Posted on by rjonakait

Iran and Oppressed Women

The news last week reported that Country Joe McDonald died. He, along with his group the Fish, sang a song of my youth. The refrain from the Fixin’ to Die Rag:

And it’s 1, 2, 3,
What are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it’s 5, 6, 7
Open up the pearly gates
Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee!
We’re all going to die.

Antiwar anthems recede. However, America’s hunger for conflict only temporarily diminishes, for we are country almost constantly at war. We can ask, as Country Joe might, “What are we fighting for this time?”

We have been given many answers. We need to stop Iran from having nuclear weapons, even though they have none, and even if they want them, they would not have them anytime soon.

We need to stop them from having ballistic missiles that could be fired to our homeland, even though they have no such missiles, and even if they want them, they would not have them anytime soon.

Perhaps we are in this war simply because Israel wants us to, although that has been denied, as could be expected, by our version of a supreme leader. He is, he maintains, no lapdog of Bibi.

Or maybe we are in this war because Trump was in a bad mood because his MacDonald potatoes were not fried in RFK-approved beef tallow.

Perhaps we are in this war because Trump wants attention diverted from Jeffrey Epstein.

Or perhaps it was because Hegseth needed a testosterone boost after he had completed his sets of pushups for the day.

And there were some brief comments, which have receded, that we were at war to increase the freedom of Iranians.

Some have bought into that last rationale. Women in particular are so poorly treated in Iran that it is appropriate, nay, downright noble, to bomb the country and then bomb it some more, people say.

Women, and others, have faced oppressive Iranian conditions. Made in 2007, Marjane Satrapi’s marvelous film of her graphic novel of the same title, Persepolis, takes on a new life. It illustrates how devastating it can be to live in a theocracy.

Nevertheless, Iran is not the only country that mistreats women. Should we bomb all of them? This got me poking around, and I quickly found that there are lists of which countries are the best and worst for women. A couple of these rankings are highly regarded. One of them is produced by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (https://giwps.georgetown.edu/the-index/). It ranks 178 countries. On their world map, you can easily see that many of the low-ranked countries are clustered in the Mideast and Africa.

 According to the list, Denmark is the best place for women followed by other Northern European nations. Afghanistan is the worst. A few other rankings caught my eye. Iran is 128th. In other words, there are many countries worse than Iran, according to this Institute. The United States is #31. Israel, our ally in this latest war, is ranked #84, worse than Saudi Arabia that comes in at #63. India is #131. Iraq is #158.

As I indicated, this list, while respected, is not the only one. This may come as a shock, but women are mistreated in many ways. Analysts do not always agree on how to rank different kinds of mistreatment, so there is a subjective component to each list. How should educational opportunities for girls be weighed against trafficking of girls; equality of women’s salaries against rates of intimate partner violence; clothing restrictions against genital mutilations; and so on. The various rankings have similarities but are not precisely the same.

There is another list of interest that ranks the ten worst counties (10 of the worst countries for women’s rights | Concern Worldwide). In honor of March 17, it comes from Concern Worldwide, the largest Irish humanitarian group. It bears striking similarities to other listings: Afghanistan is in the bottom ten, as is Iraq. This is noteworthy. They are both countries that the United States has bombed…the technical term… the bejesus out of. That ordinance has not produced better conditions for women. That is not surprising. When we destroy a country’s infrastructure, kill its citizens, ravage its economy, and create refugees and homelessness, it is unlikely to lead to better lives for women…or anyone, for that matter. Chaos rarely leads to hope-filled progress. It more often leads to oppression. Indeed, it was barely news here that two weeks ago Yanar Mohammed, an Iraqi women’s rights activists, was killed outside her Baghdad home.

But surely our actions will lessen the oppression of women in Iran. Our bombs that fell on a school killing perhaps 150 girls means that there will be 150 fewer women to be oppressed in the glorious Iranian future that our bombs are sure to create.

