Bluebird

Military Druids

Air Force Academy adapts to pagans, druids, witches and Wiccans

Officials say an $80,000 Stonehenge-like worship center underscores a commitment to embrace all religions.

 

By Jenny Deam, Los Angeles Times

November 26, 2011, 4:36 p.m.

Reporting from Colorado Springs, Colo.—

In the still of a cold November evening, a small gathering of pagans, led by two witches, begins preparations for the coming winter solstice. But these are not just any pagans, and this is not just any setting. They are future officers of the United States Air Force practicing their faith in the basement of the Air Force Academy's cadet chapel.

Their ranks are slim. According to the academy's enrollment records, only three of 4,300 cadets identified themselves as pagans, followers of an ancient religion that generally does not worship a single god and considers all things in nature interconnected.

Still, the academy this year dedicated an $80,000 outdoor worship center — a small Stonehenge-like circle of boulders with propane fire pit — high on a hill for the handful of current or future cadets whose religions fall under the broad category of "Earth-based." Those include pagans, Wiccans, druids, witches and followers of Native American faiths.

Witches in the Air Force? Chaplain Maj. Darren Duncan, branch chief of cadet faith communities at the academy, sighs. A punch line waiting to happen, and he's heard all the broom jokes.

For the record, there are no witches among the cadets this year. But the two spiritual leaders for all Earth-based religions — one a civilian, one an Air Force reservist — are witches and regularly cast spells, which they say is not so different from offering prayer. There also are no druids this year. But there could be next year.

"We're here to accommodate all religions, period," Duncan says. The building of the Cadet Chapel Falcon Circle on the hilltop, he says, is no different from the past conversion of chapel rooms into worship spaces that serve this year's 11 Muslim, 16 Buddhist and 10 Hindu cadets. There are also 43 self-identified atheist cadets whose beliefs, or lack of them, Duncan says are also to be respected.

"It is very nice to have our own space," says Cadet 1st Class Nicole Johnson, a 21-year-old senior from Florida who became a pagan after entering the academy.

This is not about religious tolerance — a phrase Duncan, a Christian, rejects as implying that the majority religion is simply putting up with the minority. He calls it a 1st Amendment issue. If the military is to defend the Constitution, it should also be upholding its guarantee of religious freedom. "We think we are setting the standard," Duncan says.

In addition to providing worship space, new policy dictates that all cadets take courses in understanding the religions of those who may someday fall under their command. Recently he's fielded calls from West Point and Annapolis about replicating the Air Force's efforts.

In 2005, the Air Force — still reeling from accusations of sexual assaults against female cadets at the academy — was accused in a lawsuit of allowing aggressive proselytizing toward non-Christians. The suit, ultimately dismissed, was brought by an attorney and academy graduate, Michael Weinstein, who founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and has continued to fight what he calls aclimate of religious oppression at the academy.

Weinstein isn't buying this new spirit of "Kumbaya." He says he has received hundreds of complaints from cadets who allege pressure by other cadets or superiors to profess faith in Christ and cites a desecration incident in 2010 when a cross was left at a previous Earth-based worship site. The Air Force condemned that incident, and it was never discovered who was responsible.

Weinstein says the presence of the powerful fundamental Christian organization, Focus on the Family, just a short hop down the highway from the academy only adds to tension for non-evangelicals.

Meade Warthen, a civilian spokesman for the academy, stands by the academy's efforts, adding that it takes heat not only from critics like Weinstein but also from those who say it does too much to accommodate other religions.

Back at the solstice preparations, with glue guns drawn and takeout pizza within easy reach, the pagan cadets decorated yule logs with bits of ribbon and glitter. Yule logs, whose ritual burning symbolizes faith in the reappearance of the sun, will be displayed alongside the Christmas trees and menorahs in next month's crowded religious calendar at the academy.

And though Johnson acknowledges that her beliefs are often misunderstood, she says she has taken no serious grief from other cadets, save occasional questions about whether pagans dance naked (she doesn't) or whether she can cast a spell on commanding officers (she wouldn't even if she could).

The rule is no spells cast without someone's permission. There is a prevailing tenet of her faith, she says: Do as you will, but harm no one.

Deam writes for The Times.

Pro-Choice Prez against birth control?

