a bird and a bottle

With all the recent bad news about abstinence only programs here in the U.S., one hopes that their popularity is on the decline. Sure, there are still plenty of communities in which v-cards and silver rings are the thing, but there’s at least hope, with so many states refusing abstinence only funding, that its influence will wane.

For those who still doubt the potentially disastrous effects of refusing to educate teenagers about contraception (not to mention preventing the transmission of STDs), we can direct their gaze to China’s big cities to see what one result of such a policy might be. As the NY Times reports today, abortion rates are on the rise in China’s urban centers. Why is this happening? It’s not married women trying to avoid fines for violating the country’s one child policy. It’s young urbane women who, though sexually active, have never been taught about contraception or even the basic mechanics of pregnancy.

Health experts say that many single women lack even a basic understanding about reproductive health and contraception. At the same time, premarital sex, once rare, is now considered common, particularly in urban areas. So as more single women are having sex, despite often knowing little about it, they also are having more abortions.

“There is a blind spot in sex education in China,” said Xu Jin, director of the [women's health] clinic, which is run by Marie Stopes International, a nonprofit group that provides sexual and reproductive information and services. “We are here to fill the hole in the system.”

Using abortion as a way to fill a knowledge hole is the worst nightmare of the wingnut antis. And I don’t think it’s necessarily the best approach either; better would be to educate women on how to prevent pregnancy if they do have sex. Instead, the U.S. - and it seems China, too - have decided to ignore that need and leave women to figure it out on their own. The result? Higher rates of unintended pregnancy and women who have no idea about how their own bodies work. Case in point:

One afternoon in mid-April, Dr. Deng was between appointments when a black telephone rang on her desk. It was a hotline for single women.

“You have a pregnancy problem?” Dr. Deng asked. “Where are you?”

“Gansu,” the caller answered, naming one of the poorest provinces in western China.

“How old are you?” Dr. Deng continued.

“22.”

The woman had had sex twice in early March and had taken a morning after pill. Her period had come on March 17. She had not had sex since then but it was late April and her period was late. She was worried. Dr. Deng offered reassurance: no sex, no pregnancy.

Oy. On the whole, knowledge is greater about sex and pregnancy here, even (i think) among communities where abstinence only is the norm because of the ubiquity of sex in pop culture. That said, is this really a level of knowledge and a way of dealing with reproductive health that we want to emulate?

Yeah, I don’t think so either.

(translation: (1) Bush, like the pope, is against abortion. (2) Yes, he prefers that they become adults and that they have the opportunity to die killing in Iraq).

Anyone in desperate need of some good news on the women’s health front? Yeah, me too.

Well, here it is: Mexico City today legalized abortion. And by a landslide — the vote in the city council was 49-16!

Here are the details, via the NY Times:

The new law will require city hospitals to provide the procedure in the first trimester and opens the way for private abortion clinics. Girls under 18 would have to get their parents’ consent.

The procedure will be almost free for poor or insured city residents, but is unlikely to attract patients from the United States, where later-term abortion is legal in many states. Under the Mexico City law, abortion after 12 weeks would be punished by three to six months in jail.

OK - so it’s not a perfect law (the parental consent provision is strict and 12 weeks is fairly early). But it’s pretty damn good, and the city should be commended not only for taking a stand in a country where abortion is generally proscribed, but also - and perhaps more importantly - making that stand more than symboling by requiring that the procedure be provided free to poor women. If the “pro-lifers” here were really concerned about life, and about respecting fetal life for that matter, they would take similar steps and push for both birth control and much greater access to abortion.

So, kudos to Mexico City. And thank you, Mexico City, for some badly needed good news.

It’s an old trope. In 1590’s Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe wrote of Helen of Troy, the woman over whom the Trojan Wars were fought:

Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

Ah yes, the trope of the beautiful woman who drives men to violence over her.

And it only took a day for it to reappear. Which it did with utter lack of taste in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph (an Australian paper).

The headline of the article reads: “Was Gunman Crazed over Emily?” And the lede, next to a big picture of a beautiful teenage girl:

THIS is the face of the girl who may have sparked the worst school shooting in US history.

The speculation, of course, is about whether the Virginia Tech shooter, who killed this young woman and the RA who tried to help her first, was set off on his violent rampage because of some unrequited love for her. If that’s true — and it seems from the news reports that the shooter did have a history of stalking — then it’s terrible. But it’s also not right or appropriate to say that she sparked the shooting. She was murdered. The blame for this atrocious act cannot be placed at her feet.

