A couple of years back, I started referring to my friend Rebecca Brown as “the divine Ms Brown” (as in “the latest piece by the divine Ms Brown…”). Not that I have any desire to worship her – or anyone or anything else for that matter – but her writing definitely touches on the transcendent. The word fit.

Then I realized that another friend, contemporary-art curator Robin Held, deserved a better adjective than all the “amazings” and “wonderfuls” constantly used for her. I started thinking of her as “the iconic Ms Held.” That fit too.

I could always stick with the usual words, of course. But when “awesome” is used for everything from the latest video game to a new flavor of ice-cream, it becomes meaningless. There’s no real awe there, just as there’s no real wonder in “wonderful.”

“Amazing” is popular, but seems to indicate surprise that any woman could be strong and intelligent and outspoken.

“Incredible” begs the question.

And as for “courageous” – if it takes courage for a woman to speak her mind and be active in the world (at least in the West), then we’re in worse trouble than I thought.

There’s a whole range of monikers we could use instead of the standard wonderfuls and awesomes and amazings.  I began jotting them down, and found that I could put names of women I know to every one of them. I’m pretty sure you can do the same:

— the badass Ms X

— the incomparable Ms Y

— the unstoppable Ms Z

— the outrageous Ms A

— the formidable Ms B

— the dynamite Ms C

— the fearless Ms D

— the fearsome Ms E

— the notorious Ms F

— the path-breaking Ms G

— the ferocious Ms H

— the inimitable Ms I

— the indomitable Ms J

— the brilliant Ms K

— the magnificent Ms L

— the dynamic Ms M

— the genius known as Ms N

— the epic Ms O

— the mind-blowing Ms P

and this isn’t even the whole of the alphabet.

Some of these tags are stronger, some less so, but you get the idea: We need better accolades for strong, intelligent women. And quit with the weak female-only ones.

Words like “gutsy” don’t cut it — who ever describes a man they admire as gutsy?  “Ballsy?” — oh puh-lease…  “Incredible”? — really, you find it hard to credit?  “Innovative?” — aren’t we all?

So let’s innovate.  No matter what gender you are, feel free to pitch in and share better suggestions in the comments.  And start using them. Liberally.

Think big, think strong, and celebrate strong women with strong language!

The right-wing is trying like hell to do a number on the minds of American women. You know that thing about abortion being the hardest choice a woman will ever have to make, or the one she most regrets? Bullshit.

In fact 90% of all American women who’ve had an abortion are either glad or simply relieved they did (click here for the research.)  And for every woman I know who’s had an abortion (that’s half the women I know, and quite possibly half the women you know too), a safe, routine, minimally invasive procedure was far from the hardest decision of their lives. For many, like me, it was the simple, sane choice. The only hard part was finding the money to pay for it.

You want a hard decision? What about marriage? Or divorce? Taking on a mortgage? Choosing a cancer treatment? Allowing a terminally ill spouse to die with dignity? What about the multitude of hard decisions we all have to make in the course of our lives, men and women?

But right-wingers don’t think women capable of rational decision-making at all.  It’s apparently especially hard for us delicate souls, which is presumably why they think we agonize over it and decide wrong.  How very Victorian of them. They’re apparently white knights in shining armor, out to save every woman from her own distressingly poor judgment.  In their ideal world, no woman would be “allowed” to make a decision without prior permission from the Republican caucus.  Certainly not any woman with an income under a million a year.

But it’s not our decision-making that stinks, it’s theirs.  Because not only is it morally and ethically bankrupt, it’s full of lies — deliberate lies.

— Like Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina pretending to be near tears as she talked about watching a video that didn’t exist and never had.

— Or the head of the House Oversight Committee trying to play gotcha with the head of Planned Parenthood by using a bogus chart created by an anti-abortion group.

— Or abortion opponents pretending there’s no such thing as an embryo.  They’d have us think that every abortion is that of a full-term viable fetus, when none are.  The vast majority of abortions are embryonic, medically defined as up to eight weeks from conception.  But hey, you can’t see an embryo on a sonogram, let alone wave photographs of it in an attempt to guilt-trip women.  So lie, baby, lie — and screw the lives you mess up in the process.

It’s clear by now that nobody cares about facts in the fantasy world of today’s Republicans.  Real facts, that is, as opposed to imaginary ones.

