Comments Elsewhere

Well, it sounds like there was a lot interesting and worthy of attention in Shiva’s talk. But I’m getting a bit hung up on this:

“There are 25 different written languages in India. Each region has its own newspaper. Thus Indian citizens aren’t subjected to media saturation of constructed political issues. Dr. Shiva notes how, according to the U.S. media, abortion and gay marriage are more important than the war and the economy. Television serves as a tool of distraction from the concerns of our real lives.”

I mean, since when is abortion (for example) not a concern of our real lives? Real women need abortions every day and legislators who push an anti-choice agenda want to point real guns at them if they try to get one. It’s no less a matter of life and death than the war, and certainly more of one than, say, “the economy” — a nebulous statistical construct that clusters together some issues of immediate, pressing significance to our everyday lives (the kind of jobs that are or aren’t available in your or my hometown) and a lot that are just as remote as, well, the price of tea in China. I know that a lot of people on the Left are leaning these days towards thinking that if they could just try to play up class and downplay “cultural issues” then they could bring in white men who might otherwise drift toward the pseudo-populist hard Right, but it seems like every time this strategy gets spelled out it seems like something that ought to make feminists (for example) feel really queasy.