(via WIMN’s voices; also at LG&M)

Apparently, not only is our War on Drugs devastating poor neighborhoods in communities of color in the U.S., it’s also hurting the poor in South America.

According to Benjamin Dangl’s new book, excerpted on AlterNet, the War on Drugs is hitting coca farmers, who are legal and unionized in Bolivia, particularly hard.

Admittedly, I haven’t read the whole book yet, only this excerpt, but I have to say that the thesis that the drug war is having that impact surprises me. I would think that by driving up the price of cocaine in the U.S., the drug war would help those farming it in South America. But I suppose that’s naive — it’s probably putting more money in the pockets of the importers but helping keep the farmers powerless to lobby for better protection and pay.

It’s an interesting - and unexpected - effect of disastrous domestic policy, and it’s worth checking out.

Oh, and check out my most recent post at LG&M.

Via Ezra Klein - A new UN study out today shows that the gender wage gap is almost as big in the U.S. as it is in the developing world.

I haven’t yet read the full report (it’s 40 pages and exams are drawing near) but from what I can tell based on this chart alone, it seems like four countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa do the best in terms of pay parity — one cent better per dollar than the U.S.! How’s that for a rude awakening?! The place in the world that is probably most closely associated with gender inequality based on religion (Saudi Arabia, Israel, etc.) pays women better than we do in the U.S., in all our enlightened glory.

Am I reading this right? Can anyone (who has or has not read the fully study) challenge this assumption, or explain it? My curiosity is piqued.

In a column in a recent Orlando Sentinel, columnist Kathleen Parker lights into Salon and the NY Times for their recent articles about women in the military, sexual assault, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Why is she so mad at the NYT and Salon? Well, because she thinks that the sexual assaults experienced by numerous women soldiers is “not quite rape.” Huh? Here’s Parker in her own words:

Both stories, however, contain enough errors to raise questions about whether the rape-assault rate is as high as suggested. The Salon story reports, for example, that one woman was “coerced into sex” by a commanding officer, which the Salon writer asserts is “legally defined as rape by the military.”

This is simply not true. According to the Manual for Courts-Martial, rape is defined as “an act of sexual intercourse by force and without consent.” The same woman also was prominently featured in the Times story, where she said she was “manipulated into sex.”

Not quite rape, in other words.

It’s funny that she’s going after two articles for their supposed inaccuracies when, as Salon’s Broadsheet notes, her definition of rape is “not quite” right.

Parker is right — the manual does define rape in those terms. But, reading just a few lines down from the manual’s upfront definition of rape, you’ll find this: “Consent, however, may not be inferred if resistance would have been futile…” The soldier was “coerced” into sex; meaning forced to do something that she didn’t want to do; meaning “resistance would have been futile”; meaning she was raped.

Galling, huh? But it’s not even the worst part. Parker goes on to blame not the patriarchal and chauvinistic military structure for the rapes, but the women victims and their feminist predecessors. I’m not kidding:

Clearly, some of what is considered sexual harassment falls into the category of harmless sport — the usual towel-snapping that is, in fact, a way to neutralize sex.

But more overt sexual aggression may be the product of something few will acknowledge, at least on the record: resentment.

Off the record, in dozens of interviews over a period of years, male soldiers and officers have confided that many men resent women because they’ve been forced to pretend that women are equals, and men know they’re not.

The lie breeds contempt, which leads to a simmering rage that sometimes finds expression in aggression toward those deemed responsible.

Targeting women isn’t excusable, obviously. It’s also not the women’s fault that they’ve been put in this untenable situation — exposed both to combat and to the repressed fury of sexually charged young men.

The fault lies with the Pentagon and others who have capitulated to feminist pressures to insert women into combat. Although women are prohibited from direct ground combat and are assigned primarily to support roles, the lack of clear boundaries in Iraq has eliminated the distinction.

Right. So men are excused because their resentment of women usurping their time-honored role as soldiers justifies these rapes. Don’t blame the perpetrators or their commanders who sanctioned such behavior. Blame feminists who dared to claim that women might not actually be equal to men (gasp!). Blame “feminist pressures” for equality (god forbid!). Yes, the distinction between combat and support has been erased by the unrelenting violence in Iraq. But that’s more an indictment of the war than a reason to point fingers at the brave women who enlisted to fight in it.