Those of us who live in the real world know for a fact that imaginary facts are dangerous.  Remember those non-existent weapons of mass destruction used as the reason to invade Iraq?  Or those non-existent scientists asserting with great authority that there was no such thing as climate change?

Forget hard decisions for the moment.  Here’s an easy one:  A year from now, do all you can to make sure we send this gang of women-hating, war-mongering, planet-polluting liars back to whatever slime pit they crawled out of.

How have we allowed this to happen? How have we allowed anti-abortion activists to call themselves pro-life? How have we not called them out, loud and clear, on this Orwellian double-speak?

Many of those against abortion are the same right-wingers who want to nuke the hell out of Iran or any other designated enemy of the day; who support the death penalty no matter how many death-row inmates have been proven innocent; who obstruct all attempts at gun control even when kindergarten kids are massacred; who see nothing wrong about cops shooting unarmed black men in the back. But a single fertilized egg inside a woman’s uterus? Suddenly, that’s sacred.

They’re not pro-life. I am. And Planned Parenthood is. And NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League, is. Because nobody here is advocating for abortion per se; what we’re for is the right to have one. For motherhood to be a matter of choice, not compulsion. And for a child’s right to come into the world wanted and welcomed. What we’re for, in short, is life. Not life in the abstract, but real life, as it is lived.

What we’re for is not more but fewer abortions. And the way to achieve that is clear: sex education in schools, and freely available contraception for women. Yet the anti-abortion crowd is against both. Which means that all they ensure is that there’ll be more abortions.

The historical record is clear: women have always aborted pregnancies, whether with herbs, with knitting needles, or with wire coat-hangers in back-street abortions such as the one that nearly killed a close friend when I was a student. So now that abortion is safe – a minor medical procedure – the anti-abortion crowd are doing everything they can to make it dangerous again: to make the woman pay for having the gall to be sexual, and to make the unwanted child pay too.

If a woman chooses to carry a pregnancy to term and then give the child up for adoption, I totally support her choice. But it is cruel and punitive to force her to do so. It is downright obscene to insist that a rape victim carry her rapist’s child. And to make a woman give birth to a severely disabled child doomed to die in pain within hours, weeks, or months is nothing less than torture, of both mother and child.

This isn’t about the Bible or the Quran. It’s about punishment, about a basic attitude of life negation, of harshness and joylessness. It isn’t pro-life; it’s anti-life.

If its advocates weren’t causing so much misery and suffering, I might even find it in myself to feel sorry for them.

Nearly every woman I know has either had an abortion or helped another woman get one. I know this because as the Republican attack on Planned Parenthood ramps up, I’ve been asking. Old and young, black and white and brown, married and single, straight and gay, religious and irreligious – women have been telling me their abortion stories.

But I think we need to tell them publicly too. To break the weird veil of shame and secrecy that still hangs over the decision, even when abortion is legal. To stand up and say “Yes, sure, I had one.”

So here’s the story of mine.

I was 20 years old – young and dumb, as every 20-year-old has every right to be. Not that dumb, though, since I was using a diaphragm thanks to the Marie Stopes clinic, the one place in the whole of England at the time that would provide contraception to an unmarried 17-year-old.  And the diaphragm worked fine until my first summer in Jerusalem, when it didn’t. Not because of any fault in the device, but because I hadn’t put it in. Carried away, late in my menstrual cycle, I’d said “Come on, it’s okay.” And three weeks later, realized it wasn’t.

There was no doubt in my mind what I needed to do. The guy I was with was a no-goodnik, the result of a bad case of delayed teenage rebellion on my part. I had an undergraduate degree in psychology but no idea what I wanted to do next, only that since I could barely handle myself, no way could I handle a baby. But abortion was still illegal in Israel. And I was dead broke.

I found my way to the Jerusalem branch of an aid organization for Brits – a single room with a single occupant, who took one look at me as I stood miserably in the doorway and before I could open my mouth said “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

I nodded yes.

“And you need an abortion.”

Another nod.

“And you don‘t know where to go.”

Again, a nod.

“And you don’t have any money.”

At the final nod, she said “Sit down,” and made three phone calls: one for an appointment with a leading gynecologist who didn’t believe in forcing women to have children; one to her HQ to get approval for a loan to pay his fee; and one to a publishing house to get me a job as a copy-editor so that I could pay back the loan.

