Honor?

I gotta be honest—there are some concepts I just don’t get.

Take my first three years at Wal-Mart, for example. My supervisor changed jobs in my first week of work. Then the director of the department quit. It was all a muddle, and they left me blissfully alone, never bothering to “evaluate” me.

Well, that was perfectly fine. My old boss, Ofelia, had never really evaluated me. Or rather, she was always evaluating me.

“How are you liking your classes,” she’d say in low tones and with a you-can-tell-me-anything look.

“Wonderful,” the student would whisper.

“Ofelia, you pumping the students again!?” I’d boom….

So I was nicely under the radar—the best place to be in corporate America. Had I stayed there, I might still be there….

“That’s a lack of respect,” cried one of the students. “You have to demand an evaluation!”

Why? Would it help me? Did my boss know anything about what I was doing? (Answer—no, which she cheerfully admitted. So she did what Ofelia did, and figured all was well….) They gave me a raise every year, evaluated or not, so there was no financial motive.

But respect is a big thing down here—and the phrase una falta de respeto signals serious annoyance and hurt. And I am as deaf to it as Beethoven was to his last symphony.

In the first place, if I perceive that someone has dissed (seriously expected that to get red-squiggled, but no, it passes!) me, is it true? A boss irritably asks for a report that is overdue, the student comes in the very highest dudgeon to class and reports this assault on her dignity. Time for an open-door! (Read, jump one level over the supervisor and complain….)

I would be delicate. Wasn’t the report overdue?

Right—so maybe the supervisor was having a bad day and his supervisor was riding him for the report—or the information in it—and yes, he should have been nice. Maybe.

Or maybe not?

The second problem I have with all this respect stuff is that I can’t figure out how someone’s bad behavior to me diminishes me. My boss at Wal-Mart told me the shocking story of a boss at another renowned company—3M. She had submitted a report. And he threw it on the floor, denouncing her and it.

In a staff meeting.

Not the classic example of Minnesota nice.

Right—that truly is an assault. But did anyone in the room think that the report was bad? Did anyone think that the boss was anything but a pathetically weak, rude and petty tyrant? His behavior diminished him, not my boss.

OK—now we come to honor. Susan, in perceptive comments, rightly points out that “honor killings” predate religions, and are not endorsed in the Qur’an. In fact, just the opposite.

And she sent me to an interesting—however chilling—Wikipedia article on the subject.

Well, well—the old problem sticks its head up again. Because whatever the Qur’an says or doesn’t say on the matter, twenty percent of Jordanians—in one survey—think it does.

And it may be that I am just as ill-informed as those twenty percent. I didn’t know, for example, that there are a dozen or so honor killings in Great Britain, every year. I vaguely knew that there are honor killings of guys engaging in homosexual acts. Nor did I know that honor killings in the United States both exist and are probably under-reported, since people want to be politically correct and respect “cultural differences.”

Did your blood pressure just rise?

Should have. But apparently some people value correct over life. Here’s one citation from the Wikipedia article:

Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, an anthropology professor at Rhode Island College, explains how honor killings can be viewed in cultural relativist terms. She writes that the act, or even alleged act, of any female sexual misconduct, upsets moral order for the culture of interest and bloodshed is the only way to remove any shame brought about by the actions and restore social equilibrium.[9]

Yeah? You know, I’m not sure if this “explanation” has crossed the line and joined into “justification.” I also don’t see that we get much from this point of view.

The real truth—in my view—comes from another writer, also a woman. Try this out….

As noted by Christian Arab writer, Norma Khouri, honor killings originate from the belief that a woman’s chastity is the property of her families, a cultural norm that comes "from our ancient tribal days, from the Hammurabi and Assyrian tribes of 1200 B.C."[31]

More like it, hunh? And could we add that 3212 or more years have passed, and men are still valuing women only for their ability to make more men? Or more chattel that might later produce more men?