Democrats Urge Obama to Protect Contraceptive Coverage in Health Plans

By ROBERT PEAR

Published: November 19, 2011

WASHINGTON — A dispute has erupted between President Obama and Democrats in Congress over a proposal to broaden the exemption from new rules that require health insurance plans to cover contraceptives for women free of charge.

The National Academy of Sciences recommended that the government adopt such a requirement. And Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, announced in August that she had done so.

But after protests by Roman Catholic bishops, charities, schools and universities, the White House is considering a change that would grant a broad exemption to health plans sponsored by employers who object to such coverage for moral and religious reasons.

Churches may already qualify for an exemption. The proposal being weighed by the White House would expand the exemption to many universities, hospitals, clinics and other entities associated with religious organizations.

The prospect of such a change has infuriated many Democrats in Congress, who fought hard to secure coverage of birth control under the new health care law. Senators voiced their objections on Thursday in a telephone conference call with Pete Rouse, counselor to the president. House members registered their objections on Friday in a call with Valerie Jarrett, another member of the president’s inner circle.

House members have sent a letter to Mr. Obama urging him not to widen the exemption. Such a change, they said, would keep contraception out of reach for millions of women.

Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, said the broad exemption was “an outrageous idea.”

“Millions of women work for colleges, hospitals and health care systems that are nominally religious, but these folks use birth control and need coverage,” said Ms. DeGette, a leader of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus.

The 2010 health care law says insurers must cover “preventive health services” and cannot charge for them. On Aug. 1, Ms. Sebelius issued rules that require health plans to cover contraceptive drugs and devices and sterilization procedures, among other services.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said: “There is not a scintilla of legislative direction in the statute that requires the broadened exemption the administration is contemplating. This change would be a reversal of the progress made in favor of reproductive rights when President Obama took office.”

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, said: “It just doesn’t make sense to take this benefit away from millions of women. Americans of all religious faiths overwhelmingly support broad access to birth control.”

The rules already include an exemption for certain “religious employers,” but the exemption is so narrow that some church groups say it is almost meaningless. A religious employer cannot qualify for the exemption if it employs or serves large numbers of people of a different faith, as many Catholic hospitals, universities and social service agencies do.

When the administration announced the requirement for contraceptive coverage, it said the decision was “based on science.” The resulting uproar has forced Mr. Obama to weigh competing claims of Catholic leaders and advocates for women’s rights, including some of his strongest supporters.

The insurance mandate came up when Mr. Obama met this month at the White House with Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Archbishop Dolan said Mr. Obama was “very open to the sensitivities of the Catholic community.”

A Senate Democrat who participated in the phone call with the White House said: “This is a pro-choice president. It’s a surprise that we are even having this debate with the administration.”

Several lawmakers said administration officials had left them with the impression that the president was leaning toward a broader exemption.

But the White House said Mr. Obama had not made a final decision and would listen to all points of view at a meeting of administration officials soon after he returns on Sunday from his trip to Asia. In the past month, leaders of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and other family planning advocates have met with Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, William M. Daley, and other White House officials to oppose any broader exemption.

The issue resonates at the local level, as Catholic priests around the country have urged parishioners to tell federal officials why they object to the new mandate.

In a letter to the administration, the bishops’ conference said the requirement for coverage of contraceptives and sterilization was “an unprecedented attack on religious liberty.”

Under the government’s narrow criteria, the bishops said, “even the ministry of Jesus and the early Christian Church would not qualify as ‘religious,’ because they did not confine their ministry to their co-religionists.” Moreover, the bishops said, “the exemption is directly at odds with the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which Jesus teaches concern and assistance for those in need, regardless of faith differences.”

In comments filed with the Obama administration, some Catholic groups said the exemption for religious employers should be broadened to include any nonprofit tax-exempt organization that is controlled by or associated with a church or religious order.

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, said the exemption, as now written, “falls far short of securing the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment.”

Stormin' Mormon

Op-Ed Columnist

Anne Frank, a Mormon?

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: October 18, 2011

WASHINGTON

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

 

At an appearance at George Washington University here Saturday night, Bill Maher bounded into territory that the news media have been gingerly tiptoeing around.

Magic underwear. Baptizing dead people. Celestial marriages. Private planets. Racism. Polygamy.