We have been firm friends ever since.

The procedure itself was a non-event. (The doctor gave me a prescription for the pill and said he hoped to never see me again, though in fact he did, but not with me as the patient – he ran a maternity clinic, and was the obstetrician for three of my friends as I helped with their labor.) I parted ways with the no-goodnik, and set about the never-ending process of growing up.

And now, almost half a century later? No regrets. Quite the contrary, since I suspect this was the one rational decision I made the whole of that year. In short: thank god I had an abortion.

Does this television sequence sound familiar?

Night time. A woman brushing her teeth in the bathroom. A dark shadow appears behind her. A gloved hand clamps over her mouth. A struggle. A knife. Cut to morning. Bloodied body on the floor. Enter detective, with dumb ‘witticism’ along the lines of “Had a hard night.” Cut to commercials.

Prime-time television makes a fortune out of women being stalked, beaten, raped, tortured, and murdered.   All in high-def detail, of course. Programs such as Law and Order’s sleazy ‘Special Victims Unit’ spinoff and the even sleazier Criminal Minds are huge money-making franchises, every episode sold on first to cable and then throughout the world.

Mandy Patinkin, one of my favorite actors, walked out on Criminal Minds after its first two years, calling it a huge mistake to have ever accepted a starring role on it. “I never thought they were going to kill and rape all these women every night, every day, week after week, year after year,” he said. “It was very destructive to my soul and my personality.”

It is very destructive to all our souls and personalities.

So why don‘t all the other actors walk out? (I know — money makes their world go round). Why in fact does anyone watch these programs? (I may not really want the answer to that.) Why do advertisers pay to be in those commercial breaks? (oh yes: because people watch.) And what exactly is going on in the minds of those who write and produce and air such programs?  Doesn’t anyone in television-land realize that they‘re presenting violence against women as entertainment?

Or worse still, do they realize it very well?

No, I’m not saying that such programs create rapists and murderers, or that they present rape as okay.  Their ostensible focus is on the horror of rape, and at least on the surface, they seem to be raising consciousness of how brutal a violation it is.

Beneath the surface, though, there’s a deeply creepy fascination with rape, one that feels darkly voyeuristic.  So what I am saying is that such programs are a very visible part of a world-wide culture that still does not take rape with full seriousness — a culture that still doesn‘t register it for what it is:  not “sexual assault” nor “sex crime,” but brutality.  Rape is not about sex; it’s about brutalizing women.

There has to be someone out there who is as pissed as I am at this but with far better organizing skills.  Someone who can get at those who make such programs where it really hurts:  not in their balls, but in their pocketbooks.  Someone who can create a campaign to pressure advertisers to stop supporting programs that use violence against women as entertainment.

Imagine a boycott of the goods and services of all such advertisers.  Imagine stickers pasted on toilet paper and antacids and “feminine-care” products in supermarkets saying “This product pays for rape as entertainment.”  Imagine the publicity, the “bad PR,” the panic this would induce among directors of marketing.  They’d cave.

What Mandy Patinkin did, we all need to do. We all need to walk out on this sleaze.

The video is chaotic.  It shows a woman being stripped, tossed around, hit, kicked, held down, penetrated, beaten into unconsciousness by a mob in Cairo.  It’s described in this New York Times report, which avoids any link to the video itself.  In fact the original YouTube upload has been deleted.  Deleting it, however, is just another way of trying to cover it up.  As I write, this one is still active.  And yes, you are warned, it’s brutal.  As all rape is.

I know that those who read this blog, men and women alike, will be incapable of watching these couple of minutes with anything but horror.  But I also know that part of the reason it went viral when first posted is that there are men out there who are turned on by it.

Just the thought of that makes me want to gag.  As does the boys-will-be-boys response to it from an Egyptian TV host, who said, with a stupid giggle:  “They are happy.  The people are having fun.”

This isn’t “just” an Egyptian problem.  Or a Nigerian or Somali or Brazilian or Turkish or Italian or Swedish or Indian or Pakistani one.  My first association was with last year’s photo of an unconscious near-naked girl being lugged around by wrists and ankles, like a carcass, by high-school rapists in apple-pie Steubenville, Ohio.