There’s cold reasoning and hot reasoning, the social psychologists say. Cold reasoning is what you imagine you’d do in a given situation. Hot reasoning is what you think and do in the situation itself. In other words, it’s easy to look on in indignation at the American soldiers torturing guys in the prison in Iraq. You’d never do that!

But you weren’t there. You didn’t see the mine blow up, the body parts of your best buddy fly past you, feel your bowels turn to water as you shit on yourself. You don’t know terror.

And it may be that it’s easy to think about cultures relatively in Rhode Island. So maybe Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban should watch the clip below.

Two Muslims (Part Two)

Readers may remember my rant against a “religious” Muslim, who in the name of Islam was going to kill his 15-year old daughter for the sin of writing a boy’s name in her notebook.

Three hours after writing the post we’re in a cab, John and Jeanne and I. The driver is clearly an Arab, and—let’s assume—Muslim.

The first thing he says?

“Wow, Ma’am, that’s a wonderful button you’re wearing! I love it!”

“Oh, you mean the one of Big Bird?” asks Jeanne.

“Yeah, it popped right out at me—even before I stopped! Love it—it’s terrific!”

And so we meet our second Muslim.

Who doesn’t lack for words, nor opinions. In fact, he’s on a par with Puerto Rican volubility—and that’s high in the nineties on the standard scale.

“My daughter just loves Obama—she calls him ‘Barrack.’ And the other day, she told me, ‘Daddy, why does your belly stick out and Barrack’s doesn’t? You’re never gonna get to be president with your belly sticking out!’”

Jeanne inquires—how many kids does he have?

Two girls—12 and 5.

And he wants to know—where can he get that Big Bird pin?

The pin is round, has Big Bird smack in the middle. Above—“Save Big Bird.” Below—“Vote Obama!”

“I was almost going to give him mine,” says Jeanne later, “but I have a collection of pins going back decades, and this one is special.”

That’s when she remembers—the Obama campaign committee is striking camp at Broadway and 93d. So she proposes that he stop, she’ll get out, grab one, and we can be on our way.

“God bless you, Ma’am!”

So we do, picking up one for me as well.

Well, the cabbie is ecstatic with the gift; he can barely wait to get home and give it to his daughter.

We go on to talk politics.

“You know, it’s incredible to me that the first thing the Republicans are saying is that they’ll do everything possible to prevent Obama from doing ANYTHING! I mean, aren’t they elected to lead, to make compromises, to make the country a better place? Isn’t that what we pay them for?”

A cab? Nah—we’re in the Democratic National Convention, with the cabbie the keynote speaker!

“And you know, what I like about Obama is that he’s all about the next generation, about improving the schools, about making a world that’s better for all, about seeing your kids go places that you couldn’t get to!”

Balloons are dropping!

“People come into my cab who are Republican, I tell them ‘hey, that’s OK! We’re all American, we’re all working for the same goal, and even though we may disagree, that’s great! That’s what makes us strong! That’s what unites us, our ability to listen, criticize, compromise, and respect each other! That’s the American way!’”

Confetti!

“I see my kids learning things I never knew and I know that their world is going to better than mine!”

And the spotlights pan the backseat!

Fearing that at any moment the Stars and Stripes Forever would fill the taxi, I asked about the gasoline situation. The governor has imposed rationing, and so you can only get gas every other day, depending on the last number of your license plate.

And yeah—that applies to cab drivers, as well.

‘What,’ I think, ‘that’s completely outrageous! Gas is the lifeblood of this guy’s business!”

The guy responds—he was in a line from 7 to 11PM to get a tank of gas.

Right—but what about tomorrow? Will a tank of gas last him?

“It’s a hard life,” remarks Jeanne. “Most cabbies gotta make 200 bucks a day, just to pay rent, expenses, gas….  So a lot of them have partners, who can work the extra shift.”