But, see, to Parker, not only are feminists and women soldiers to blame for their rapes, they’re responsible for the fact that this war has been such an unmitigated disaster.

Finally, our commanders and fighting men could focus on the business of war rather than tending to gender skirmishes that distract commanders and steal time, resources and energy from the military’s purpose.

Right-o. Because if the men could just focus on fighting the war and not getting killed (rather than tending to silly concerns like equality and rape), the war wouldn’t be going so badly.

This is propaganda in its lowest form.

The Republican noise machine (Amanda’s great term) is in a tizzy about this photo of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is in Syria.

They’re calling her trip a publicity stunt and a bad idea, and criticizing the fact that Pelosi is in Syria — representing a bipartisan Congressional panel — to begin with. And there’s been a lot of talk about her decision to don the headscart to go into a mosque. Of course, as Amanda notes, the most vitriol has come from Althouse and Glenn Reynolds, who maintain that Pelosi cannot be a feminist and also wear a headscarf. That’s BS. Showing respect when entering a religious house of worship is totally different than endorsing that mandatory head covering.

Of course, as Media Matters points out, the criticism of Pelois’s tip in the first place is disingenuous. Plenty of Republicans have or are planning to travel to Syria to engage in peace talks. And being the hypocrites that they are, the talking heads have seized on the image of Pelosi in a headscarf because they think it will be divisive. Or make her look bad. Or something. It’s a lot of fuss over…nothing.

Especially when she donned it to enter a mosque, just as visitors to Italian churches must cover their shoulders and male visitors to synagogues often wear yarmulkes.

Oh yeah, and given, as Zuzu masterfully points out, that Laura Bush too has worn a headscarf when appropriate to show respect.

It’s a double hypocrisy whammy.

As Jill has written, the pro-life (anti-choice) agenda is only pro-life if it fits their politics. And if you’re not a woman who has sex.

You might think I’m crazy, but I don’t think that President Bush’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) is all that pro-life. Stay with me here. Yes, the program has done some great things thus far, but in its later stages is where the politics of “life” comes into play. And it’s not pretty.

The NY Times reports today in an Editorial that the program’s early stages, which have been focused on scaling up AIDS treatment, have been fairly successful. That’s certainly good news, particularly for the African countries that receive the bulk of PEPFAR’s funding and are bearing the brunt of the world’s AIDS epidemic.

But, as the Times points out, in the long term it’s AIDS prevention programs that are going to have the biggest and longest lasting impact. And that’s where the “pro-life” agenda comes in.

Programs to prevent the spread of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, are perhaps the most important tool in that long-term fight. Yet Congress specified that only 20 percent of the money could be spent on prevention, and one-third of that had to be used to promote abstinence until marriage. More money has been spent in that area than on other prevention activities, including distribution of condoms and blocking mother-to-child transmission.

What this means is that of all of the PEPFAR grants, a relatively small amount is going toward programs that prevent transmission of HIV through sexual activity. And of that small amount, much of it is going to support abstinence only programs.

PEPFAR’s website reports that the program has done a lot to prevent sexual transmission of HIV/AIDS:

Supported community outreach activities to nearly 61.5 million people to prevent sexual transmission.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? 61.5 million people have learned to prevent HIV transmission through sex. Only problem is, they haven’t really. All they’ve learned is that the American right believes that abstinence is the only way and to hell with all those others (the vast majority of people) who choose to have sex. But despite this message, people still have sex. They just haven’t been taught how to do it safely. As Advocates for Children reports, abstinence only programs have been unsuccessful in the U.S.:

Evaluation of these 11 programs [in the U.S.] showed few short-term benefits and no lasting, positive impact. A few programs showed mild success at improving attitudes and intentions to abstain. No program was able to demonstrate a positive impact on sexual behavior over time.

Abstinence only programs, the choice of the “pro-life” crew and, not surprisingly, Bush’s PEPFAR, just don’t work. Instead of taking a pragmatic approach, which would support abstinence but teach people how to prevent HIV when they do have sex should they choose to do so, PEPFAR says ‘don’t have sex. And if you do, it’s at your own risk.’

To teach this to teenagers in the U.S. is irresponsible. To use it is an HIV prevention tactic is unconscionable.

Yet it’s the favored approach of the “pro-lifers.” Go figure.

