And Another Thing

Low-Income Students Need your Help! UPDATED

By Katha Pollitt

The school year is well underway, and most of you know how savage the budget cuts have been. Excellent teachers who care about their students –yes, they exist! --are struggling along without proper books, supplies, and equipment. Classroom libraries lack books, science labs lack materials, art programs lack the most basic supplies-- like paint!

In wealthy suburbs, affluent parents help fill the gap, but schools in low-income neighborhoods can't raise extra funds that way. Result: We expect students to achieve more than ever – and that's a good thing – but we don't provide the tools they need and too often can't afford to purchase for themselves: review texts for AP classes, graphic calculators, class sets of novels, even basic items like notebooks.

You can help! On my Giving Page at www.donorschoose.org you can chip in to help buy a cello for an elementary-school music class in Mississippi, a class set of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" for an AP English class in Washington DC, review books for an AP psychology class in New York City, art supplies for "at-risk" middle-schoolers in North Carolina --and much more.

We hear a lot about ineffective, ill-prepared teachers, but the ones who put themselves out on www.donorschoose.org are the ones who desperately want their students to succeed and who, through no fault of their own, need our help to get the tools to do their job.

Can you help? You can give any amount -- even $5! Small donations add up. No funds to spare right now? Send the link to your lucky friends, post it on your blog or Facebook page.

Every child should have an opportunity to play a musical instrument, read great books, take challenging courses, and learn in a safe, well-equipped classroom. You can help make it happen!

BONUS: send me your receipt for $50 or more for a project on my Giving Page and I will send you a signed copy of The Mind-Body Problem, my new book of poems.

UPDATE: Thank you, Kelli from Santa Clarita, who is helping to purchase copies of "Guns, Germs and Steel" for a Global History honors class in a NYC school where 90% of the students qualify for free lunch. And thank you, Laura from Ithaca, who donated to fund review texts for an AP calculus class in a NYC high-poverty school AND also to buy paint for an art class in a high-poverty North Carolina middle school that focuses on "at risk" kids.

Note to commenters: It's great that you know all about what's wrong with the public schools (sarcastic eye roll), including teachers' poor "preperation" (like in spelling?), but what about chipping in to help kids who are in school right now and who have no say in school budgets or education policy or the priorities of teachers' unions?

You can light a candle AND curse the darkness. How about it?

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October 21, 2009

Facebookers, Unite! Help MADRE Win the Causes Challenge

By Katha Pollitt

The Facebook Causes application is running a contest among its member do-good organizations. Every day, the group that has the most individual donors that day wins $1000; runner up gets $500. The grand winner – most individual donors by November 6 –wins, get this, $50,000! The runner-up gets $25,000 and the five next highest gets $10,000 each. Not too shabby!

Now here's the thing: MADRE, the women's rights organization, has joined the contest to raise funds for its work protecting women's rights workers in Afghanistan, where as I'm sure you know many have been threatened with death by the Taliban. MADRE needs your help to win one of these these generous prizes. Can you help? Yes, you can! The competition is for donors, not money totals, so all you need to do is go here and donate $10. In fact, you can donate $10 once a day every day from now till November 6th. If Madre wins even one day, it will get $1000, which is a significant amount. Today, October 15, by 3pm , would be a great time to donate, because with just a few more donors MADRE would beat an anti-choice group, Make Abortion UNTHINKABLE, for second place. That's $500 for women's rights, or $500 to take them away. Which should it be?

Please check this contest out, Facebookers, and be generous. Don't delay, because each day's mini-contest ends at 3 pm.

Read all about MADRE's work at www.madre.org.

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October 15, 2009

Berlin Postcard

By Katha Pollitt

Saturday, October 3, was Reunification Day, the anniversary of the formal reuniting of East and West Germany in l990. Here in Berlin the big event was a weekend-long outdoor spectacle involving Die Riesen, giant marionettes created by the French street theatre company Royale de Luxe. Some two million people turned out to watch a huge little-girl giant and an even more enormous grown-up-man giant dressed as a deep-sea diver wandering in search of each other in various neighborhoods. It was meant as a 'maerchen" or fairy-tale, although no one seemed to know the story of the little girl and the deep-sea diver. Something about separation and reunion, anyway. Since it was a beautiful warm blue-sky day (one of the few! it rains a lot here) my husband and I set out to find them. We walked and walked through the Tiergarten and stood in a huge crowd on Unter den Linden but the promised giants didn't appear and eventually we had to leave. (Two bits of local anthropology you'd never see in New York: at the street fair stretching along Unter den Linden you could buy many kinds of alcoholic beverages, including schnapps, and just stand about pleasantly drinking; the great lawn in the Tiergarten, along which the crowds walked, was littered with the bicycles people had used to get there. Unlocked bicycles.)

