Silflay Hraka

Ngnat got a special Sleeping Beauty napkin with her dinner tonight, a leftover from the early birthday party we held for her on Saturday. It went well with the leftover hotdog. She got upset when the Sainted wife handed me a plain napkin, though.

S.W. explained to her that these were special napkins, for a special girl, and that’s why daddy didn’t get one.

Ngnat was having none of it. “Daddy’s special too!” she said, and burst into tears.*

So I too had a leftover Sleeping Beauty napkin with my leftover hotdog, and all was well with Ngnat, if not with me. I hate Sleeping Beauty.

Hate her, despise her, pull for the witch to cast her and all her tribe into a pit of molten lava for eternity her. It’s a horrible annoying video, worse than Barney at his smarmiest, or Barbie at her boobiest. The heroine is Walt Disney’s blandest of all time, not to mention the crappiest female role model for little girls since Marie Antoinette. She makes Snow White look like a paragon of forcefulness.

For all of the claims that Barbie is bad, she has a career, at least, and lives on her own. Briar Rose, the supposed center of Sleeping Beauty, has no will of her own, is totally acted upon throughout the entire movie, and doesn’t even speak for the last third of the film. Or the first third, for that matter. Out of the entire movie, she has 31 lines of dialogue, almost all of which are either about meeting a handsome prince or her flirting with a handsome prince. She’s an absolute milquetoast, especially when compared to Disney heroines like Ariel or Belle.

Every ostensibly good female character in the movie is either incompetent, or powerless. The only female character with any power, Maleficent, is of course evil, not to mention jealous, and is dressed like a lesbian Viking with a Goth fetish to boot. Everything about her suggests frustrated male, from her cuckold’s horns to her weirdly obvious name. She’s not so much female as she is an Eisenhower era vision of a drag queen, the whole of that period’s view of homosexuality wrapped up in one tight package.

Her enemies, the good fairies, are only remotely competent when in the presence of a man, and then only as supporters of his actions. They bless the sword the Prince uses to pierce the Dragon lady, who then dies, slain by a gleaming white phallic symbol. By themselves they do horribly stupid things like practice magic for the first time in sixteen years, on the very last day that the Sleeping Beauty curse can be invoked, conveniently drawing the notice of Maleficent’s familiar just in time for her to bedazzle the all too easily ensorceled girl. And why pray tell, was magic so sorely needed? Because they were arguing over the color of a dress. Women, just too flighty for words, don’t you know?

The virginal heroine, protected from the outside world for 16 years, falls into a deathlike trance after encountering her first prick** and is only saved by a prince, coincidentally the possessor of the second and presumably last prick she’ll ever encounter. Yep, unless those pricks are part and parcel of the embodiment of true love, they’ll ruin you. To rescue her, the prince not only has to kill the evil drag queen, but must first hack his way through a forest of thorns, which resemble nothing so much as the most threatening, coarsest and blackest patch of pubic hair ever animated. Pubic hair with thorns, yes, but her name is Briar Rose. Where do you think she got it from?

Someone should remake this movie with a man as the sleeper, and a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed Briar Rose as the rescuer. Have her invade the witch’s castle amid a torrent of gunfire and acres of blood, execute Maleficent with a graphic shot to the back of her head, light a cigarette and leave the prince to his slumber.

At the very least, she’d be a better role model for my daughter the Disney’s limp blonde noodle is.

It’s hard to decide which is worse in the movie, the off hand yet absolute depiction of women as powerless objects, or the horribly twisted sexual subtext of the whole thing. As Song of The South is to African Americans, so Sleeping Beauty is to women. It may be worse. You don’t have to be a feminist*** to see the stuff I noted above; it’s two-by-four to the side of the head obvious, so there’s probably a lot that I overlooked. I’ll get more chances to review it, that’s for certain. Ngnat shows no signs of realizing how bad it is, no matter how many times I explain it to her.

