Barbara's Blog

Gap Kids: New Frontiers in Child Abuse

It was enough to make you vomit all over your new denim jacket. The Gap has been caught using child labor in an Indian sweatshop, and not just child labor--child slaves. As extensively reported on the news, the children, some as young as ten, were worked 16 hour days, fed bowls of mosquito-covered rice, and forced to sleep on a roof and use over-flowing latrines. Those who slowed down were beaten with rubber pipes and the ones who cried had oily cloths stuffed in their mouths.

But let’s try to look at this dispassionately – not as a human rights issue but as a PR disaster, ranking right up there with the 1982 discovery of cyanide in Tylenol capsules. Think of this as a case study in a corporate Crisis Communication course: How is The Gap handling the problem, and could it do better?

This is not the first time The Gap has been caught using child labor, but CEO Martha Hansen went on the air to state that the situation was “completely unacceptable” and that the company would “act swiftly.” Two problems here: One, she failed to detail the actions. It would have been nice, for example, if she had announced that some of the top-producing child slaves would be reassigned to manage Gap outlets in American malls, and that the under-performers would be adopted by Angelina Jolie.

The other, more serious, problem is that she got defensive about child labor. This is the mistake Kathie Lee Gifford made in 1996. When accused of using child labor in Honduras to manufacture her Kathie Lee line of clothing, Gifford broke into tears on TV. Maybe Hansen meant to cover herself by saying that The Gap would not “ever, ever condone any child laborer making our garments” rather than saying the company does not condone child labor itself. We already knew, from the rubber pipes and oily cloths, that The Gap does not condone much from its child laborers.

Hansen underestimated the potential support for a full-throated defense of child labor. More and more American children are tried and punished as adults today. And the ubiquitous conservative pundit William Kristol will surely be enthusiastic, considering his recent – though possibly facetious-- statement that “whenever I hear anything described as a heartless assault on our children, I tend to think it's a good idea.”

The core of the argument, though, is that anyone who opposes child labor has not witnessed its opposite, which is child unemployment and idleness.

Hansen claims to be a mother herself, but I wonder how often she has returned home from a hard day in the C-suites to find her unemployed offspring Magic Marker-ing the walls and crushing the Froot Loops into the carpet. This is what jobless children do: They rub Crazy Glue into their siblings’ hair; they spill apple juice onto your keyboard. Believe me, I see this kind of wantonly destructive behavior every day. Vandalism is a way of life for unemployed children, and they do not know the meaning of remorse.

In fact, corporate America should go further and make a strong statement against the sickening culture of dependency that has grown up around childhood. Why are jobless children so criminally inclined? Because they know that whatever damage they inflict, the Froot Loops will just keep coming. The Gap should portray its child-staffed factories as part of a far-seeing welfare-to-work program, which will eventually be extended to American children as well.

To appeal to American parents, our own child factories should be run more like Montessori schools, where the children are already encouraged to regard every one of their demented activities as “work.” If they’re going to pile up blocks and knock them down all day, then why not sew on buttons and bring home a little cash? But even American families will have to brace themselves for the inevitable cost cutting measures. First the cookies and milk may have to go, then, as in India, the toilets and beds. Wal-Mart has already pioneered the price-cutting defense of human rights abuses, and The Gap should follow suit.

The company can of course expect some lingering opposition. Just as there are vegetarians and pacifists, there will always be some men, for example, who would rather wear skirts than blue jeans impregnated with the excrement and tears of ten-year-olds. Well, let them shop at American Apparel or some other “sweat-free” vendor, and if they can’t find anything there, let them wear dhotis. In a nation that cannot bring itself to extend child health insurance (SCHIP) to all children in need, child-made clothes make a fine fashion statement. And why not accessorize your denim jacket with a scarf derived from one of those oily cloths stuffed in weeping workers’ mouths?

Happy Fascism Awareness Week!

I’ve never been able to explain Halloween to the kids, with its odd thematic confluence of pumpkins, candy, and death. But Halloween is a piece of pumpkin cake compared to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which commences today. In this special week, organized by conservative pundit David Horowitz, we have a veritable witches’ brew of Cheney-style anti-jihadism mixed in with old-fashioned rightwing anti-feminism and a sour dash of anti-Semitism.