Besides Keroack’s resignation (hooray!), there was other good reproductive justice news yesterday.

Mexico City is set to pass a law that would substantially liberalize abortion laws there. The city council will vote on April 19 and the Mayor has pledged to sign it. The law would be a beg step for any country, and an especially notable one in Latin America, where three countries completely ban abortion in all cases. And get this: the proposed law is even more liberal than the U.S.’s, and in all the right ways. The NY Times has the full story:

Dominated by liberals, Mexico City’s legislature is expected to legalize abortion in a few weeks. The bill would make this city one of the largest entities in Latin America to break with a long tradition of women resorting to illegal clinics and midwives to end unwanted pregnancies.

[...]

The Mexico City bill would make it legal to have an abortion during the first trimester for any reason. The procedure would be free at city health facilities. Private hospitals would be required to provide an abortion to any woman who asks for one, though doctors with religious or ethical objections would not be required to perform abortions.

You see that? Abortion would be FREE at all city facilities and hospitals would be required to provide the service to any woman who asks. Sure, specific doctors with objections can refuse to perform, but someone at the hospital has to do it if a woman wants it. We can’t even get such assurances for birth control.

And there’s none of the infantilizing waiting periods, which assume that women have to be forced to think through this decision, which any woman knows is and just another way to throw an obstacle in the paths of women seeking abortions. There’s no Hyde Amendment-type caveat; in Mexico City, all women rich and poor will have equal and real access to abortion services. There’s no informed consent provision which in the U.S. requires doctors to read a script engineered to discourage women from following through with their abortions and which restricts the free speech rights of doctors and the privacy rights of their patients. In short, it’s a great law.

Of course, it’s passage will not be without opponents:

“Women are dying, above all poor women, because of unsafe abortions,” said María Consuelo Mejía, the director of Catholics for the Right to Decide. “What we would like is that these women never have to confront the necessity of an abortion, but in this society it’s impossible right now. There is no access to information, to contraceptives. Nor do most women have the power to negotiate the use of contraceptives with their partners.”

Conservatives respond that abortion is tantamount to murder. “This law is a law that will cost many lives,” said Jorge Serrano Limón, the head of Provida, an anti-abortion group. “If it is signed, it will spill a lot of blood, the blood of babies just conceived in the maternal womb.”

Same old rhetoric. One side focuses on women and their rights, the other pretends women don’t exist except for as walking wombs. But here’s my favorite quote from someone opposing the law:

Mr. Serrano Limón [the head of Provida] and other opponents also dispute that the law will end illegal abortions. The procedure carries such a stigma here, they say, that whether legal or not, many women will seek out underground clinics to keep their condition secret from their friends and families anyway.

So, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that perhaps the reason that abortion is so stigmatized in Mexican society is because the repressive and restrictive laws have made it that way. The Church’s rhetoric hasn’t helped either, of course. Legalizing abortion will help destigmatize it by allowing women to come out from the shadows and to stop seeking out those back alley abortionists. See, Mr. Serrano Limón? It’s a simple game of cause and effect.

Speaking of cause and effect, this law will have a huge impact on women’s health, and particularly on the lives of poor women.

Many women here are watching the political battle with a mix of trepidation and hope. Like many laws in Mexico, the abortion law is honored as much in its breach as its observance.

Government officials estimate at least 110,000 women a year seek illegal abortions in Mexico, and many abortion rights groups say the number is much higher. At least 88 women died in 2006 from botched abortions, the Health Ministry says, though it is far from clear that all cases were reported.

For the well off, it is common knowledge that certain gynecologists perform illegal abortions in private hospitals, disguising the procedure as something else on documents.

For the poor, unwanted pregnancies often mean finding a midwife or an underground clinic, abortion rights advocates say. Some young women also resort to huge doses of drugs for arthritis and gastritis, available over the counter, that can cause miscarriages. Others use teas made from traditional herbs to cause miscarriages. All of these methods carry dangers.

Having read Rickie Solinger’s Beggars and Choosers (which I heartily recommend, btw), I’m wary of heaping blame on midwives and others who perform often safe and effective abortion services when the procedure is illegal, because it again imagines the world of abortion rights as a bunch of forces acting on women rather than a combination of many factors.

That said, there are clear risks to underground abortions, most of them created not by the procedure itself but by its illegality — in those rare instances when there is a problem, women cannot seek medical attention for fear of prosecution. And the ramifications for their lives, health, and fertility are great.