*In case you were wondering, she does say nice things to her mother, as well. Tonight for instance, just before bed, she said “Mommy, you’re my best friend.” But since Mommy doesn’t have her own blog, and indeed looks askance at the whole practice, her interactions with Ngnat are much less recorded.

**this is a pun. What she actually encounters is technology with a phallic symbol attached, and we all know how women are with technology, right? She touches the phallic symbol, which makes her bleed, quelle surprise, then falls down in a faint. La petite mort, indeed.

**and god knows I’m not, though I did once write an end of term Women’s Studies paper for a girlfriend, who had freaked out and was screaming “This is all such bullshit!” at her textbook the night before it was due.

It got an A.

Count Zero Interrrupted

William Gibson is giving up blogging.

Zod: Must.Resist.Smell.Of.Stale.Fad.

Substantial Penalties Apply To Early Withdrawal

Well, this is unexpected.

Most former exiles wanted a lesser U.S. role, arguing that only Iraqis should rule the country, while those who had not left Iraq said they wanted more U.S. supervision because they did not trust those who returned after Saddam Hussein’s fall.

Given the prior news coverage of protests in Iraq, one would think the Iraqi positions would be reversed, with the exiles supporting a broad U.S. role instead of opposing it. In fact, they probably do, but can’t afford to say so without casting themselves in the role of Washington’s hand puppets. The newly freed Iraqis, with the exception of the Iranian-backed Shiite clerics, want the U.S. involved over the intermediate to long term. Were coalition forces to leave in the near term, their perception is that the the next rulers in Iraq would be those same Iranian-backed Shiites.

I commented on someone’s blog a while back that it would be nice to hear someone in the administration state that the U.S. would not allow the establishment of sharia law in Iraq, no matter what. I figured actually saying so was impolitic and therefore unlikely, which of course meant that soon afterwards Donald Rumsfeld said something along those exact lines.

As the Iraqi Shiite are riven with factionalism, odds are that the adherents of an Iranian style theocracy do not even form a majority within the Shi’ite population, but the United States would likely do nothing further to discourage their intentions in any case.

One, because they really are a minority of the overall Iraqi population, albeit a vocal one. Politically, they are likely to have as much influence on the final shape of the Iraqi government as the American anti-war protestors did on George Bush’s foreign policy.

Two, even if the Shiite clerics hold a wider sway over the Shiite population, their power flows from the mullahs in Iran, and the position of the Iranian ayatollahs is a precarious one. The Bush administration is betting that it can outlast them, that the Iranian street will overthrow them long before the Iraqi Shiites can shift us out of Baghdad. The longer the process of building an Iraqi government takes, the better our position. We are running the building of Iraqi democracy as a marathon, a race which the Iranian backed clerics know they cannot win, so they’re using what influence they have to turn it into a sprint. A power comes back online, and food and water become more available, the more their influence will dwindle. The only hope of the mullahs is to get the U.S. out now, or to provoke our troops into committing an Amritsar-like massacre.

Three, fundamentalist Iraqi Shiites make excellent bogeymen. The wilder eyed they are, the more bellicose their pronouncements, the more they scare moderate Shiites, Kurds, Iraqi Sunni Muslims and what remains of the Iraqi intelligentsia and middle class. None of those groups want ayatollahs ruling in Iraq, anymore than they want Saddam back. This applies to the Arab governments outside Iraq as well. As long as the fundamentalist Shiites appear to be a viable threat, U.S. forces in the region are the lesser of two evils.

Paradoxical as it may seem, radical Shi’ia fundamentalism will a positive factor in the growth of an Iraqi democracy, as long as the United States stays the course in Iraq. Their actions will serve to spook the other disparate groups in the area, forcing them towards a more common ground in a defensive reaction. We should probably thank Iran (and Turkey for that matter) for its ham-handed attempts at influence. Had the fundamentalist Shiites not presented themselves as the repressive alternative to U.S. rule, it probably would have proved necessary to invent them.

Hijo De Am?rica

Who’s a better father for an American boy? His gay American foster parent, or the deported Honduran criminal who is his natural father?

