Hi. I gave this to a friend of mine who liked it so much I decided to send it out. It's terribly literate (literally!), complex and as beautifuly written as its message. The 2nd article fits well the mailing and the month. Ed
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/03/opinion/03dowd.html The New York Times Frozen Mermaids, Scary Sirens By MAUREEN DOWD Published: March 3, 2005 Washington I went to see Al Pacino's "Merchant of Venice" movie the other day. It was funny to watch the climactic courtroom scene in which the cross-dressing Portia sets a dazzling legal trap for the cross Shylock. The vengeful loan shark can take his pound of flesh from Antonio, she tells him, but it has to be exactly a pound. And if Antonio bleeds, the laws of Venice dictate that all of Shylock's lands and goods will be confiscated. The 16th-century Shylock skulks off. A 21st-century Shylock would have had a solution: liposuction. Shylock could have extracted his precise pound of flesh, and the fashionably epicene Antonio could have come out of it looking even sleeker. Shakespeare wrote a lot about the power of beauty and the withering of beauty. As one pre-Botox sonnet went: "When forty winters shall besiege thy brow/And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,/Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,/Will be a tattered weed of small worth held." Shakespeare also wrote about narcissistic personalities and the treacheries of time. So I'm sure he would have been fascinated by the obsession of our modern culture with freezing the clock - and the face - with lifestyle drugs and medical treatments. Cosmetic enhancements have become so common that you can now get "frequent flier" cards for wrinkles - racking up rewards every time a dermatologist or a plastic surgeon sticks a needle in your face. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that, following up on Pfizer's success with Viagra "value cards," which offer repeat customers discounts, Medicis Pharmaceuticals, the maker of Restylane, an anti-wrinkle skin filler, is offering a rewards program "to encourage injections every six months by offering gifts that escalate in value with each subsequent appointment - adding up to $375 after the fourth follow-up visit." A Restylane treatment is about $500 to $750 and lasts about six months, according to the article. So Medicis says it aims to keep customers on track to maintain their "corrected look." You just get the Restylane syringe box top from your doctor and send it in, as you used to do with cereal boxes to get toys. And you can keep your "corrected look" going until you hit that "Alas, poor Yorick" phase. What Shakespeare could have done with this material. And wouldn't you love to hear the Bard on the Oscars? Others found the Oscars boring; I found the show slightly alarming. I used to worry that women were heading toward one face. Sometimes in affluent settings, like the Oscars or the shoe department at Bergdorf's, you see a bunch of eerily similar women with oddly off-track features - Botox-smoothed Formica foreheads, collagen-protruding lips, surgically narrowed noses, taut jaws - who look like sisters from another planet. It's like that futuristic Sylvester Stallone movie "Demolition Man," set in 2032, with Arnold Schwarzenegger as president and Taco Bell as the sole survivor of the Franchise Wars. In the future, there will be only one face. And if the Oscars are predictive, there will be only one body - big chest, skinny body - and one style. It was bizarre how actress after actress came out in the same mermaid silhouette: a strapless sheath with a trumpet-flared or ruffled skirt. Where are the good old wardrobe malfunctions of Cher and Barbra? In decades past, each top glamour girl aimed for a signature face and measurements, a trademark voice, a unique walk. You never saw Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner showing up in the same dress, or Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe looking like a pair of matching candles. In some wacky, self-defeating conspiracy, stylists have joined forces with surgeons to homogenize today's actresses so it's hard to tell one from another; the Oscars had a safe, boring, generic look. Top female stars who have had a lot of work done start looking like one another on magazine covers, and being confused for one another at publicity events. Chris Rock was right: star power is in short supply in a town where women would rather be conventional than individual. It's the same problem Hollywood has making movies: too much cloning, not enough originality. As Shakespeare wrote of the ultimate glamour girl, Cleopatra: "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety." Women have become so fixated on not withering, they've forgotten that there are infinite ways to be beautiful. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** Dr. Arnold's Diet Take a Steroid; Kick a Woman By ALEXANDER COCKBURN CounterPunch March 2, 2005 Back in the early 1990s, the right-wing taste of the year was Newt Gingrich. He led the Republican sweep into Congress in the 1994 mid-term elections. His "Contract With America" loomed in every headline. Liberals wailed that Gingrichism was invincible. The counterattack began right in Gingrich's front yard, in Georgia. The Atlanta Central Labor Council and Jobs with Justice staged a noisy sit-in in Gingrich's local Congressional office and seized the headlines with stinging descriptions of the Contract as a cruel assault on the poor and the working class. For months, groups of union workers dogged the Congressman at his every stop across the country. This noisy guerrilla warfare rallied the faint-hearted and threw Gingrich, then Speaker of the House, off balance. By 1995 a rattled Gingrich had lost his