A major purpose of this week is to wake up academic women to the threat posed by militant jihadism. According to the Week’s website, feminists, and particularly the women’s studies professors among them, have developed a masochistic fondness for Islamic fundamentalist. Hence, as anti-Islamo-Fascist speakers fan out to the nation’s campuses this week, students are urged to stage “sit-ins in Women’s Studies Departments and campus Women’s Centers to protest their silence about the oppression of women in Islam.”

Leaving aside the obvious quibbles about feminist pro-jihadism and the term “Islamo-Fascism,” which seems largely designed to give jihadism a nice familiar World War II ring, the klaxons didn’t go off for me until I skimmed down the list of Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week speakers and found, incredibly enough, Ann Coulter, whom I last caught on TV pining for the repeal of women’s suffrage. "If we took away women's right to vote,” she said wistfully, “We’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It's kind of a pipe dream; it's a personal fantasy of mine."

Coulter is not the only speaker on the list who may have a credibility problem when it comes to opposing oppression of women in Islam or anywhere else. Another participant in the week’s events is former senator Rick Santorum, whose book It Takes a Family blamed “radical feminism” for pushing women into the workforce and thus destroying the American family. A 2005 column on that book in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, began with: “Women of America, I hope you look good in a burqa. If Senator Rick Santorum,R-PA, has his way, we will all be wearing the burqas discarded by our recently liberated sisters in Afghanistan…” (This was the before the Taliban re-emerged.)

Not quite in the burqa-promoting league, but close, is another official speaker for the week, Christina Hoff Sommers, who has made her name attacking feminism for exaggerating the problem of domestic violence and eliminating opportunities for boys. These are the people who are going to save us from purdah?

Another disagreeable feature of jihadism – anti-Semitism – is also represented on the list of speakers for Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week, again by the multi-faceted Coulter. Just last week on CNBC, she referred to America as a “Christian nation.” Asked where this left the Jews (not to mention the Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans and atheists), she said they could be “perfected” by converting to Christianity.

You might imagine that this view of Jews as “imperfect” would bother  Horowitz, who is famously alert to any hint of anti-Semitism on the left. But no, he defends Coulter, writing that "If you don't accompany this belief by burning Jews who refuse to become perfected at the stake why would any Jew have a problem?" Sure, David, and if that’s the threshold for intolerance, Osama bin Laden could probably win an award for humanitarianism.

Maybe none of this should be surprising. When Mel Gibson, who is not known to be a member of the Hollywood left, unleashed a drunken anti-Semitic tirade on his arresting officers, Horowitz also rose to his defense, arguing that ensuing outrage reflected a “hatred” – not of anti-Semites -- but of Christians.

As for the anti-feminism of Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week: This fits in neatly with the thesis of Susan Faludi’s brilliant new book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. She shows that, in the wake of an attack by the ultra-misogynist Al Qaeda, Americans perversely engaged in an anti-feminist campaign of their own, calling for an immediate restoration of traditional gender roles. Coulter was part of that backlash, opining in 2002 that “feminists hate guns because guns remind them of men.”

Before you put on your costumes to celebrate Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week, let me set the record straight. American feminists do not condone, defend, or ignore jihadist misogyny. In fact, we were warning about it well before Washington turned against the Taliban and have been consistently appalled by the gender dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and Iran.

But if the facts don’t fit in with Islamo-Fascist Awareness, they have to go. For example, in a May ‘07 column in The Weekly Standard Christina Hoff Sommers  listed me as one of the “feckless” feminists who refuse “to pass judgment on non-Western cultures.” What? If Sommers had even done ten minutes of research she would have noticed, among other things, a column I wrote in the New York Times in ’04 stating that Islamic fundamentalism aims to push one-half of the Muslim world—the female half-- “down to a status only slightly above that of domestic animals.”

Yes, feminists tend to hate war and sometimes even guns, and this may be why Horowitz and company hate us. They should know, though, that we especially hate a war that seems calculated to inflame Islamic fundamentalism world wide. If many Muslim women around the world willingly don head scarves today, it’s in part because our war in Iraq has, tragically, pushed them to value religious solidarity above their feminist instincts.

Or maybe I’m missing the point of Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week. Maybe it’s really an effort to show that our own American anti-feminists (and anti-Semites) are just as nasty as the ones on the other side. If so, good job, guys! No need to continue with the trick-or-treating, you’ve already made your point.