“By any standard, Mormonism is more ridiculous than any other religion,” asserted the famously nonbelieving comic who skewered the “fairy tales” of several faiths in his documentary “Religulous.” “It’s a religion founded on the idea of polygamy. They call it The Principle. That sounds like The Prime Directive in ‘Star Trek.’ ”

He said he expects the Romney crowd — fighting back after Robert Jeffress, a Texas Baptist pastor supporting Rick Perry, labeled Mormonism a non-Christian “cult” — to once more “gloss over the differences between Christians and Mormons.”

Maher was not easy on the religion he was raised in either. He referred to the Roman Catholic Church as “an international child sex ring.”

But atheists, like Catholics and evangelical Christians, seem especially wary of Mormons, dubbed the “ultimate shape-shifters” by Maher.

In a Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll released on Tuesday, people were asked what single word came to mind for Republican candidates. For Herman Cain it was 9-9-9; for Rick Perry, Texas; and for Mitt Romney, Mormon. In the debate Tuesday night, Romney said it was repugnant that “we should choose people based on their religion.”

In The Times on Sunday, Sheryl Gay Stolberg chronicled Romney’s role as a bishop in Boston often giving imperious pastoral guidance on everything from divorce to abortion.

Stolberg reported that Romney, who would later run for Senate as a supporter of abortion rights against Teddy Kennedy and then flip to oppose those rights in Republican presidential primaries, showed up unannounced at a hospital in his role as bishop. He “sternly” warned a married mother of four, who was considering terminating a pregnancy because of a potentially dangerous blood clot, not to go forward.

Another famous nonbeliever, Christopher Hitchens, wrote in Slate on Monday about “the weird and sinister belief system of the LDS,” the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Aside from Joseph Smith, whom Hitchens calls “a fraud and conjurer well known to the authorities in upstate New York,” the writer also wonders about the Mormon practice of amassing archives of the dead and “praying them in” as a way to “retrospectively ‘baptize’ everybody as a convert.”

Hitchens noted that they “got hold of a list of those put to death by the Nazis’ Final Solution” and “began making these massacred Jews into honorary LDS members as well.” He called it “a crass attempt at mass identity theft from the deceased.”

The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank.

It took Ernest Michel, then chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, three years to get Mormons to agree to stop proxy-baptizing Holocaust victims.

Mormons desisted in 1995 after Michel, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, “discovered that his own mother, father, grandmother and best childhood friend, all from Mannheim, Germany, had been posthumously baptized.”

Michel told the news agency that “I was hurt that my parents, who were killed as Jews in Auschwitz, were being listed as members of the Mormon faith.”

Richard Bushman, a Mormon who is a professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, said that after “the Jewish dust-up,” Mormons “backed away” from “going to extravagant lengths to collect the names of every last person who ever lived and baptize them — even George Washington.” Now they will do it for Mormons who bring a relative or ancestor’s name into the temple, he said.

Bushman said that “Mormons believe that Christ is the divine son of God who atoned for our sins, but we don’t believe in the Trinity in the sense that there are three in one. We believe the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are three distinct persons.”

Kent Jackson, the associate dean of religion at Brigham Young University, says that while Mormons are Christians, “Mormonism is not part of the Christian family tree.”

It probably won’t comfort skeptical evangelicals and Catholics to know that Mormons think that while other Christians merely “have a portion of the truth, what God revealed to Joseph Smith is the fullness of the truth,” as Jackson says. “We have no qualms about saying evangelicals, Catholics and Protestants can go to heaven, including Pastor Jeffress. We just believe that the highest blessings of heaven come” to Mormons.

As for those planets that devout Mormon couples might get after death, Jackson says that’s a canard. But Bushman says it’s part of “Mormon lore,” and that it’s based on the belief that if humans can become like God, and God has the whole universe, then maybe Mormons will get to run a bit of that universe.

As for the special garment that Mitt wears, “we wouldn’t say ‘magic underwear,’ ” Bushman explains.

It is meant to denote “moral protection,” a sign that they are “a consecrated people like the priests of ancient Israel.”

And it’s not only a one-piece any more. “There’s a two-piece now,” he said.

Republicans are the ones who have made faith part of the presidential test. Now we’ll see if Mitt can pass it.

Banning prevention in Texas

The Texas Tribune

Planned Parenthood Struggles After State Budget Cuts

By THANH TAN

Published: October 15, 2011

Hidalgo County, situated along the border that separates Texas and Mexico, is home to one of the country’s fastest-growing but poorest populations. Largely Hispanic and Catholic, the county also has one of the highest birth rates in a state where Medicaid finances more than half of all deliveries.