This sickness infects some men, but affects every woman.  Yes, all women.  The Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen took off in response to the misogynistic shooting rampage in Santa Barbara, California two weeks ago, and here’s the formidably intelligent Rebecca Solnit on what it means.

Solnit was in Seattle last week talking about her new book, Men Explain Things To Me, and when she mentioned her unease at finding herself alone on an elevator at night with a strange man, there was a lone weird laugh from a man behind me in the audience.  It wasn’t clear what he found so funny.  Perhaps he simply couldn’t understand this kind of unease.  But every woman can.  It’s the year 2014, and yet it’s still not “wise” for a woman to go down a dark street at night, or ride in an empty subway car, or walk in the woods.  What was most remarkable about Wild, Cheryl Strayed’s account of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, was not the length or the difficulty of the hike, but the fact that she was a woman walking alone.  If she had been male, there would have been no book to be written.

It’s absurd that the onus is still on women to avoid being subjected to violence.  One way and another, we are told to avoid this, avoid that, take care, take karate classes, be on the alert, be afraid.  Don’t go out at night, say some.  Stay home, lock yourselves in, adopt the behavioral equivalent of a chador.  (Don’t go out at night?  An equally rational ‘solution’ would instead be to tell men not to go out at night.)

But there’s an antidote.  And it comes from men — men who really do respect women, and who know that to remain silent in the face of woman-hatred is only to give it free rein.  As former president Jimmy Carter put it in A Call to Action, violence against women is not only a woman’s issue;  it affects us all, and the only way to win this battle is to work together.  I take heart from this photo that artist D.K.Pan posted on his Facebook page after the Santa Barbara massacre.  Women are finally speaking out;  we need more men like Jimmy Carter and D.K.Pan to speak out with us.

Two excellent minds — liberal activist and journalist Mona Eltahawy and Huffington Post UK political editor Mehdi Hasan — went head to head at the Oxford Union on whether, per the provocative headline of Eltahawy’s article in Foreign Policy Magazine, Arab men hate women.

Go to it, accidental theologists!  But…

Please view the whole video before you comment.  Let’s get beyond knee-jerk reactions.  It’s true that it’s a long video, but if you don’t consider the whole issue important enough to merit 47 minutes of your time, I hereby suggest you forfeit the right to comment.

–

Can comedy do what common sense can’t?

In case you somehow missed it, this video mildly satirizing the Saudi regime’s absurd ban on women driving has gone totally viral since it was posted on Saturday:

That thing about ovaries?  The Sauds seem to imagine that driving can make a woman infertile.  I kid you not.  Being a back-seat passenger has no such effect, it seems.

Could this possibly have anything to do with the idea of control?

(In case you’re amazed at how uniquely backward the Sauds are with respect to women, by the way, you might consider this ironic detail:  exactly the same argument was used in Israel for decades to stop women from flying planes.  Again, being a passenger was held to have no such effect — just being at the controls.  As a result, the first group of female Israeli air-force pilots graduated not in the ’70s or the ’80s or the ’90s, but all of two years ago, in 2011.)

So who is the guy in the No-Woman-No-Drive video?  He’s Hisham Fageeh, he’s a Riyadh-based stand-up comic who’s studied religion, and thanks to Mother Jones magazine, there’s more on him here.  And if you need a sense of what the dozens of women who defied the ban this past weekend were risking, here’s a TED talk by the wonderful Manal al-Sharif, who went to jail for doing it.

Meanwhile, I’m taking to the road (and the air) through mid-November, with Bob Marley on my playlist. But will I ever be able to listen to ‘No Woman, No Cry’ the same way again?

Here’s my review of Richard Rodriguez’ “Persian carpet of a book” in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.

Yes, it’s a rave.

No, I’ve never met him.

Yes, I’d love to:

On rare occasion, a writer makes a reviewer’s life hard. Richard Rodriguez’s Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography has to be celebrated as one of those occasions.

The deep pleasures of such a book defy the usual capsule account. Instead you want to read sentences and whole passages aloud as I’ve been doing over cafe and dinner tables the past few weeks – “Listen to this!” You want to press “Darling” on others as a gift of friendship, judiciously picking whom to share it with lest you expose Rodriguez to pedants who can’t fathom the way his mind works.

