it’s “cool” to be an informer, it’s scary to think what society will be like in another twenty years.
I heard an NPR interview a couple of years ago with a New York school teacher who left taped schoolyard conversations at recess (without the participants’ knowledge, of course). She was so horrified at all the pop culture references to violent TV shows, she said, that she “wept.” When the NPR interviewer tepidly questioned the practice of tape-recording the kids, the teacher nonchalantly explained that she had no other choice, since the kids still had not been rid of their atavistic attitudes toward snitches and informers.
Not long afterward, I saw an article in which New York public school officials were suggesting mandatory preschool, and extended school days/years, as a way of getting to “at risk” kids earlier, and keeping kids out of trouble. That’s the ultimate solution, I’m sure: to get kids out of the corrupting influence of their biological families as quickly as possible, so that they can be protected from absorbing any autonomous cultural attitudes that aren’t shaped by the State.
Which brings me back to the point of Burke’s example 1: the fact that she thought a party organized by a private student’s parents, on private property, was any of the FUCKING BUSINESS of the teacher. Apparently the publik skools are to be, not just in loco parentis over their pupils for eight hours a day, but over society at large.
Ivan Illich argued thirty years ago that the government schooling system as it was then constituted was inherently unstable. Either it would collapse and be replaced by autonomous and self-directed alternatives, or the power of the government schooling system would expand to take in all learning, over an entire lifetime.
Demonstraits, You’ve shown integrity in that you can have an opinion about something even when it is in contrast to the principle. IF more people were capable of living and let live, we would be better off.
MA.
“Since housing isn’t a right in this country, we need to protect the ability of people to maximize their access to available housing.”
Huh? If something isn’t a right, doesn’t that mean that we do not need to protect people’s ability to exercise it? Isn’t protecting one’s ability to do something precisely what we mean when we call something a right?
Assuming a prospective tenant has the ability to pay rent and live in a rental unit responsibly, the landlord should be held legally accountable for denying the apartment to someone based on any other reason.
Why? If I feel like selling some tomatoes that I grew in my backyard to some of my closest friends and neighbors, does that mean that I have to make these same tomatoes available to the anyone who wants to buy them? Why don’t I get to decide who gets my tomatoes and who doesn’t? Isn’t this choice an essential feature of ownership?
Unless you can convince me that you could live just as easily without a roof above your head as you could without home-grown tomatoes, then I reject the comparison with your tomato stand. Houses aren’t widgets.
You also confused my statement that housing isn’t a right in this country (which it isn’t, like in most third world countries) with the statement that discrimination is against the law. These are mutually exclusive.
Housing — more than any other issue — is where libertarianism wallows in a sea of grey. A property owner doesn’t want to see the house next door converted from a stately single-family Victorian into a half-dozen rental units for day laborers. But that’s the free market. If it’s your house, you should be able to do what you want with it. Right? But don’t you also worry about how the property around you affects the value of your property?
When I was buying a home, a real estate agent warned me that there were black people living next door to a house I was interested in. In her ignorant, racist way, she thought that she was doing me a favor. When I finally bought a house and decided to sell it later, I foolishly enlisted the help of this same agent. A black couple whose bid I’d accepted suddenly withdrew when they became suspicious of termite damage.
The selling agent lived a block away. It was rumored that a real estate agent in that neighborhood who introduced black people into the community would never get another listing, I later learned. When I threatened to take the house off the market — after almost 200 showings, a buyer miraculously emerged in a matter of hours.
This ain’t tomatoes. It amounts to everything people own with 30 years of debt piled on top of it. It amounts to elderly people being kicked out on the streets when they are evicted by landlords (which I see every week in my work).
One of the reasons you don’t see libertarians elected to office is because they can’t answer these kinds of questions without peeling back millenia of progress in human rights and social advancement to a simple world of tomato stands and widgets.
People need food too MA, what’s your point?
Housing markets can respond to all of these problems. Subdivisions and restrictive covenants prevent neighborhoods from having factories next to homes. But unlike govt. mandated zoning can change more quickly and nimbly.
Likewise, just because black couple can’t buy a particular house, does not mean they must therefore be homeless and destitute. People generally like to live near people like themselves. Since everyone needs homes, neighborhoods with different characters emerge. The market can sort this out to everyone’s satisfaction and it has done so.