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Justin Dehn for The Texas Tribune

A patient's child at Planned Parenthood's clinic in McAllen.

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Justin Dehn for The Texas Tribune

A sign at the organization's Mission clinic.

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Justin Dehn for The Texas Tribune

Patients at the McAllen clinic to voice their concerns over the Legislature's family-planning budget cuts.

Not all of those new mothers and fathers are ready to be parents, and Patricio Gonzales, a former social worker in McAllen, the county’s largest city, has witnessed the consequences — case after case of child neglect and abuse. Convinced that family planning could be a solution, he became the chief executive of the Planned Parenthood Association of Hidalgo County, which was founded in a Methodist church in nearby Mission.

In 2010, the Hidalgo County network’s eight clinics provided family-planning services to 23,000 patients, many of whom are uninsured and cannot afford to pay. The services include contraception, breast and cervical cancer screenings, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, and wellness exams for both men and women — but not abortions.

“Basically, we are their doctors,” Mr. Gonzales said. “And for many of them, this is a way to help them get out of poverty.”

Operating in a region with a limited donor base and high need for health services, Mr. Gonzales said, the clinics have relied heavily on government financing. So when state cuts to family planning took effect in September, the Hidalgo County network lost a $3.1 million contract and was forced to lay off half its staff and shut down four of its facilities. (Another five clinics have closed around the state since the beginning of September.) Mr. Gonzales estimated that the closings would affect approximately 16,000 low-income men, women and teenagers in the Rio Grande Valley.

What is happening in Texas is emblematic of a national trend. Unable to overturn Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion campaigners have worked in recent years within Congress and state legislatures, many of which have become increasingly conservative, to make gaining access to the procedure as difficult as possible. Around the country, state legislatures from Arizona to Kansas have passed sweeping measures this year intended to make it more onerous for Planned Parenthood clinics to stay open.

In Texas, lawmakers approved a measure requiring doctors to perform sonograms on women seeking abortions and to describe to them what they see and hear. They also worked to strip financing from any organization that performs abortions or refers women to abortion providers, even if the majority of the organization’s services — or all of them — are primary and preventive care.

“Taxpayers should not be subsidizing the abortion industry,” said Elizabeth Graham, the director of Texas Right to Life.

Supporters of Planned Parenthood maintain that about 95 percent of the organization’s services consist of routine health care. Planned Parenthood clinics receive state aid in Texas by legally separating their family-planning services from their abortion services, which are off limits to tax dollars, but the distinction has never been enough to appease politicians who oppose abortion.

“Their interest is not in giving women options,” Representative Wayne Christian, Republican of Center, said during this year’s legislative session. “Their ultimate answer is, ‘The best we can do is an abortion.’ ”

Earlier this year, Mr. Christian and his colleagues cut the state’s family-planning budget by two-thirds, to $37.9 million over the next two years from $111.5 million. The money was diverted to other causes, including autism and early childhood programs. Budget analysts warned lawmakers that reducing family-planning access would affect at least 180,000 men and women each year and could lead to more than 20,000 additional babies being born at a cost of more than $200 million.

Planned Parenthood reports that 66 of its Texas clinics remain open, but hours and educational outreach efforts have been reduced. This year, 11 clinics received state support, down from 40 clinics last year.

Anti-abortion activists say the women who have relied on Planned Parenthood can go to crisis pregnancy centers — for which lawmakers increased financing — and other community health clinics that do not refer for the procedure. But community health clinics have faced budget cuts as well.

In late August, the Department of State Health Services enforced a new priority financing system that determined that 56 family- planning providers would receive smaller grants through November. But 15 organizations would immediately lose their contracts because of “lack of need” or because there was another agency “within the same service area.” Centers that lost financing included nine unaffiliated with Planned Parenthood, like the People’s Community Clinic in Austin and Haven Health Clinics in Amarillo.

Lone Star Circle of Care, a federally qualified health center with locations throughout Central Texas, received some financing but not enough to cover the demand for birth control and testing.

“We’re talking about basic primary things that everyone should be entitled to, and it really shouldn’t be attached to any political or religious agenda,” said Dr. Tamarah Duperval-Brownlee, Lone Star’s chief medical officer.

