On Obamanomics

The following editorial was published in "The Morning Call" (circulation 90,000) on December 15, 2011. The original piece can be found here: http://articles.mcall.com/2011-12-14/opinion/mc-obama-myths-rozsa-yv-1215-20111214_1_debunking-two-myths-obamanomics-stimulus-bill

The Labor Department recently reported that 140,000 jobs were created in November, causing unemployment to fall to 8.6 percent, the lowest it has been in 21/2 years. When you add that to the nearly 3 million jobs that grew in the private sector over the past 21 months, you have to wonder whether Obamanomics is starting to work.

The answer is no. It has always worked.

Of course, statements like that run afoul of one of the far right's two cherished myths about Obamanomics. Since their usual response when contradicted is to fulminate against the nonbeliever, liberals are often advised to keep quiet and let them have fun with their myths. The problem with that strategy, though, is that it doesn't allow us to have fun with our facts.

Myth No. 1: Obamanomics failed to address the unemployment crisis.

The facts: Do you remember when unemployment was mushrooming? It only rose gradually at first, climbing from slightly under 5 percent when the recession began in December 2007 to slightly more than 6 percent nine months later. When Wall Street crashed in September 2008, that mild swelling became an explosion, with the rate skyrocketing at a catastrophic average of 0.4 percent per month until Obama's stimulus bill took effect roughly three months after being passed. By then, the joblessness percentage had doubled in a year and a half to 9.4 percent in the month (May 2009) the stimulus began to work.

At that point the explosion stopped. Thanks to the pump-priming effect of the stimulus, unemployment stabilized at between 9.4 and 10.1 percent for the next year and a half. After Obama attached a second stimulus to the Bush tax cut extensions of December 2010, it actually fell slightly, staying within the 8.8 to 9.4 percent range for the first 10 months of 2011. Now it's at 8.6 percent — still tragically high, but nevertheless a marked improvement given the mess that existed for more than a year before this president took office.

Myth No. 2: Obamanomics is socialistic.

The facts: This assertion would be quite justified if Obama's policies adhered to the tenets of socialism, which according to Merriam-Webster involves "advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods." Obama, though, is the president who refused to nationalize the banks after the Wall Street meltdown despite widespread calls to do so, who campaigned in 2008 not for a single-payer health care system but for a public option (to protect a free market presence in medicine), and who upon being elected replaced the public option with the individual mandate, a right-wing alternative that originated from the Heritage Foundation and was originally sponsored by Republicans like Newt Gingrich.

When confronted with such information, right-wingers usually resort to claiming that while Obama's policies may not be literally socialistic, they are putting us on a slippery slope toward socialism. This ignores that slippery slope arguments are fundamentally illogical, since they commit the fallacy of asserting one event will inevitably follow another without proving that such a succession is inherent.

It also ignores that many of America's earliest leaders supported expanding the government's role in areas of the economy that had previously been private or locally-administered. Indeed, one of the main reasons delegates at the Constitutional Convention wanted to discard the Articles of Confederation was that they believed a stronger central state was required to fund adequate infrastructure projects and prevent economic bedlam.

That same mentality prompted George Washington to create the first national post office, Thomas Jefferson to propose federal funding for schools, roads and canals, Abraham Lincoln to finance state colleges and the transcontinental railroad, and Theodore Roosevelt to pass laws regulating food and drugs, as well as advocate social insurance, minimum-wage laws, and eight-hour workdays. If those spending projects and regulations were all socialistic, then Independence Hall and Mount Rushmore must be the meccas of the far left.

All of this reminds me of a memorable quip from my political hero, Adlai Stevenson, which I think liberals should use today just as he employed it nearly 60 years ago: "I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends … if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them."

Feminist Musings of a Fat Man

Author's Note: When I wrote this piece back in February 2010, I was at least sixty pounds heavier than I am at present. Either way, I'm posting this old article because I recently discovered (thanks to this website's statistics section) that "Feminist Musings of a Fat Man," is by a sizable amount the most frequently visited editorial at RiskingHemlock.

I like to eat and I don't like to move.

In a nation plagued by a worsening obesity epidemic, excuses have become as common as credit card debt, and I for one am sick of people talking about "glandular disorders" and "eating to dull the pain." While I do not deny that it is unacceptable for a 24-year-old male to be at my current weight, I at the very least have the self-respect - and the sense of personal accountability - to acknowledge that my corpulence is due not to circumstances that were thrust upon me, but rather to my own tendency to thrust large quantities of junk food into my mouth. Hence when people ask me why I'm fat, I bluntly admit to them: "I'm fat because I like to eat and I don't like to move."

Of course, whenever I glance around at the wide world of pop culture, I realize that - if one has to live life as a fat person - it is far more advantageous to do so as a man than as a woman. This point was rammed home for me as I saw the following news story about ex-supermodel Gemma Ward:
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While I don't doubt that Ms. Ward's weight is not ideal for a fashion model, calling her a "Roll Model" seems not only cruel, but misleading. Whatever the ramifications of her weight gain may be for her career, Gemma Ward is certainly not "fat." In fact, I consider it a safe bet that nineteen-out-of-twenty heterosexual males would still find her to be extremely attractive with her current physique, and to state otherwise is not only mean-spirited, but inaccurate.