Just b/c person X can’t buy a particular thing they want at a particular meoment doesn’t prove shit. I want to buy a Humvee for a $1. But that doesn’t mean there is some kind of market failure b/c I can’t. The only real market failures are when willing buyers and sellers can’t come together. No reason to think this is true in the arena of housing.
She certainly doesn’t speak for me, the trees, or anyone I know of the female gender.
Matt: if you’ve ever tried to find an apartment in NYC, you will find some VERY choosy apartment managers/owners.
Roach,
These things don’t just sort themselves out. It took wars and laws and Constitutional Amendments to compel racist businessmen to behave civilly. It remains an ongoing process and black people are still disproportionately represented among the poor and homeless.
Again, why the irrelevant hypotheticals? I’d listen to your argument if you could pose real-world examples.
OK, MA a few points, as you seem reasonable:
1) In Houston, w/ no zoning, restrictive covenants do much of what zoning does.
2) Jim Crow proves the efficacy of free markets. W/o legal sanction, marginal entrants–in business, housing, whatever–would hire blacks at lower wages, in the long term raising black wages relative to whites. Jim Crow prevented this from happening with the threat of legal sanction. Richard Epstein’s Forbidden Grounds explains this at length.
3) Food was an example. We need food, but the government doesn’t do much to get it to us. We go out and buy it. And what do you know rich and poor alike somehow make it happen (even to the point where obesity, not starvation, is our chief national health problem).
4)Blacks are poor and homeless. What does this prove exactly? Lots of blacks play NBA and NFL sports; that doesn’t mean anything is wrong with the system. If blacks have more of the characteristics that likely make one poor and homeless, then that’s how it’s supposed to be, even if it’s regrettable.
“It remains an ongoing process and black people are still disproportionately represented among the poor and homeless.”
and this is because…???
Can I tell you why? Because they choose it. They make choices just like everyone else, and those choices determine how they live (and this refers to all homeless people, not just black homeless).
In our day, this day, everyone has the same chance as everyone else because of our education system. If you want to get a job, YOU CAN! Don’t give me this disproportionate crap.
I’m livid that people still think this way.
I’m glad somebody finally raised the issue of $1 humvees. Huge, huge problem. When I think about it, I just get so angry…
Thanks for the kinds words, Ms. Dani. It’s always nice to find someone with whom you can politely differ!
Ms. Dani,
Just to be clear on your point of view: are you saying that all homeless choose to be homeless?
Hm. It must be nice to live in your world.
Supergenius,
Are you saying that homeless people are helpless victims of Fate utterly lacking in “free will”?
Was it a homeless person’s Destiny to be homeless, or did he choose to be homeless?
Burk is a feminist in the line of Catherine MacKinnon. MacKinnon believes that all women need to have their consciousnesses raised about their inferior position in the world. If you disagree, you simply haven’t had your consciousness raised. It’s really quite a handy way to argue.
Supergenius – “Hm. It must be nice to live in your world.”
Hm. It is.
So, are you saying, Supergenius, that you were destined to have a home and that the homeless are destined to not have a home. Who chose that for you by the way, because I would like to request a bigger house?
I, and several others, wanted to be homeless in 2000 but we just couldn’t sell our homes. It sucks carrying two mortgages.
My frustration with the homeless debate is the fact that there are scores of shelters in any given city which are simply not used by the homeless.
When we moved to south Florida, we met a homeless man named Nick who, as a quite reasonable and coherent person, stated that he actually chose his lifestyle. He had been previously married and had a teenage daughter. He like having fewer obligations and responsibilities. And he never went hungry thanks to the generosity of our local soup kitchen that is supported by local churches and individuals — not the government.
Tony: My frustration with the homeless debate is the fact that there are scores of shelters in any given city which are simply not used by the homeless.
A couple of years ago I remember reading an article in The Wall Street Journal where they took the figures on the estimated number of homeless Individuals and doubled them. Then they added up all the state and federal aid designated strictly for the homeless, and they divided this number by the first figure (Number_of_homeless * 2). The result was something on the order of $50,000.00/year per homeless person.