“I did not intend to write a spiritual autobiography,” he writes in the foreword, and I’m glad to say that despite the subtitle (an editorial addition, I suspect), he hasn’t. This is something infinitely more supple – a rich tapestry, a Persian carpet of a book. True, it’s framed as an exploration of his own Catholicism post-9/11, when he realized that “Christianity, like Judaism, like Islam, is a desert religion, an oriental religion, a Semitic religion, born of sinus-clearing glottal consonants, spit, dust, blinding light,” and began to wonder how he and the “cockpit terrorists” could worship the same Abrahamic God.

But Rodriguez’s faith is light-years away from the deadening dogma of “mitered, bearded, fringed holy men.” As he investigates “the ecologies of the holy desert” – specifically the Judean desert – what he creates instead is more like an ecology of the soul. And unlike the desert, it teems with life.

St. Francis, Elvis, Muhammad Ali, Pope John Paul II, Cesar Chavez, Keats, William Randolph Hearst, Moses, Warhol, Herbert Hoover, Dorothy Day, Shelley – a short list of the roster of personalities jostling shoulders as they wander in and out of the virtual salon of Rodriguez’s mind, where San Francisco is “the mystical, witty, sourdough city,” Las Vegas is “disarmingly innocent,” and Jerusalem’s multiple archaeological layers are “vertiginously sunken – resentments and miracles parfaited.”

His writing is suffused with such little epiphanies, words and images springing to fresh life: His Mexican mother’s ojalá, “God willing,” as a Spanish borrowing from the Muslim inshallah; yellow tulips “closed and as thumpable as drumsticks” outside a Vegas hotel as a friend dies of AIDS in a nearby hospice; Picasso’s division of the female face “into competing arrondissements – one tearful, one tyrannical – like the faces of playing-card Queens.”

But at the heart of this book are women. Rodriguez – gay, Catholic Rodriguez – loves women. Not the way many men say they do, with a sexual twinkle in their eye, but deeply and gratefully. The stand-alone masterpiece of the title chapter starts with that “voluble endearment exchanged between lovers on stage and screen” (Noël Coward‘s “sequined grace notes flying up” like “starlings in a summer sky”), touches among other things on the use of habeebee among Arab men (“In a region of mind without coed irony, where women are draped like Ash Wednesday statues … men, among themselves, have achieved an elegant ease of confraternity and sentimentality”), and builds to the central take on how much the three “desert religions” need women to survive (“Somewhere in its canny old mind, the Church knows this. Every bishop has a mother.”).

Rodriguez depends on women “to protect the Church from its impulse to cleanse itself of me.” It was women who stood against the arid maleness he sensed as a child: “Outside the Rodriguez home, God made covenants with men. Covenants were cut out of the male organ. A miasma of psychological fear – fear of smite, fear of flinty tools, fear of lightning – crackled in God’s wake. Scripture began to smell of anger – a civet smell. Scripture began to smell of blood – of iron, of salt.”

He writes movingly of his schoolteachers, the Sisters of Mercy – movingly, yet with a wry, clear eye. A single sentence evokes a whole Irish immigrant world: “Most of the women who swelled the ranks of missionary orders had left peat-fumed, sour-stomached, skinny-cat childhoods behind.” That wry eye notes their “burqa-like habits” – perfect! – which “lent them protection in the roustabout world, also a bit of romance.” These women in teaching and hospital orders, he writes, were the forerunners of feminism, “the least sequestered women imaginable.”

The specific “darling” here is a newly divorced friend, and the whole chapter is in a way a conversation with her – an extended love letter, really – leading up to this stunning conclusion: “I cannot imagine my freedom as a homosexual man without women in veils. Women in red Chanel. Women in flannel nightgowns. Women in their mirrors. Women saying, Honey-bunny. Women saying, We’ll see. Women saying, If you lay one hand on that child, I swear to God I will kill you. Women in curlers. Women in high heels. Younger sisters, older sisters; women and girls. Without women. Without you.”

Even the most flinty-hearted reviewer could only melt at that.

As Nick Kristof put it, “Malala is defined not by what the Taliban did to her, but by the power of her response.”

This week, she left even Jon Stewart speechless:

These two portraits are of the same woman.  Her name was Helen Brooke Taussig, and she was a famed cardiologist who did ground-breaking work in pediatric cardiac surgery.  So which one do you think has never been shown in public?