The Right's Academic Universe

What is the purpose of the universe, anyway? I hadn't started reading the Sunday papers with this question in mind, but after slogging through mass rapes in Congo, bombings in Baghdad, and K-Fed'€™s worthiness as a father, I could no longer dodge it. Then, in the middle of the New York Times Week in Review section -€“ some of the priciest real estate in the print industry -€“ I came across a two full-page ad under the headline "Does the Universe Have a Purpose?"€

The text of the ad was the responses of 12 scientist and philosopher-types, ranging from the purposeless (biochemist Christian de Duve), to the purpose-driven (Jane Goodall) and the just plain whiney, as in astronomer Owen Gingerich'€™s "œFrankly, I am psychologically incapable of believing that the universe is meaningless." (Suck it up, Owen, it's the only universe you've got.) I was miffed that I had not been asked to contribute my theory that this is a trial universe which has turned to be defective. But I was even more distracted by the sponsor of the ad - the John Templeton Foundation.

Just a couple of weeks ago the Templeton Foundation had showed up in the news in a somewhat less exalted context. John M. Templeton Jr., the president of the foundation, turns out to be one of the funders of Freedom's Watch, the new rightwing group which has been running pro-war commercials conflating Al Qaeda with whomever it is we're fighting in Iraq. You may have seen the one in which a veteran complains that stopping the war now would render the loss of his legs meaningless, much like the universe itself.

This is not John Templeton Jr.'€™s first or only venture into rightwing politics. In 2004, he started the group Let Freedom Ring, aimed getting out the evangelical Christian vote for George Bush. He recently joined the Romney campaign'€™s National Faith and Values Steering Committee, a group which includes an anti-abortion activist and a fellow from the Heritage Foundation.

So the real question may be, "What is the purpose of the Templeton Foundation?"€ Founded by John Templeton Jr.'s father, Sir John Templeton, the investor, the foundation set out to bridge science and spirituality while -€“ on a not obviously related track -€“ promoting free enterprise. In just the last ten years, it has become a serious force in the academic world, generally funding anything too soft and fuzzy for the governmental grant-makers -€“ studies, for example, on optimism, happiness, character, forgiveness and faith. This year, its $1.5 million annual Templeton prize went to Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who states, on the foundation's website, that "We urgently need new insight into the human propensity for violence."

Maybe he should have started by querying John Templeton Jr. on that one. Or maybe there was a mistake, and the foundation had intended the award, not for the Canadian philosopher, but for the Liberian warlord Charles Taylor.

And what are we to make of Templeton's stickiest project of all - an $8 million grant to create the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, that last being defined by Templeton Sr. as "total constant love for every person with no exception"? Are there some major oedipal issues between the Templetons Jr. and Sr., or is the universe just a little too tricky for me?

But the Templeton's most famous baby is the young field of Positive Psychology, launched by University of Pennsylvania's Martin Seligman after his five-year-old daughter accused him of being a "grouch" and he resolved improve his outlook. Pos Psych carves out everything ordinary Psych, with its bent toward pathology, ignores, which is in itself an admirable ambition. In practice though, it tilts dangerously, for something that considers itself a science, toward the prescriptive. If you'€™re not happy -€“ or optimistic or upbeat - you better get to work on that now, and we have the "coaches" to help you.

Put all this happiness and optimism together with John Templeton Jr.'€™s political agenda and you could come up with some pretty paranoid scenarios: For example, that the Templeton Foundation is a plot to numb Americans into smiley-faced acquiescence to the status quo. And could it be a coincidence that Templeton helped finance the re-election of the most optimistic president we've had since Ronald Reagan?

So I attended the 6th Annual International Positive Psychology Summit conference in Washington DC last week to see what was up, and am happy - make that also optimistic, hopeful and almost positive - to report that this Templeton-spawned group could probably not plot its way out of a paper bag. The presentations I sampled occupied the full range from mediocrity to silliness. At the mediocre, or sub-mediocre, level was a paper on the effects of a Christian summer camp on teenagers, suggesting that it enhanced such virtues as self-control and patience. For silliness, you couldn't beat a couple of sessions featuring "€œcoaches" and management consultants using their power points to illustrate how to make corporations more "positive" and "€œstrength-based."

Strangest of all, Pos Psych'€™s founder Martin Seligman appeared, to the dismay of many in the audience, to renounce the whole enterprise, stating from the podium that "I'€™ve decided my theory of positive psychology is completely wrong, so I've put forth a different notion." All I can report is that the new notion expands Pos Psych's jurisdiction to include anthropology, political science and economics, and seems to be based empirically on Seligman's love of bridge - the card game, that is, not the link between the spiritual and the scientific. Beyond that, my lengthy and detailed notes offer no enlightenment.