In Hidalgo County, the Planned Parenthood network received a one-time award of $113,000 from the state in September after two other agencies rejected the money — enough to treat about 650 patients, but not enough to keep its clinics open in Mission, Progreso, Rio Grande City and San Carlos.

Mr. Gonzales said he was most concerned that clients would have to travel longer distances for care — or would stop seeking treatment altogether.

One of those clients, Nidia Torres, 62, of San Juan, started going to Planned Parenthood when she was 15. Ms. Torres said the organization helped her plan five pregnancies and treated early signs of cervical cancer in 1985.

Though she is staunchly opposed to abortion, Ms. Torres said she supports prevention. She is concerned that a desire to punish Planned Parenthood could have unintended consequences for the health of those in the community.

“If someone comes in and she’s pregnant? She’s pregnant. There’s nothing we can do,” Ms. Torres said. “We’ll be worse if they take away that money for Planned Parenthood. The hospitals will be filled. We will have more children. We will need more food stamps. This is not what the Valley needs. This is not what our community needs. This is not what Texas needs.”

ttan@texastribune.org

Why don't they just outlaw sex

Mississippi considers anti-abortion 'personhood amendment'

October 10, 2011 |  7:45 am

 

The anti-abortion movement's tactic known as a "personhood amendment," which legally defines a person as existing at the moment of fertilization, has been rejected twice in recent years by voters in Colorado.

But the effort has found new life in Mississippi, where a personhood amendment will appear on the Nov. 8 ballot. Mississippi is, by some measures, the nation's most conservative state, and the proposal has earned the support of both the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor, the majority of attorney general candidates, and a host of other state leaders.

If Proposition 26 passes, abortion foes hope it will build momentum for a broader national assault on Roe vs. Wade. Supporters say similar propositions will be featured on ballots in Florida, South Dakota and Ohio in 2012.

Both sides in the debate agree that the measure would outlaw abortion, even in the cases of rape and incest. But there is disagreement about what other, potentially wide-ranging effects it may have.

"Part of the concern is that it's not entirely clear what will happen if this passes," Mississippi College law professor Jonathan Will told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger recently.

The text of the measure proposes that the definition of "person" in the state constitution include "every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof."

Opponents fear that could ban some fertility treatments and birth-control methods, including IUDs, which prevent the implantation of fertilized eggs. In the Clarion-Ledger, Will raised the possibility that the legal voting age would actually be 17 years and 3 months after birth, and that population figures might have to be calculated with the frozen embryos housed in fertility clinics taken into account.

Michele Alexandre, an associate law professor at the University of Mississippi, is among those who worry that if Prop 26 passes, women unaware of their early pregnancy might be exposed to prosecution if they are found to have consumed alcohol or engaged in "a strenuous physical competition."

The Yes on 26 supporters argue that the amendment would not ban "most forms" of birth-control pills, though they say it would ban the pregnancy-terminating treatment known as RU486. They deny it would prohibit in vitro fertilization, though it "would not allow unused embryos to be destroyed."

They also dismiss as "silly and cruel" the suggestion that the law would result in criminal prosecutions of women who miscarry.

Personhood USA, which spearheaded the Colorado ballot measures, is heading up the Mississippi effort. The liberal investigative magazine Mother Jones notes that another major player this time around is a man named Les Riley, founder of the group Personhood Mississippi. Riley, the magazine reported, is a neo-secessionist who "once supported an effort to form an independent theocratic republic in South Carolina."

A better bake sale

October 7, 2011, 1:14 pm

Fordham Holds Bake Sale in Response to Berkeley’s

By REBECCA R. RUIZ

In rebuttal to last week’s controversial bake sale protesting affirmative action in college admissions at the University of California, Berkeley, students at Fordham University in New York staged their own sale on Friday.

A Fordham professor of African American Studies, Mark Naison, is leading the charge, mobilizing students in his senior seminar on affirmative action to peddle pastries priced according to research they conducted on various groups’ advantages in admissions.

As Mr. Naison wrote in a piece Thursday on The Huffington Post, the counter-sale reflects “frustration at the misinformation about affirmative action that prevails among large sections of the American public.”

He continued:

Preferences given recruited athletes and children of alumni are far more powerful than those given underrepresented minorities and affect a far larger number of students.

The Fordham students’ price list, below, turns much of the Berkeley list on its head.