The story of one woman, Dolores, who did not want her full name used, is typical. When she was 18, she became pregnant after her first sexual encounter with a boyfriend she barely knew, mostly because she knew nothing about contraception or even the basics of sexuality.

“I was alone and had no help,” she said in an interview. “In fact, I thought about it a lot before I made the decision, but in the end there was no other way. I wasn’t in the economic position to face the situation.”

Panicked, she visited a midwife, who inserted a flexible tube into the womb to let air in and provoke a miscarriage. Dolores was told to wait three days before removing the tube.

She started bleeding within 15 minutes of leaving the midwife’s house. The bleeding continued unabated for a month. At last, she fainted in front of her parents from a loss of blood and they took her to a hospital, where she recovered slowly after a week of treatment. “I almost died,” she said.

Now 41, she has never carried a baby to term. Two of her pregnancies ended in premature births, and both infants died.

Pro-life? With stories like this pro-life has to be pro-abortion rights.

I’ve got my fingers crossed for April 19 (ironic, the religious undertones of that gesture). I’ve got hope (though it’s slim) that Mexico City can be a leader for a new era of abortion rights in Latin America (and maybe beyond?).

At the Vienna Convention in 1961, the participants declared that women’s rights are human rights.

But it was only yesterday that Amnesty International UK, the British affiliate of one of the leading human rights organizations in the world, announced that it had decided to support abortion rights. Human rights advocacy groups have long stayed away from abortion (and remained neutral officially) because of the political nature of the debate around abortion and because of how explosive those conversations have been. Yesterday’s announcement is not representative of Amnesty International globally, but it may indicate that a change will come when the organization’s full Council votes on it this summer.

Salon’s broadsheet has the background:

But the vote, which came in response to a rising number of repressive anti-abortion laws, is being used to test the waters about changing Amnesty’s global position. The change would allow substantial legal influence to work on behalf of women who are being prosecuted or persecuted for having abortions.

I say: if we’re serious that women’s rights are human rights, this step is long overdue. Catholics for a Free Choice (an American organization) agrees:

Catholics for a Free Choice President Jon O’Brien supports AIUK’s decision, saying, “Increasingly, human rights advocacy groups the world over are realizing that a woman’s freedom is intimately tied to her ability to control her reproductive health. Be it the UK, Ireland or Mexico, all women deserve access to safe, legal abortion. Amnesty International UK has a great opportunity to affirm that reproductive rights, including the right to end a pregnancy through abortion, are a vital part of the human rights canon.”

Of course, anti-choice organizations are already coming out against this step. You can voice your support for international recognition of abortion as a human right by contacting Amnesty here.

I’ve been avoiding writing about Guantanamo.

I’m not sure exactly why, but I think it has something to do with the size of the can of worms I’d be opening.

Am opening.

There’s been a lot of fanfare over the last few days about the resolution of two cases at Guantanamo: David Hicks’s guilty plea and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confessions. Many people see it as a step toward resolution — toward the end of the indefinite detentions at Guantanamo.

Today, Adam Liptak, writing in the NY Times, puts the Hicks plea and the Mohammed confession in perspective. These resolutions, he writes, do not say much about the efficacy or fairness of the system that the Bush Administration has established for adjudicating cases at Guantanamo. In fact, says Liptak, in a regular criminal justice system, these processes would be aberrant. Critics of the Bush Administration policy (and I) agree:

To hear critics of the administration describe them, the conclusions of the two proceedings were tainted by past abuse and a justice system not worthy of the name.

“The proceedings themselves just demonstrate the absence of fixed rules,” said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law who represents other prisoners at Guantánamo. “This is justice on the fly.”

Of course, the administration’s defenders stand up for the procedures that are being implemented. But I’m left with the nagging feeling that no resolution that comes out of detention at Guantanamo can ever be considers just. I’m particularly concerned about the incentive system that detention at Guantanamo and labeling as an enemy combatant constructs. So is Liptak.

Guilty pleas are common in ordinary criminal cases, too, of course. But in a garden-variety criminal prosecution, the parties bargain, in the famous phrase, in the shadow of the law.

In the usual case, defendants make a rational calculation based on the strength of the evidence against them, the state of the law and, most important, outcomes in earlier cases. If defendants think a plea will result in a shorter sentence than the likely one at trial, discounted by the possibility of acquittal, they plead guilty.