When that session came to an end, I cornered the young psychologist who had been appointed by the Templeton Foundation to give out this year's Martin E.P. Seligman Award for Outstanding Dissertation Research in Positive Psychology. "What about John Templeton’s funding of pro-war commercials?" I asked him. "No comment," he responded at great length, mentioning along the way that he'€™s been asked that question before.

And well he might be. The Templeton Foundation's academic beneficiaries include not only opportunists and self-help gurus, but some serious scientists, and they need to dissociate themselves from the reckless belligerence of John M. Templeton Jr. I'm not saying they should return their grants, just chip in a little of that Templeton largesse for a full-page ad in the New York Times with an intriguing headline like "What Is the Purpose of Science? Clue: It'€™s Not War." Charles Taylor, with his $1.5 million award, should organize the effort.

The Clinton Campaign: Running on Ambien

Just a year ago the hot question was: Is America ready for a black or female president? As the campaigns wear on, the question has shifted to: Can America survive the tedium of its black and female candidates?

Obama, for example, hasn’t turned out to be any more challenging to white America than re-runs of the Cosby show. He was slow to pick up on the Jena 6 case and never showed up at the rally – although, to be fair, neither did Clinton or Edwards. Like the others, he has refrained from noting that Giuliani, in addition to being a cell phone exhibitionist and a 9/11-abuser, presided over a New York City police department famed for its torture and killing of young black males.

But it’s Hillary who’s causing the citzenry’s heads to pitch forward and collapse on their chests. Every time she opens her mouth, her flat, monotonic voice lays out yards of opaque white gauze, muffling any possibility of “discourse.” Where does she stand? Over here, and a little to the side, and maybe a few steps to the right. Hers is known as the “flawless” campaign, but no one in it seems to be able to turn off the endlessly triangulating tape in her head.

Lately she’s taken to emitting to sudden, inexplicable, bursts of deep laughter – known in the media as “the cackle.” Whether this is a deliberate “humanizing” touch or a glitch in the computer program no one knows. According to the New York Times, the “weirdest moment” came in response to a question from Bob Schieffer about Republican charges that her health plan would lead to “socialized medicine.” As the Times reports, “She giggled, giggled some more, could not seem to stop giggling –‘Sorry, Bob,’ she said – and finally unleashed the full Cackle.”

Maybe she has a better sense of humor than I’d imagined, because the thought that her plan to turn health care over to the private insurance companies might be “socialist” has me rolling on the floor too.

I just wish I could work up the same degree of enthusiasm for Hillary as my friend Katha Pollitt, who recently told the Times: “If people don't stop saying incredibly sexist things about Hillary Clinton, I may just have to vote for her.” But what are these incredibly sexist things? True, there was the whole faux “cleavage” issue, and the occasional whack-job who writes to enlighten me about Clinton’s bisexuality or Chelsea’s true daddy.

Then, in of all places – feminist Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday – I found a genuinely sexist comment about Hillary. Dowd apparently approvingly quotes Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, saying that Clinton is “like some hellish housewife who has seen something that she really, really wants and won’t stop nagging you until finally you say, fine, take it, be the damn president, just leave me alone.”

Now I’m all for having literary editors, poetry editors, and the like commenting on our political process, but the “nagging housewife” image is not only a sexist stereotype – it’s about 50 years out of date, stemming from an era when most married women were financially dependent on their mates. Besides, male politicians are never likened to stereotypical husbands, even though some of them can be equally hard to dislodge from the recliner in front of the TV or, as the case may be, the Oval Office.

But the “hellish housewife” comment does not make Hillary a feminist martyr, nor does it make me any more willing to listen to her, either now or for the next five years. Trying to say nothing to offend, she ends up saying nothing to inspire or even inform, and Obama, though still far more engaged and human-like, risks ending up with another Ambien candidacy.

Part of the problem is structural. We make our presidential candidates campaign for at least a year at a stretch. Take a normal person and subject him or her to month after month of trail mix and chicken Caesars, sleep deprivation, and the need to be “on,” smiling and handshaking, 16 hours a day. No solitary moments of reflection, no walks in the park, no escape into thrillers. What do you get after a few months of this? A golem, the artificial, man-like creature of Kabalistic lore, a personoid incapable of normal responses.

So yes, America is ready for a black or a female president. Just be sure to wake us up when it happens.