Women (General Admission): $1.30

Men (General Admission): $1.25

Under-Represented Minorities: $1.00

Legacies (Children of Alumni)” $1.00

Recruited Athletes: 50 cents

Children of the Very Wealthy: 25 cents

Male pinups

Men of the Stacks: A library lover's pinup calendar

September 30, 2011 |  3:56 pm

 

Can librarians be pinups? Twelve of them are -- in the 2012 Men of the Stacks calendar. These are men who are happy to be seen as something other than just bespeckled bookworms and who want to reach out beyond the ladies-only sexy librarian cliche.

On the Men of the Stacks website, they write:

We are, or course, professionals.  We are educators, programmers, project managers, entrepreneurs, program coordinators, contractors, consultants, and speakers.  We are academics.  We are authors, diversity officers, historians, administrators, deans, professors, and researchers.  We are creatives.  We are musicians, bakers, painters, and storytellers.  We are athletes, yogis, gym-rats, runners, and hikers.  We are passionate.  We are dog-lovers, radicals, conservatives, Christians, and Buddhists.  We are in our twenties.  We are in our forties.  We are in relationships.  We are perpetual bachelors.  We are privileged beings who try to use their advantages to better the lives of others.

Who are we?  We are The Men of the Stacks.

Oprah's blog calls them "rather studly." The inaugural Men of the Stacks calendar costs $19.99; proceeds go to the It Gets Better fund.

 

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Screenshot of the Men of the Stacks calendar photo gallery. Credit: Men of the Stacks

Bats talk superfast

 

Bats Find Their Way With Superfast Vocal Muscles

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR

Lasse Jakobsen and Coen Elemans

Daubenton’s bats (Myotis daubentonii) capturing prey.

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR

Published: September 30, 2011

The last thing an insect hears before it is eaten by a bat is what scientists call the terminal buzz, a sonar-based call that bats use to track their prey. Bats can produce these echolocation calls at a rapid rate, up to 190 calls per second; they also use the buzz to navigate.

It was never known precisely how they produced these calls so quickly. But now scientists are reporting that bats are able to make these calls thanks to superfast vocal muscles; they are the first mammals known to have this type of muscle. The muscles are very weak, but so quick that they can contract 100 times as fast as ordinary human muscles and 20 times the speed of humans’ fastest muscles, the ones in the eye.

Until now, superfast muscles had been found only in songbirds, rattlesnakes and certain fish, all of which use them to produce sound. Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark and the University of Pennsylvania wanted to see if they existed in mammals as well, which led them to look at Daubenton’s bat, a species found throughout Europe and Asia.

“I thought, ‘If we’re going to find them in mammals, it’s going to be bats,’ ” said an author of the study, Coen Elemans, an assistant professor at Southern Denmark. “If you hunt prey that is fast-moving and also evading you, it’s very important to produce these calls at a very, very high rate.”

In their study, which appears in Science, Dr. Elemans and his colleagues recorded the bats’ calls and determined when the echoes reached their ears. The scientists found that the bats’ brains could process the sounds even faster than their muscles could generate them: up to 800 calls per second, in some cases, before the calls would start to overlap with the echoes and cause confusion.

The Italian Slant

Essay

Reading Alberto Moravia in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy

Paramount Films of Italy, via The Everett Collection

Jean-Louis Trintignant in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 adaptation of Moravia's novel "The Conformist."

By RACHEL DONADIO

Published: September 30, 2011

In its culture as in its politics, Italy lives under the shadow of Silvio Berlusconi. With his endless legal entanglements and sexual imbroglios and his colorful manner of governing (or not governing), it often feels as if the prime minister has taken all the oxygen out of the room, the airwaves, the entire republic. “How did we get here?” is the dominant — indeed often the only — topic of conversation in Italy today.

The novelist Alberto Moravia, a 20th-­century giant whose work is generally overlooked today, offers one key to unlocking the mystery. Born in 1907, Moravia came of age under Fascism — he belonged to a generation of writers, including Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Elsa Morante (Moravia’s first wife), who found global audiences after the Second World War. In his most important novel, “The Conformist” (1951), Moravia explored the complicated links between sex and politics in a nation of cynical opportunists. The formative moment in the life of the protagonist, Marcello Clerici, comes at age 13, when he shoots a defrocked priest who has tried to seduce him. True to the novel’s title, Clerici, whose name means “clergy,” later joins the Fascist Party more out of boredom than conviction. In addition to exploring the homoeroticism of power (a theme that later captivated Pasolini), Moravia’s novel also delved into a careerism and even nihilism that he identified just below the surface of Italian society, reaching far deeper than any ideology.