This reminded me of an old comedy skit I saw on Will Ferrell's website "funnyordie.com". In it, two young men at a beach decide to pretend that they're drowning so a "perfect 10" lifeguard can come and give them mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The punchline? When the lifeguard shows up - gamely played by former Baywatch starlet Nicole Eggert - the men are disgusted at her "fat" physique and decide that they don't really want to be saved. Although poetic justice of a sort is delivered unto them at the very end, the message of the video clip is still quite clear: If women let themselves go, their value to men will diminish accordingly. What makes it all the more disturbing is that the "fat" version of Nicole Eggert is not fat at all - she is simply an out-of-shape woman who, though no longer at her "perfect 10" peak, is still attractive enough to turn heads (in a positive way).

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At the core of all this is a very serious social problem:

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In America, a woman's intrinsic value is determined by her appearance.

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No sooner do I make observations such as this before I hear multiple friends denounce me as being a feminist extremist:

"Think of all the progress women have made since the 1960s!"

"You can't blame men for being attracted to one type of woman instead of another!"

"Men are judged by their appearance too!"

Each of these arguments can be rebutted quite easily:

1) Yes, the feminist movement has done wonders in improving the social, economic, political, and cultural circumstances of American women - not only since the 1960s, but since the days of Susan B. Anthony and the suffragettes - but it is foolish to look at the progress that has been made and extrapolate from that the conclusion that all remnants of sexism in this country have been eradicated. Examples of systemic societal sexism abound, as I pointed out in a blog article last October:

There was the massacre of women at a Pennsylvania gym by an outspoken online misogynist earlier this year, a terrible hate crime against women that New York Times columnist Bob Herbert accurately observed would have been plastered all over the news had it been perpetrated on the basis of race or religion, but was given a remarkably small amount of coverage when the victims were determined by gender. Our pop culture is full of sexism, blatant and subtle alike, from the rampant denigration of women in rap music to the sexualization of female roles in movies and television - why is it, for example, that only female superheroes are required to show as much skin as a PG-13 rating will allow, or that female movie stars fail to serve as high box office draws as much as males do?

The world of politics isn't much better. One can look to Congress, where only 17% of all Senators and House members are women even though more than 50% of our nation's population is female, and where America's first female Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, had to have the photo op of her swearing in take place while she was surrounded by children. Nor is this sexism limited to our legislative branch. One of our Supreme Court judges, Clarence Thomas, was confirmed despite being notorious for sexually harassing his female law clerks, with the social stigma falling on the women who came forward to testify against him rather than on the man himself (one such woman, Anita Hill, was famously branded with the description "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty" for daring to discuss her experiences). Even the Obama Administration isn't free from the taint of sexism - Lawrence Summers, the Director of the National Economic Council, was confirmed by the Senate despite having lost his job as President of Harvard University in 2006 after suggesting that women aren't as intelligent as men in mathematics and the sciences.

These are only the most prominent examples of this problem. In the workplace, women are still paid less to perform the same jobs as men. In the business world, they remain grossly outnumbered by men as CEOs and corporate boards of directors. Many areas of the arts remain out of reach for the vast majority of women, from film directing to stand-up comedy. Even as epithets against blacks, Jews, Latinos, Asians, and other minorities have become taboo in our vernacular, few take umbrage when a woman is harassed on the basis of their sexuality or gender, as indicated by the common use of epithets like "ho", "skank", "slut", and "cunt."

There are plenty of examples that I neglected to mention even in that article: How there are dozens of tabloid stories about the latest female celebrities who have packed on the pounds - Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jessica Simpson, Tyra Banks, Britney Spears - with the few token "male weight gain" stories clearly existing only as a half-hearted attempt to disarm those who try to point out the gender imbalance in how that type of fare is reported; how when sitcom star Kirstie Alley gained weight, the media obsession over it caused her to launch an indulgently self-pitying TV show called "Fat Actress"; how people assume that professional titles like "doctor", "professor", and "attorney" are automatically male in nature, so that women who occupy these roles frequently need to have their vocation prefaced by their gender identity; how conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh, when derisively dismissing the feminist movement, claimed that “feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream.”

2) I agree that you can't fault men for preferring one type of woman over another - nor, for that matter, can you blame women when they express revulsion for men who lack ambition, engage in immature antics, or spend the better part of their days smoking pot and playing video games, even though I know some guys who resent women when they do precisely that. Sexual predilections are rarely a matter of personal choice, so it is indeed unfair to blame men when they gravitate toward one female body type over another.

At the same time, it is extremely problematic that overweight and/or unattractive women will routinely find themselves defined by their appearance EVEN IN CIRCUMSTANCES THAT ARE NEITHER SEXUAL NOR ROMANTIC IN NATURE. This brings me to my rebuttal for the third point...

3) While men are also judged by how they look, at the end of the day, it is rarely their defining attribute. Because we live in a world where virtually every avenue of professional advancement is controlled by men, an unattractive man is far less likely to find that his appearance has hindered his career goals than is an unattractive woman. Even in casual settings, people have found that women who gain weight are more likely to be treated with maliciousness - or, even worse, as if they were invisible - then are their more physically attractive counterparts, often without any regard to the content of their characters. Likewise, although weight and attractiveness based epithets are employed against both genders, a woman is far more likely to find her social standing plummet if she puts on a few pounds than is a man in a comparable situation.

All of this I know because, as a fat man, my life has not changed considerably from what it had been when I was thinner. Sure, I am occasionally the butt of jokes, and obviously I have new enemies that used to be my friends (old pairs of blue jeans and long flights of stairs are especially vicious to me). At the same time, who I am and how I am viewed by the rest of the world hasn't been substantively altered as a result of my extra body mass. It deeply disturbs me to know that, if I was a woman, the situation would be very different. The rest of society should be bothered by this as well.