None of that holds at Guantánamo. The incentives and calculations are quite different there.

Mr. Hicks, for instance, was bargaining in the shadow of many things — the conditions at the base, international diplomacy, homesickness and the possibility of indefinite detention without charge. But he was not, for the most part, bargaining in the shadow of the law.

The statute under which he was to be tried was brand new and untested. The relevant regulations are as yet largely unwritten. There is no body of similar trials to set the parameters for settlement discussions.

If the President (et al) want these “trials” and “pleas” to be taken seriously, they need to provide the same protections to alleged enemy combatants as are provided to American defendants; due process has got to mean something, and people need to be entitled to counsel from the beginning of the process. Currently, detainees are not entitled to an attorney for the hearings at which they are designated “enemy combatant.” I’m guessing that once that label is attached to a person, it tends to stick. The presumption of innocence vanishes. The trial, if there is to be one, becomes a farce. And a guilty plea becomes the only way out and is inherently coerced.

I, among many, believe Guantanamo should be closed, and was saddened but not surprised by Bush’s statement last week that the prison will remain open at least until the end of his tenure. But given that it’s sticking around, the administration has got to stop pretending that what’s going on there is acceptable and that Hicks and Mohammed are examples of how and why.

There’s an uproar in the U.K. these days over a new policy in place in several prisons there: giving incarcerated men and women the keys to their cells.

Rubbing your eyes? You read it right.

It has become widespread practice in British prisons to give the incarcerees keys to safety locks on their cells. Focused on those men and women who are nearing release, the policy is meant to help inculcate responsibility for one’s own belongings and respect for others.

British right wingers, of course, are in a frenzy:

Shipley Tory MP Philip Davies accused the Government of “turning prisons into hotels”.

He said: “People will be horrified to know so many prisons give inmates their own keys. It will reinforce their views that the regime is far too lax and cushy.

“These people are banged up for a reason. But the Government seems more concerned about the human rights of criminals than those of their victims, who are footing the bill to keep them in increasingly pleasant surroundings.”

(don’t you just love how the Daily Mail puts “human rights” in scare quotes like that (not in the quoted portion)? As if it’s not a real concept.)

Anyway, of course this policy doesn’t mean that incarcerated men and women actually roam free. They are in prison, after all. There’s the whole trouble of armed guards and barbed wire fencing. It’s not as if keeping someone locked in a 8×10 cell is requisite to incarceration. The British Home Office agrees.

Home Office Minister Gerry Sutcliffe said: “It’s mainly used for people who are soon going to be released or in open prisons.

“It’s all part of providing incentives to encourage them to take more responsibility for themselves, to give them a little bit more respect and decency.”

He stressed that the prisoners’ locks could be over-ridden by staff keys and insisted: “There are no security issues about this. The keys are for their own cells and nowhere else.”

Could this work in the U.S.? Is it a good enough policy that we should care? Is this even a place where prisoner’s rights activists should be expending their energy?

The World’s Only Municipal Haunted House. That’s what G — SF’s friend with whom we stayed in Moscow — called Lenin’s tomb, the huge black granite monument to the early Communist leader. Apparently, Lenin was virtually mummified despite his wishes, and became what one website calls “Russia’s Statue of Liberty.” Right. Anyway, Lenin wanted to be buried in a much more discreetly:

When Lenin died of a stroke and heart attack on Jan. 21, 1924, his widow said he’d wished to be buried next to his mother in a simple cemetery plot. But the communist elite had other ideas.

They originally planned to freeze their beloved leader, but his body began to deteriorate badly as a super-freezer was being built. Instead, using an untested chemical process, Lenin was embalmed and his skin carefully treated to preserve a lifelike appearance.

The giant sarcophagus sits on side of Red Square, in front of the Kremlin’s outer wall.

Behind the tomb, past Russian leaders, including Stalin, are buried and have statues in their honor. Year round, huge wreaths of flowers ring Stalin’s grave (this goes back to the common Russian sentiment I mentioned in an earlier post — he didn’t really kill all those people, or if he did, it was for the good of the country).

Inside, it is all black granite and few lights, Soldiers every 10 feet or so keep you moving (no stopping, no photos). Lenin lies there in a black suit, one fist clenched in Communist salute.