Moravia died in 1990, a many-laureled man of letters. Several years later, three unpublished novellas were found by chance in a suitcase in his Rome residence. The manuscripts, which offer variations on a love story set during World War II, were most likely written in the early 1950s, between “The Conformist” and “Contempt,” a brutal 1954 account of a disintegrating marriage. Now they have been published under the title TWO FRIENDS (Other Press, $18.95), in an excellent translation by Marina Harss, offering a fascinating glimpse of how Moravia’s writing evolved. In one particularly revealing moment, the mother of a middle-class Roman family cries, “For all I care, the English can win, or the Germans. . . . I just want someone to win so we can forget all this!” Reading this today, in the long twilight of the Berlusconi era, the line is almost haunting. Deeply cynical and perhaps darkly comic, it speaks to what Italians call l’arte di ­arrangiarsi, the art of making do — a highly sophisticated skill, a vestige of centuries of feudalism, with which savvy Italians are immediately able to sniff out power dynamics and arrange their affairs accordingly.

Another central theme in Moravia’s works is impotence, both political and sexual. In these novellas, the characters have decent luck in bed but generally feel powerless against the larger currents of 20th-century history. The bedroom becomes a shelter against the world, but the world never fully leaves the bedroom. At one point in “Two Friends,” Sergio, an impoverished, aspiring young Communist, attributes his lack of conviction — about his career, his lover, his politics — to his formation under Fascism. It had “wormed its way into his blood, not in the form of political allegiance, but rather as a kind of torpor and mortal passivity, like a poison that slowly intoxicates and weakens the body,” Moravia writes. “He was confronted once again with his feeling of impotence, but this time it not only affected his personal life but encompassed the destiny of the nation and humanity as a whole.”

In “Two Friends,” Moravia links a human drama to the struggle between Communism and Fascism for Italy’s heart and soul. Again, reading Moravia in Berlusconi’s Italy, where scores of women offer themselves for the leader’s pleasure, it feels as if the country today provides only bedroom drama, not a larger ideological struggle. Midcentury passivity has devolved into a languid air of late-­imperial decline.

lthough it was Jean-Luc Godard who adapted Moravia’s “Contempt” into a film and Bernardo Bertolucci who directed “The Conformist,” Moravia’s true spiritual kin are Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. Their devastating portraits of upwardly mobile, desperately unhappy Italians captured an alienation, rootlessness and despair that seemed to rise with every percentage point of gross domestic product during Italy’s boom years in the 1950s and ’60s, as the feudal resignation of the past evolved into aestheticized existential ennui. Indeed, there is something of Marcello Mastroianni in Moravia’s protagonists: they present an endless series of self-­loathing, conflicted men who aspire to make art or take some form of decisive action, but who instead are thwarted and trapped by their own lack of nerve; often, they analyze their own failings with great lucidity, creating elaborate psychological monuments to their own passivity.

Like the men Mastroianni played for Fellini and ­Antonioni, Moravia’s protagonists also routinely mistreat the women in their lives, often in spectacular fashion, as in “Two Friends” when Sergio hits his lover, Lalla, who responds as if the strike caused her pleasure, not pain. But there is one crucial moment in “Two Friends” that goes against that tendency. Sergio hopes to convert his wealthier and more conservative friend Maurizio to Communism, a cause he has only halfheartedly embraced, by allowing Maurizio to sleep with Lalla, if Maurizio then joins the party. But the political seduction remains unconsummated. When Lalla realizes what is taking place, she recoils in a rare act of defiance for one of Moravia’s women, whose hips and breasts are generally more fully fleshed out than their characters or convictions. “Neither of you has shown any respect for my right to choose,” she says. “You have done so in the name of Communism, and you in the name of anti-­Communism. . . . You’ve both treated me like an object, . . . but I’ve had enough.” Strong words, and ones that still sting today.

Rachel Donadio is The Times’s Rome bureau chief and a former writer and editor at the Book Review.

San Francisco Nude-Ins

Protesters Bare All Over a Proposed San Francisco Law

By MALIA WOLLAN

Published: September 25, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO — Perhaps it should not be a surprise that San Francisco does not have a law against being naked in public, nor that a small, unselfconscious segment of the city’s residents regularly exercise that right.

