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I’ve heard good things about a new documentary film, Praying with Lior, only opening now in a few cities and playing primarily at Jewish film festivals. From the film’s website:

An engrossing, wrenching and tender documentary film, Praying with Lior introduces Lior Liebling, also called “the little rebbe.” Lior has Down syndrome, and has spent his entire life praying with utter abandon. Is he a “spiritual genius” as many around him say? Or simply the vessel that contains everyone’s unfulfilled wishes and expectations? Lior – whose name means “my light” — lost his mother at age six, and her words and spirit hover over the film. While everyone agrees Lior is closer to God, he’s also a burden, a best friend, an inspiration, and an embarrassment, depending on which family member is speaking. As Lior approaches Bar Mitzvah, the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony different characters provides a window into life spent “praying with Lior.” The movie poses difficult questions such as what is “disability” and who really talks to God? Told with intimacy and humor, Praying with Lior is a family story, a triumph story, a grief story, a divinely-inspired story.

It sounds like this could go either way, right? The stereotyping of a child with Down syndrome as closer to God than the rest of us, an inspiration or a burden are themes on developmental disability we’ve heard many times before.

But filmmaker Ilana Trachtman’s motivations as reported by Devorah Shubowitz at Media Rights reveal complexities behind the intent of the documentary:

As Trachtman struggled to focus during a Rosh Hashanah service at Elat Chayyim, a multi-denominational Jewish retreat center in the Catskills, she was mesmerized by the soulfully attentive off-key voice that came from behind her. When she saw the source, a boy with Down syndrome, she was shocked. Lior’s praying shattered her expectations of what people with disabilities can do. “He amazed me. He could do something that I can’t do — pray with real concentration in Hebrew and in English. So I stalked him because of my own spiritual curiosity.” When Trachtman heard Lior was going to have a Bar Mitzvah, she thought somebody should tell his story on film and shortly after, she decided to be that person….

Audiences may debate whether this photogenic young person’s “star quality” sets him apart from other people with disabilities. Some may argue that Lior’s integration is dependent upon his recognition by and attractiveness to non-disabled society. Others may think his charisma is connected to his disability. The film certainly brings to the foreground issues of the aesthetics of disability, and non-disability, in film.

Another review at Cinematical also suggests that disability is just one (important) facet of this complex family story about love and religious faith.

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

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Friday Cat Blogging (™ Kevin Drum)

I’ve been putting in some tweaks to the page layout, as you may have noticed, and, while I was at it, the appearance of one too many animated ads for the Fighting Uruk-Hai of Arizona in my sidebar finally inspired me to revise and expand my ad disclaimer. As you can see, if you scan over to the right, it now reads: Views inscribed in the Rad Geek People’s Daily are mine, and may not be those of sponsors. Google ads are served algorithmically, without individual review, so contrariwise, an ad’s appearance does not imply my endorsement of the sponsor.

To be fair, the Adsense management interface does have a provision for screening out future appearances of particular ads, after-the-fact, if you catch one that you don’t want them to appear on your page. On the other hand, I should hope that most of my readership is not about to vote for Gothmog. And if I let the ads appear, then, should anyone happen to click on a McCain ad, that means a little more money is taken away from the McCain 2008 Presidential campaign, and given to me instead. Which seems like a particularly sweet sort of revenge.

Joel Stein gives us a very handy lesson on that in his most recent column, fetchingly called "A little something for the ladies." Note the term "ladies" and the "little something"! Could it be....a diamond ring? Ooh, shiny! Gimme, gimme! If not I shall stomp my tiny foot and cry! And you will not get laid for a century at least!

The column isn't about what to give your little lady on Valentine's Day to get the blowjob you've paid for, nope. It's about women as political animals. Well, as political pet animals, really. It's also a very very funny column, and I'm going to show you how you, too, can write a funny column like that.

First, though the column is supposedly on women, make sure that every man reading it will think of his little bit of armpit fluff instead. For instance, you could begin like this:

You know how ladies, when they don't get what they want, can go a little crazy? Am I right, fellas? Right now, they're pretty upset about losing their first chance at a female president. This would have empowered little girls, shattered sexist beliefs about female incompetence and forced men around the world to view a woman as an agent of power instead of a sex object -- all of which, it turns out, are important to women even though they buy Star magazine. Ladies are complicated.

Pure male genius, that paragraph. Notice how he gets you to agree that women are crazy, in the very first sentence? Women cry and get angry for no good reason at all, whereas men never get angry or crazy. Never. The third sentence explains, subtly and sneakily, how women are illogical, too, because they really want to be sex objects, even if they pretend they don't. So you have to appease them, placate them, for what else can you do when someone is crazy and illogical yet necessary for those sexual uses?

The next paragraphs elaborate on women's silliness and immaturity and the easy way that a man can cope with that:

Because women do most of the voting, and the shopping and the TV watching and the book reading -- porn really must take up a lot of men's time -- they need to be placated. Which shouldn't be hard. You know how when your dog dies, your wife wants to get a puppy right away? That's what America has to do. We need a replacement Hillary.

Because while women are sad that Hillary Clinton seems poised to lose the Democratic nomination, they're even more dejected that there appear to be no women with enough political stature to run for president next time. That's why Barack Obama and John McCain need to pick female running mates. Either that or we're going to have to find some money in the federal budget for 150 million flower bouquets.