I realize there’s more than a couple of different issues here, but my gut reaction is that there’s no reason to deport an American citizen, no matter how young, to a third-world country, no matter how pleasant the city, to be raised by a felon. It’s not like he won’t be coming back in 11 years anyway.

Hijo De Am?rica

Who’s a better father for an American boy? His gay American foster parent, or the deported Honduran criminal who is his natural father?

I realize there’s more than a couple of different issues here, but my gut reaction is that there’s no reason to deport an American citizen, no matter how young, to a third-world country, no matter how pleasant the city, to be raised by a felon. It’s not like he won’t be coming back in 11 years anyway.

Hijo De Am?rica

Who’s a better father for an American boy? His gay American foster parent, or the deported Honduran criminal who is his natural father?

I realize there’s more than a couple of different issues here, but my gut reaction is that there’s no reason to deport an American citizen, no matter how young, to a third-world country, no matter how pleasant the city, to be raised by a felon. It’s not like he won’t be coming back in 11 years anyway.

Hijo De Am?rica

Who’s a better father for an American boy? His gay American foster parent, or the deported Honduran criminal who is his natural father?

I realize there’s more than a couple of different issues here, but my gut reaction is that there’s no reason to deport an American citizen, no matter how young, to a third-world country, no matter how pleasant the city, to be raised by a felon. It’s not like he won’t be coming back in 11 years anyway.

Tilting At Ospreys

After 20 years of development and testing, and 12 years after it was originally supposed to be deployed, The V-22 Osprey is still not ready for deployment.

Internal program documents obtained by The News & Observer show that the groundbreaking tilt-rotor aircraft — 20 years and $14.7 billion in the making — is failing two critical tests it was supposed to have passed several years ago:

* carrying a 5-ton cannon, an essential part of its mission; and
* keeping its balance with the maximum load of fuel necessary for making 2,100-mile trips across the Atlantic.

It’s two-for-one deal. A money pit;

A joint program of Bell Helicopter and Boeing, the Osprey program has steadily increased in price; it is now estimated to cost $48.3 billion if all the planned planes are built. Each aircraft will now cost more than $105 million.

and a death trap.

The Osprey can roll over and lose control when descending too rapidly at low forward speeds. Unlike helicopters, it cannot autorotate, or land safely if it loses power. And problems continue to plague the hydraulic system, computers and firefighting system.

The worst thing about the Osprey is that tilt-rotor technology is relatively old, and thus relatively familiar. The first tilt-rotor flew in 1955, yet a program to develop a 1980′s era tilt-rotor aircraft for the military is still going on, suggesting that the problem lies not in the tilt rotors themselves, but in the design of the aircraft itself.

After 20 years, whether or not the program can be successful if enough money is thrown at it shouldn’t be the question anymore. Every year the program was funded after 1991 was a year in which the manufacturers of the Osprey, had their incompetence rewarded with millions of dollars. Funding that incompetence meant there was never any pressure on Bell Helicopter and Boeing to produce an aircraft that worked.

Bell, Boeing, and all the other defense contractors are capitalist firms, and as such should theoretically respond to market pressures, something that should be incorporated into the defense appropriations procedure. Every contract should have a series of benchmark tests that a company should pass, with a proviso that if a company fails to meet the timetable for a certain test, then bidding for that contract will be re-opened. Such a policy wouldn’t need to be enforced many times before defense contractors would stop promising the stars and start delivering on time.

We may see something like this anyway, if Donald Rumsfeld decides to deal with the Osprey in the same manner he dealt with the Crusader.

Blogging Origins

I also can wordify anything.

No, Blogging Isn’t Affecting my Family Life. Why Do You Ask?

The Sainted Wife: I dreamed we met Instapundit last night.

What did he look like?

Kind of a blond construction worker redneck type.

Well, he doesn’t look like that. What did we do then?

I don’t remember anything else.

Why are you smiling?

Cause I like Spongebob.

Uh-huh.