 

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

A proposed law would put some restrictions on public nudity in San Francisco, and a “Nude-In” on Saturday became a tourist attraction. “This is about body acceptance, not politics,” the organizer said.

That tiny minority was joined this weekend in the autumn fog and cold by unclothed sympathizers at a “Nude-In.” One of their objectives was to draw attention to a proposed law — introduced by Scott Wiener, a city supervisor — that would prohibit nudity in restaurants and require unclad people to put a towel or other material down before sitting bare-bottomed on benches or other public seats.

Mr. Wiener said the law was introduced in response to an increase in nakedness in parks, streets and restaurants.

“It used to be that there would be one nude guy wandering around the neighborhood and no one thought twice about it,” said Mr. Wiener, who represents the city’s Castro district. “Now it’s a regular thing and much more obnoxious. We have guys sitting down naked in public without the common decency to put something down underneath them.”

Mr. Wiener’s effort was destined to grab headlines, but he probably did not anticipate that his legislation would inspire even more people to disrobe.

“Wiener might as well have shot lasers and fireworks into the sky announcing that public nudity is legal,” said George Davis, 65.

A self-described “urban nudist” who once ran for mayor and often campaigned in the buff, Mr. Davis now spends most afternoons lounging in his birthday suit in a public plaza in the Castro.

Putting a towel between your backside and a seat is “basic nudist etiquette,” said Mr. Davis, adding that the legislation requiring it was “totally unnecessary.”

Still, Mr. Davis said, the publicity about the proposed law could be credited for the new faces at the Nude-In, which was held Saturday at the Jane Warner Plaza in the Castro.

Other nearby cities like Berkeley and San Jose have passed laws prohibiting public nudity, but in San Francisco it remains legal. In accordance with state law, public nudity is only illegal when accompanied by “lewd thoughts or acts” or “where there are present other persons to be offended or annoyed.” But since state law prohibits police officers from being the offended party, it takes a citizen’s arrest— a rare occurrence in a city that prides itself on its open-mindedness and tolerance — to take a naked person into custody.

Many of the people who took part in the Nude-In said that they already used towels when they sat down, and that they thought Mr. Wiener’s legislation was pointless. The event itself was originally organized not as a protest but as a curtain-raiser for the Folsom Street Fair, which spread over 13 city blocks on Sunday. “This is about body acceptance, not politics,” said the Nude-In’s organizer, Mitch Hightower, 50, who runs a pornographic Web site.

Nowhere is brazen public nudity more evident than at the Folsom Street Fair, which is billed as the largest leather and fetish event in the world. The gathering attracts hundreds of thousands of people every year, many of them wearing black leather chaps and nothing else.

“In San Francisco, public nudity is a big part of a lot of social street events, and that’s a good thing,” Mr. Hightower said.

Businesses in the Castro are divided over the role that naked people play in the neighborhood’s economic and cultural appeal. Despite receiving some complaints about nudity from business owners, Steve Adams, president of the Merchants of Upper Market and Castro, says he often sees tourists posing for photographs with the nudists.

“Nudity really doesn’t impact business,” said Mr. Adams, whose group represents about 300 businesses. “In fact, it is kind of a draw for tourists. As long as the people who come to look spend money in the neighborhood, that’s all I care about.”

At the Nude-In, bystanders in sweaters and jackets circled the cluster of several dozen naked people, gawking and snapping photos with their smartphones. Two teenage girls posed with a man carrying a “Nude Is Not Lewd” sign and wearing nothing more than a white cowboy hat and a pair of worn leather boots.

“I brought my out-of-town guests here to show them an ‘only in San Francisco’ experience,” said Maggie Cahill, 53, a technology manager at a bank who stood scrunching her nose at the scene with friends from Los Angeles. “Where are the supermodel types?” she asked. “We want to know why it’s always the people who should not be naked who get naked.”

Some of the nudists at the rally seemed to already be adhering to the sought-after decorum by sitting on newspapers. In fact, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, one of the city’s weeklies, explicitly advertised its usefulness for just that purpose, printing a special clip-out page in last week’s issue. The page pointed out that newsprint was a 100 percent recyclable seat guard, and in bold type it said: “If you go bare, put ’er there.”