The photo doesn’t quite do it justice, but it’s the best one available, and after two metal detectors and 2 pat-downs, I definitely couldn’t take any of my own. When we were there, it was much darker — so much so that I didn’t know there were red lightning bolts around the walls — and the looming guards only heightened the haunted house feel.

Here’s a close-up of the man himself:

Understand now why it’s creepy?

Earlier this week, I promised a review of Berlin’s Weinerei, the establishment where you get a several course meal and all the wine you can drink, then pay what you want at the end of the meal.

The wine was plentiful (Italian Prosecco, German and French Riesling, Spanish red), and the food was delicious. I had a salad with mixed wild greens, seeds, fresh pear, and a French blue (bleu) cheese and a vinaigrette. The image color is a little off — dark restaurant.

I moved on to a risotto with fresh peas, feta, and pecorino (pictured). SF had fish — also delicious and beautifully presented.

After a satisfying meal served by friendly if not super attentive waiters, we dropped our Euros in the door and headed home, enjoying this little taste of bohemia. Pun intended.

—

Food in Russia, on the other hand, requires that you don’t pay what you want. You pay what they want. Which is usually more than you’d think. One of the most surprising things about Moscow and St. Petersburg these last few days has been how expensive it is to live at all well. In Berlin, you can dine out, with wine, for 15 Euros easy. We’ve found that the only thing you can get in Moscow for 15 euros is a bliny (a crepe-like pancake) with some mushrooms inside. Tasty, but not luxurious.

I’ve also been surprised — and intrigued by — how widespread the corruption is here. In Russia, money has become king. Communism really is dead. In its place, there are billionaires running the country. Sounds familiar, huh? Only in Russia, they take it further. Every cabinet post is held by a head of a national, monopolistic corporation (gas companies, oil companies) who are each billionaires and who each have a very obvious — and unavoidable — stake in the country’s policies. The police are bought and sold by the bribes they seek openly every day. The government still wants to know where people are all of the time — hence the registration requirements I mentioned earlier. And journalists keep turning up dead.

Russia also still seems like a Third World country in many ways. You can’t drink the water because of lead from the pipes and Giardia from the local rivers. Instead of taking expensive and regulated taxis, most people just step into the street and raise their arm, hitching a ride with the first car that stops for some agreed-upon price. The majority of people make salaries in the range of $400/month (while the oligarchs continue to become billionaires). The rich-poor divide is astonishingly vast. The government denies that HIV is a problem and continues to label the deaths of incarcerated men from antibiotic-resistant TB as HIV even when evidence points to the contrary. Racism is rampant, and is particularly brutal against people from the Caucasus region, who are different in appearance from those who consider themselves “Russian” (which made me wonder why in the U.S. we use the term Caucasian as a PC term for “white”).

Despite all this, president Vladimir Putin has an 80% approval rating and will anoint a successor (who will easily win the election) before his term expires in 2008. Many people still talk nostalgically about Stalin and Lenin, and justify the 20 million lives lost under those dictators as necessary for the advancement of the country. And I thought the U.S. was bad….

Sorry for falling off the face of the earth everyone. The internet hasn’t been working in our hotel. In the whole hotel. Which I booked specifically because it had internet access in the rooms.

Anyway, we’ve been in Russia for about 2.5 days now, and let me tell you, it is a strange strange place.

More to come in a longer post this evening (right now we are off to the Hermitage), but first, a story: our first night here, we went out to dinner with SF’s friends with whom we were staying in Moscow (we are now in St. Petersburg). After dinner, we went to Red Square, which is incredible at night (photos to come too). As we approached the Square, one friend, G, handed all of his money but a couple of small bills to his girlfriend, K. In Moscow, everyone who is not a native Moscovite is required to register with the city within 48 hours of arriving. His registration had gotten mucked up because of changes to the registration system. He was worried that the police would stop him and request a bribe since he didn’t have his registration card with him. So he gave her all of his money just in case.

Sure enough, as we approached the gate into Red Square, two policemen approached us and asked (in Russian, which G, an American journalist, speaks) for our identification and registration status. We dutily handed over our passports, which showed that we had arrived only that morning. K handed over her registration card and passport. G was out of luck. The police talked to him for several minutes, grilling him about why he did not have his passport or registration. He pulled out his wallet and showed how empty it was. They shook hands and off we went.

That’s just a taste. This is one crazy place. More details later, after a day of art.