The one of the left is of someone I’d like to meet.  It’s by Jamie Wyeth, and was commissioned by Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she was head of the children’s cardiology clinic, in 1963.  But it was never hung alongside all the portraits of male doctors on the hospital walls.  It was called “witchy.”  And “evil.”  Taussig was seen as “scowling.”  This was not how a doctor should be portrayed.  Especially not a female doctor.

Fast forward to 1975, when Johns Hopkins tried again, with the portrait on the right — someone I have no interest in meeting.  It’s an utterly standard institutional portrait, down to the single-strand pearl necklace, the tightly reassuring smile to go with the tightly curled hair, and of course the white coat.  This was apparently how a woman doctor “should” look.  Conventional, bland, and “reassuring.”  Taussig herself is absent, replaced by a totally uninteresting cipher.  Yet even this piece of artistic pap didn’t make it onto the Hopkins wall of fame.

It only took fifty years, but now the Wyeth portrait of her is finally to be publicly shown — not, to what should be its shame, at Johns Hopkins, but at a retrospective of Jamie Wyeth’s work next year at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

I’ve never been a particular fan of Wyeth’s, but this portrait is powerful.  It’s a portrayal of an intense, determined woman deeply committed to her work.  Slightly disheveled, because who has time for perfect grooming when there’s important work to be done?  Serious, because her work is serious.  And per the New York Times, “steely-eyed.”

But I don’t see steely eyes.  I see a directness, an openness that I admire.  I see a woman deeply committed to the seriousness of life.  I see someone unafraid to be her own intelligent, determined, vulnerable self.  And I appreciate both Wyeth’s effort to reach out and see Taussig on her own terms, and her allowing him to do that.  For both of them, that took courage — exactly the kind of courage that’s necessary to do ground-breaking work, in any field.

And so I think about how we portray women, still, today.  The constant “Smile!” demands of photographers — demands never made of men.  The emphasis on make-up and clothes.  The obsessive focus on how we “look” — not how we look at the camera or the painter, but on how we look to others, how we will be judged by the court of appearances and surfaces.  Do we look “attractive”?  Do we look “feminine”?  Do we look as we “should” look?

It’s our choice.  We can surrender to all these demands and end up as blandly uninteresting as the right-hand portrait of Dr Taussig.  Or, as she did with Wyeth, we can find the courage to be ourselves — to look into the eyes of others with integrity and self-respect and say, “This is me.  Here I am.”

I just came across these four short clips from an interview I gave a few months ago — so impromptu and off the cuff that I’d forgotten I did it. Tarzan and Jane come up in the first one, when I’m asked about interfaith gatherings, which I generally find kind of stilted. “We tend to get together as me-Tarzan-you-Jane-we-friends,” I said. “That is, me-Jew-you-Muslim-we-friends. We need to get beyond that. We need to see each other first as people…. talk about anything but religion… eat together, two or three or four at a time, over our own dining tables…”

On the other hand, swinging around on those vines could be fun.

It seems I also had a thing or two to say about responding to Islamophobia, and about women in Islam:

After a mind-numbing two and a half  hours of Zero Dark Thirty last night, I came away with a single piece of information:  Jessica Chastain has amazing hair.

That red mane stays toss-worthily silky even in the deserts of Afghanistan.  The dust clouds raised by helicopters landing right in front of her can’t dull her plastic glossiness.  Nor can the sight and sounds of torture alter the uncanny blandness of her expression.

The movie’s much-talked-about scenes of torture are peculiarly sanitized:  shown, but not shown.  There is no real sense of agony or degradation.  The chief torturer’s lines are a bunch of clichés straight out of the Hollywood B-movie playbook.  And the effect of torture on both victim and perpetrator?  So far as this movie is concerned, non-existent.

And this is what’s being touted as some kind of breakthrough for women?  It’s hardly news that there are women CIA analysts, or women movie directors.  And after seeing the infamous photos of Private Lynddie England at Abu Ghraib in 2004, do you really want to join the chorus of “Wow, look, a woman torturer!”

Zero Dark Thirty is a movie with zero point of view.  It has no engagement with any of the political and ethical issues it indicates but never explores.  Despite its subject matter, it is, in the end, a movie as bland as its star.  Its “reality-TV” lens on the slow accretion of intelligence work is merely confusing.  And I suspect director Kathryn Bigelow knew this, interspersing moments of ham-fisted emoting to keep her audience from nodding off.

