Lawrence de Bivort wrote: > > Thanks for the Lightfoot-Klein reference, Brad. Is this a book?
This is the classic text on Female Genital Mutilation. here's the Amazon.com link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/091839368X/qid=1029457388/sr=2-1/002-9093632-3231251 And, anent cultural "sensitivity", the book makes the point that parents do this to their children because they love their children and this is what they believe loving parenthood demands, *not* because they hate their children! And that is what I find most disturbing of all about ethnic semiotic formations: not how they would have us treat our enemies, but what they have us do to ourselves and our friends. Shifting to the psychological register, there are Alice Miller's books _The Drama of the Gifted Child_, _Thou Shalt Not Be Aware_, and _For Your Own Good_. If Miller is too "popular" for you, I can provide some more scholarly sources.... In the land of the blind the one eyed man is adjudged to have a physical defect, and his one eye is cut out so that he can live a fully human life. Eventually he forgets the pain of the surgery without anesthetic, and thanks his loving elders, one of whom he becomes and operates on the next generation for their own good. [snip] -- It's a warm muddy evening here, but I will go out and look up at the curdling moon. Even a moon that's the color of aged gouda is better than a fully Venusian "atmosphere", but I prefer when the medium does not taint the message. If it takes pollution for a fish to discover water, then let the fish remain oblivious of water in its delectation of good things in the water. [See Schubert's "Trout" song and piano sonata, e.g.]. A piscine Newton would probably come along eventually anyway to found the science of aquatic optics.... \brad mccormick