I’m thinking something different. I’m thinking of two parents, two fathers. And three girls. One father is somewhere in Pakistan, planning—perhaps—a ritual killing of his daughter in America.

The other father is on the streets of Manhattan, driving for hours on end, thrilled that a stranger—now a friend!—would stop and buy him a campaign button.

Two fathers, both Muslim.

One has gone forward—physically, to another country; spiritually, to another reality.

The other is locked into his past.

We should have a word, I think.

“Two fathers, both Muslim,” I wrote four paragraphs up.

A word for a father who is, and who is not.

Two Muslims (Part One)

Well, New York continues to surprise.

Or maybe not. Coming to the city as a new (or perhaps altered) person, I’m not sure what was here before that I couldn’t see, versus what was never here at all.

“She’s a pretty amazing person,” said Jeanne about her colleague, who conducts evaluations for people requesting asylum in the US.

Then she told me the story of a fifteen-year old girl from—where? Let’s call it Pakistan, though it could be any one of countries where fundamentalist Islam is raging.

The girl wrote the name of a schoolmate in her notebook. The family discovered it.

So?

The schoolmate was a boy.

Well, you and I would probably say “so,” and maybe even wonder whether the family had any business looking inside the girl’s notebook. Not being a parent, I don’t know if that’s standard operating procedure….

You can probably guess.

Family wasn’t pleased. So they gave the girl two options:

1.     marry a fifty-some guy whom the family would chose

2.     ritual killing by a family member

The girl chose:

       3.   get the hell outta town

Well, she did. Don’t know the story of how, but she landed in the United States. And is now in hiding because she fears her family may be sending / arranging a hit man to kill her.

That’s where Jeanne’s colleague comes in. Working for a group called Physicians for Human Rights, she does evaluations for people seeking asylum in the United States.

Which has, by the way, the largest number of petitioners for asylum of any industrialized country. About 40,000 people, if yesterday’s-read-today’s-not-findable number is correct in my memory.

And she trains young physicians and med students to do the evaluations as well.

The evaluations themselves are interesting. They’re not supposed to be therapeutic—though paradoxically, they can be. Instead, they’re meant to make the person requesting asylum relive and retell the worst of the (usually) torture that they have endured—to do it fast and dirty, as it were.

Why?

Because the person requesting asylum is gonna face a judge who is going to rule on the question—has this person truly suffered persecution or terror? Is he or she in danger, should the US deport? How convincing is the evidence? Yes, you call appeal the decision. Better, though, if you don’t have to.

The person doing the evaluation, then, becomes a psychic surgeon—applying the saws and drills to the mind and memory, extracting the most painful abuse and torture to display to the judge.

Curiously, some people find the process helpful.

Right, so Jeanne’s colleague had a problem. A fifteen-year old in hiding somewhere, without cash or food or clothes. And Super Storm Sandy bearing into the city. What to do?

Rent a car and deliver the goods, make sure the kid was safe.

Well, I did my share of snorting and some of Franny’s share as well. It seemed to call for it. Look, I don’t give a shit about culture and respecting religions and pluralism and anything else. This family? Rather, these guys—since they have completely subjugated the women?

They’re unspeakable. “Heinous,” perhaps, is the adjective that springs to mind. “Abominable,” certainly, is another alternative.

I can make a case—sort of—for why Islam developed the rules and traditions it did when it was a desert religion. A religion formed where water was precious, hospitality was a necessity not a nicety, when a harsh environment forged a harsh societal code.

Right, but now?

I’d say something that I think any woman would say. There is nothing more important than the family—the husband she has loved, the children she has born and has raised. And for a guy who is willing to kill his daughter for the “crime” of writing a boy’s name in a notebook? A guy who has sent her fleeing in terror halfway around the world, and who is hiding who-knows-where as a massive hurricane / Nor’easter / snowstorm bears down on the region? A guy who does that for his family’s “honor?”

Off with his balls!

(Stay tuned for part 2.)