My German teacher, Ursula, whom we ran into later, said the problem was that the little girl giant was kaputt. Sehr traurig! But late that night we saw the two giants at the Brandenburg Gate, sleeping. The little girl giant was sleeping on the big man giant's lap. You could hear them breathing very quietly. It was strangely moving.

In other news, Garrison Keillor reads my poems much better than I do:

"What I Understood"

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October 10, 2009

Roman Polanski Has a Lot of Friends

By Katha Pollitt

If a rapist escapes justice for long enough, should the world hand him a get-out-of-jail-free card? If you're Roman Polanski, world-famous director, a lot of famous and gifted people think the answer is yes. Polanski, who drugged and anally raped a thirteen-year-old girl in 1977 in Los Angeles, pled guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sex with a minor and fled to Europe before sentencing. Now, 32 years later, he's been arrested in Switzerland on his way to the Zurich film Festival, prompting outrage from international culture stars: Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodavar, Woody Allen (insert your own joke here), Isabelle Huppert, Diane von Furstenberg and many, many more. Bernard-Henri Levy, who's taken a leading role in rounding up support, has said that Polanski "perhaps had committed a youthful error " (he was 43). Debra Winger, president of the Zurich Film Festival jury, wearing a red "Free Polanski" badge, called the Swiss authorities action "philistine collusion." Frederic Mitterand, the French cultural minister, said it showed "the scary side of America" and described Polanski as "thrown to the lions because of ancient history." French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Doctors Without Borders, called the whole thing "sinister."

Closer to home, Whoopi Goldberg explained on The View that his crime wasn't 'rape rape,' just, you know, rape. Oh, that! Conservative columnist Anne Applebaum minimized the crime in the Washington Post. First, she overlooks the true nature of the crime (drugs, forced anal sex, etc), and then claims "there is evidence Polanski did not know her real age." Talk about a desperate argument. Polanski, who went on to have an affair with 15-year old Nastassja Kinski, has spoken frankly of his taste for very young girls. (Nation editor-in-chief Katrina vanden Heuvel, who tweeted her surprise at finding herself on the same side as Applebaum, has had second thoughts: "I disavow my original tweet supporting Applebaum. I believe that Polanski should not receive special treatment. Question now is how best to ensure that justice is served. Should he return to serve time? Are there other ways of seeing that justice is served? At same time, I believe that prosecutorial misconduct in this case should be investigated.") On the New York Times op-ed page, schlock novelist Robert Harris celebrated his great friendship with Polanski, who has just finished filming one of Harris' books: "His past did not bother me." This tells us something about Harris' nonchalant view of sex crimes, but why is it an argument about what should happen in Polanski's legal case?

I just don't get this. I understand that Polanski has had numerous tragedies in his life, that he's made some terrific movies, that he's 76, that a 2008 documentary raised questions about the fairness of the judge (see Bill Wyman in Salon, though, for a persuasive dismantling of its case.). I also understand that his victim, now 44, says she has forgiven Polanski and wants the case to be dropped because every time it comes up she is dragged through the mud all over again. Certainly that is what is happening now. On the Huffington Post, Polanski fan Joan Z. Shore, who describes herself as co-founder of Women Overseas for Equality (Belgium), writes: " The 13-year-old model 'seduced' by Polanski had been thrust onto him by her mother, who wanted her in the movies. The girl was just a few weeks short of her 14th birthday, which was the age of consent in California. (It's probably 13 by now!)." Actually, in 1977 the age of consent in California was 16. Today it's 18, with exceptions for sex when one person is underage and the other is no more than three years older. Shore's view--that Polanski was the victim of a nymphet and her scheming mother--is all over the internet.

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October 1, 2009