touch, faltering badly in the famous budget face-off with Clinton. In the 2000 Democratic primary campaign the AIDS coalition ACT UP (involved in the earlier Gingrich protests) adopted the same tactic against Al Gore, showing up wherever he made public appearances and shouting out protests at the rotten AIDS policies he'd signed on to. There weren't always many protesters, but they were always there, and they had an effect. Gore changed his line, and so did the Clinton Administration. Now it's Arnold Schwarzenegger's turn. California's nurses have got him rattled, and it's already costing him. A February 23 Field Poll showed his approval ratings declining ten points since last September, a significant drop. One might have thought that it's a no-brainer to realize that kicking Florence Nightingale's butt is not a sure-fire way to the public's heart. But the Governor is so used to browbeating the press that he thought he could do the same to the California Nurses' Association (CNA), one of the most militant unions in the country, with 60,000 members and representing registered nurses at 171 health facilities throughout the state. Schwarzenegger has been trying to roll back the union's gains on nurse/ patient ratios, safety standards and kindred issues. Schwarzenegger's version of Howard Dean's scream came in December in Long Beach. As the nurses barracked him during a speech, he denounced them as one of the "special interests" and said, "I'm always kicking their butt." This witty response from the breast-grabber got plenty of play, and did the nurses nothing but good. At a January Capitol protest in Sacramento the nurses carried coffins and had a New Orleans jazz group play a death march. During the Super Bowl they flew a small plane over the steroid-swollen Governor's party at his Santa Monica home. When he was in Washington they took out a full-page ad in Roll Call flaying his record. During a Schwarzenegger speech in a Sacramento hotel, nurses held up a banner saying RNs Say Stop the Power Grab. On February 15, when Schwarzenegger and his platoons of body guards and flunkies trooped into a screening of Be Cool, 300 nurses demonstrated. Kelly DiGiacomo, 46 years old and 5'2", a nurse at a Kaiser hospital near Sacramento, had a ticket. She ensconced herself in the fourth row, wearing her nurse's scrubs. A bodyguard rushed up, and under the pretext of a possible meeting with the governor, led her to a room with a California Highway Patrol cop at the door and began to grill DiGiacomo. A few days later a CHP investigator called. DiGiacomo asked why she should be considered a threat. The investigator replied, "Well, you were wearing a nurse's uniform." "Oh, sure, the international terrorist uniform," DiGiacomo scoffed. Californians scoffed with her when they saw the news stories. At least Bush and Cheney can claim they're being targeted by hairy men from the dark side of Mecca. Here's Arnold hiding behind his goons from the woman who cares for you when you're in the hospital. Schwarzenegger's strategy has been to project an image- calculatedly fascistic in style-of irresistible momentum, aiming to crush all opposition with threats to go directly to the people with rallies backed by the mountains of corporate cash he's been raising since he was elected. It's no idle threat. Schwarzenegger has a swollen war chest, albeit one that's also starting to get him bad press. One of the reasons Gray Davis, his predecessor in Sacramento, got recalled was his 24/7 addiction to fundraising. If anything, Schwarzenegger is even more relentless, with a corporate cash IV permanently stuck in his arm. Last year he raised $28.8 million, and this year he plans to raise at least another $50 million to promote his agenda. Schwarzenegger's agenda is crudely simple: Attack and if possible destroy social safety nets in health, pensions, insurance, workers' comp, job security, education, etc., with a green light for business to pillage, outsource jobs and not pay taxes. He's already tripped. Near the end of February Schwarzenegger was reportedly abandoning his proposal to abolish the independent Board of Registered Nursing, along with eighty-eight other regulatory and policy boards. But he's still planning to roll California into DeLay-style redestricting and to ramp up the use of "emergency" diktats to undercut democratic opposition from the legislature. One such example is in the area of healthcare: an emergency order by the Governor in November to roll back patient safety standards in California hospitals, reversing the intent of a 1999 law. A CNA lawsuit challenging that order will be heard in Sacramento Superior Court in early March. You might have thought Schwarzenegger would have some sympathy for nurses, who incur long-term back trauma from having to haul patients up in bed, a task equivalent, on average, to lifting about 1.8 tons a day. No. The Governor vetoed a bill requiring hospitals (heavy Schwarzenegger donors) to install safe-lift policies and equipment. And yes, he vetoed another bill to educate school coaches about the dangers of steroids and performance-enhancing diet supplements. As I said, political momentum is the key to Schwarzenegger's game. But what happens when you trip over a 5'2" woman in nurse's scrubs? You lose momentum. What happens when you start screaming abuse at nurses and teachers? What happens when you make working women your enemies? The humbled president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, might want to have a word with Governor Schwarzenegger on that one. http://www.counterpunch.org/nurses.html [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> DonorsChoose. A simple way to provide underprivileged children resources often lacking in public schools. 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