See how clever our Joel is? That puppy question, for example? How does he know that every single wife wants a new puppy when the dog dies? Is he a mind-reader or is he linking women to what children might want when a family dog dies? To sort of infantilize women (the majority of Americans)? He's a brave guy. And so very funny.

To return to the version of women as someone's difficult wife or girlfriend: Those creatures need placating, and flowers will do. Well, if women are more like pets-with-benefits, something like a rawhide bone might do as well. But a nice bouquet of roses with perhaps a tiny teddy bear which says "I wuw u!"; those will make her cheerful and quite content. Who cares about the number of women in the Congress when you can have twelve long-stemmed roses instead!

In the rest of his very funny column Joel gives us various scenarios of how we could stuff a little lady into the slot of the Vice-President, should the roses not work after all. Some of those scenarios even give men eye-candy! Tits! Yeah. But he ends his monologue by noting that the unreasonable and emotional women would not be satisfied with a female Vice-President:

Will a female vice president really satisfy women? Of course not. But what does? The point is that we'll be showing them we understand that their frustration is legitimate, and that we're hearing them, and that we're ready to listen. That stuff will totally buy us until November.

I love that ending! See how brilliantly he managed to insert something about how women always need to talk about their emotions and to be heard and how men never listen? Well, now they listen, hand out roses and Vice-Presidents. Of course none of that is enough, because women are emotional, greedy, impossible to understand, yet childishly easy to divert by just a gift or two.

The end of the lesson. Now you know how to write a really sexist (but ohsofunny) column basically stating that women (the majority of Americans) are illogical, insatiable, emotional and silly creatures. Warning! Do not try this approach with any racial, ethnic or political group other than women. You will get severely told off, even fired, if you do.

Here’s Mike Tennant at LewRockwell.com Blog, quasi-approvingly quoting Jacob Heilbrunn’s summary of Bill Buckley:

Jacob Heilbrunn writes: Buckley wasn’t a radical conservative. He didn’t believe in trying to destroy the Eastern Establishment; instead, he wanted to reform it. Therein lies the entire problem.

Hold up. I’m lost.

In what possible sense of the word conservative is it a genuine conservative’s goal either to smash or to reform the ancien régime?

Maybe this political debate is really about something other than what Tennant, or Heilbrunn, or for that matter Buckley, thinks it is about.

Further reading:

• GT 2005-02-03: By George, I think he’s got it!
• GT 2004-08-23: The Conservative Tradition

Thanks to a tip by reader Shannon, we find that there's a Facebook group titled, "Hillary Clinton: Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich." And it has nearly 40,000 members.

There are tons others like it, but this one is especially obnoxious It's description says the group is "Dedicated to keeping Hillary Clinton out of the Oval Office and in the kitchen." They're also selling t -shirts for their "cause."

But the most upsetting part of this was the large number of women who are members - just glancing at it, I would guess that at least twenty percent of members are women. Depressing.

      Do we idealize women in the same way we do men? 

Bean pointed out this story to me; an ABC hidden camera “reality” show paid three teenage white boys to “vandalize” a car in a park (a car that was owned by ABC, of course). The boys visibly broke into the car, and then began beating it with a metal tool and spray-painting it. This went on for quite a while.

One person called 911, and one passerby asked the boys what they were doing. Elsewhere in the park, coincidently, some black folks (relatives of an ABC employee, as it turned out) were napping in their car; this also generated a call to 911.

Next day, same park, same situation — but the three actors hired were black. Suddenly, lots of people were asking the boys what they were doing, and lots were calling 911.

What interested me, in light of recent discussions on “Alas,” was the quotes from the various white people who called 911 about the three black “vandals.”

So we asked those who approached the black kids or reported them to police, “Would you have acted any differently if the boys were white?”

Sang said, “I would have done the same thing. Maybe I would have stopped them sooner.”

Joan A. and Martha had a similar response: “I did notice they were African-American young boys in a white neighborhood,” said Joan A. “But if they had been white kids, I mean, I would have done exactly the same thing.”

Martha agreed, “I might have done it quicker if they were white kids.”

“Actually, I probably hesitated because they were black,” said Joan D. “I don’t like to assume that three black kids are up to trouble. But they were clearly up to trouble,” she recalled, laughing. “But had it been three white kids I’d have done the same thing. I might have called quicker.”

ABC’s segment isn’t a legitimate study, of course; but for argument’s sake, assume a social scientist did a well-designed study which replicated ABC’s findings. (In the real world I doubt an academic ethics committee would approve purposely generating false calls to 911).

RonF and others argue that it’s wrong to believe racism is a factor when the individuals involved have a plausible, non-racist motivation for their actions. That means there’s no racism here: Every individual person who called 911 denies that there was any racism in their choice. If anything, they say, they would have been quicker to call 911 if the vandals had been white. And no one denies it’s legitimate to call 911 when one sees a crime being committed, regardless of the criminal’s race.

So, Ron and others: Is it wrong to say that there’s anything racist about a society in which random passerbys are more likely to call the cops on black teens than white teens for identical behavior? Let’s say that having black teens do the crime generates 10 times as many 911 calls, whereas white crimes doing a crime is only as likely to generate a 911 call as black people taking a nap are. But in no case can we prove that any individual making a 911 call had a racial bias.

From your point of view, there’s no racism going on here. Right?