All of which raises the question of why this movie was made at all.  A question whose answer apparently lies in the swell of orchestral music toward the end, signaling American triumphalism.

But my reaction was more of a shrug.

“We” killed bin-Laden, true.  And…?

First, ignore the cover, which makes it look as though Colm Tóibín’s new novel is the usual sentimental rehash of the familiar Virgin Mary story.  I have no idea how Scribner’s could have gone with this cover.  Or why Tóibín allowed them to do so.  Because The Testament of Mary is quite the opposite.  It’s bitter, it’s angry, and it’s profoundly moving.

What Tóibín has done is what I would have loved to be able to do in my book Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography.  In fact when I finished that book, I did play with the idea of writing a gospel of Mary.  I’m glad Tóibín’s done it instead.  Far better a writer than I, he has made her so achingly human that even as you read, mesmerized, his clear, cold-eyed prose makes you want to weep.  I have no idea how he does this, but I’m glad he does.

He writes in the voice of Mary as she looks back, her own death nearing. You could say it’s the voice of a disillusioned Mary, but this woman has never had any illusions. Instead, she’s transcendently clear-eyed.

Among many other things, this short, almost terrifyingly lucid novel is a brilliant commentary on how “history” is constructed.  Mary watches in dismay as the disciples set about creating their own version of her son’s life and death.  They “interview” her as a matter of obligation, but can’t hide their frustration when she refuses to endorse their manufactured memories.  She sees them as almost threatening presences, enforcers of their constructed view of things.  She feels “the enormity of their ambition and the innocence of their belief,” along with “their efforts to make simple sense of things that are not simple.”

But what carries this novel above all is the sheer beauty of the writing — the extraordinary voice, the lambent clarity of it.  You find that you want to read it as slowly as possible.  You start marking passage after passage.  Like this on the first page:

I cannot say more than I can say.  And I know how deeply this disturbs them and it would make me smile, this earnest need for foolish anecdotes or sharp, simple patterns in the story of what happened to us all, except that I have forgotten how to smile.  I have no further need of smiling.  Just as I had no further need for tears.

or this, which is kind of perfect for this time of year, at least in the northern hemisphere:

Now that the days are shorter and the nights are cold, when I look out of the windows I have begun to notice something that surprises me and holds me.  There is a richness in the light.  It is as if, in becoming scarce, in knowing that it has less time to spread its gold over where we are, it lets loose something more intense, something that is filled with a shivering clarity.  And then when it begins to fade, it seems to leave raked shadows on everything.  And during that hour, the hour of ambiguous light, I feel safe to slip out and breathe the dense air when the colors are fading and the sky seems to be pulling them in, calling them home, until gradually nothing stands out in the landscape.

Like that light, this novel is extraordinary.  It has a luminous quality that I can’t quite explain.  But if the sentimentalization of faith sometimes makes you ache for the disillusionment of atheism, read this book.

Compare these two news reports from October 26.  The first, from France:

The lower house of the French parliament voted on Friday to fully reimburse all abortions and to make contraception free for minors from the age of 15 to 18.  France’s national medical insurance pays for abortions for minors and the poor, while other women are reimbursed for up to 80 percent of the procedure’s cost…  Contraception is partly reimbursed.  The bill now goes to the Senate, where it is likely to pass. [AP]

A safe bet:  with free and easily available contraception, there’ll be far fewer abortions in France.  And with free and safe abortions, there’ll be far fewer unwanted children born into poverty and negligence.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the Republican party sees any form of national health insurance as some kind of dire Communist plot against America, and plans to scrap Medicare.  Its official platform calls for a ban on all abortion except in cases of incest and armed rape (and there are a ton of Republicans who want to ban it even then), and it is intent on shutting down the country’s largest provider of contraceptive advice and services:

Planned Parenthood filed a new lawsuit on Friday over a Texas rule that bars its clinics from a state health program for low-income women because the organization performs abortions…  In the past two years, conservative Republicans in more than a dozen states have taken steps to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood. [UPI]

What puzzles me about the French bill:  why it seems to exclude girls under the age of 15.

What puzzles me about the American elections:  how any self-respecting woman could even conceive of voting Republican.  Or any man with a conscience.