Posted on by rjonakait

Some Books I Do Remember

I look over the books I read in 2025. Many I can’t seem to recall at all. Others I vaguely remember. But a few have stuck with me.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Twenty-four hours orbiting the earth. I did not like this slim, Booker prize winner as much as some friends did, but the poetic meditations made it worthwhile.

When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion by Julie Satow. I was not familiar with this history of remarkable women who transformed department stores in mid-twentieth century New York City.

The Fish Can Sing by Halldór Laxness. Any writing by Iceland’s Nobel Prize Winner is worth reading.

V13: Chronicle of a Trial (Translated from the French by John Lambert) by Emmanuel Carrère. A great book about the trial of terrorists who slaughtered many in Paris on Friday November 13, 2015.

32 Yolks: From My Mother’s Table to Working the Line by Eric Ripert. This memoir from the renowned chef is surprisingly good but also disappointing. It ends too soon. I wanted to learn more about his later life, but if he has written about that, I have not found it.

The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. This fictional biography of Bella de Costa Greene is not great literature, but Greene’s story—born Black, lived as a white, became J.P. Morgan’s librarian—is a great one.

Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro. Learning how a great craftsman crafts is always fascinating.

Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America by Michael Luo. An important but often overlooked part of our history.

Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age, by Stephen R. Platt. Picked by my history book group, I expected an academic slog, but Platt made this into a page turner.

My Friends, by Fredrik Backman. This, as is anything written by Backman, is worth reading.

The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure by William Goldman. A delight for all ages.

The Maid by Nita Prose. A mystery story with a different, often amusing, main character.

Sonny Boy by Al Pacino. I resist most memoirs and especially those of show biz celebrities, but I saw several comments about how good this book is. I pulled it off a library shelf and loved it.

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. I had seen the great movie Persepolis when it came out but only now read the graphic novels that inspired the film. They are also great.

The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century by Tim Weiner. I don’t remember many details even though I read the book recently, but Weiner gives us an important and depressing look at the country.

The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon. Taught me a lot about the commercial importance of the Great Lakes and the dangers of their waters as well as about the Edmund Fitzgerald. The book is another surprising page turner.

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King. Learned many fascinating facts and insights about an important but now often overlooked person.

In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us by Steven Macedo & Frances Lee. A significant, critical examination of our responses to Covid. I am still coming to grips with this book and hope to write about it soon.

Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“This was me when I was 10 years old. This was in 1980.” Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis.

“This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.” William Goldman, The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure.

“’Is this the home of Tony Horwitz?’” Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days.

“The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette.” S. Morgenstern, The Princess Bride.

“Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist whom most people can name.” Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science.

“Fezzik chased the madman up the mountain, the madman who carried the most precious thing, for Fezzik, ever to be on earth, the kid herself, Buttercup’s Baby.” S. Morgenstern, Buttercup’s Baby: S. Morgenstern’s Glorious Examination of Courage Matched Against the Death of the Heart.

“I was performing since I was just a little boy.” Al Pacino, Sonny Boy.

“I must have died, the woman thought.” Dan Brown, The Secret of Secrets.

“On July 27, 1791, some four months after Alexander Hamilton and Federalist-dominated Congress passed ‘the Whiskey Tax,’ the frontier offered an organized response for the first time.” Brady J. Crytzer, The Whiskey Rebellion: A Distilled History of an American Crisis.

“Lucrezia is taking her seat at the long dining table, which is polished to a watery gleam and spread with dishes, inverted cups, a woven circlet of fir.” Margaret O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait.

“The story begins with sheep.” John Butman & Simon Targett, New World, Inc.: The Making of America by England’s Merchant Adventurers.

“Lilacs, rain, a hint of bitter chocolate: Stella sniffed the air as she entered the small shop, enjoying the soft golden light that enfolded her.” Ruth Reichl, The Paris Novel.

“It looked like war.” Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.

“The day Ruthie went missing, the blackflies seemed to be especially hungry.” Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers.

“On January 21, 1989, the day after George H. W. Bush’s inauguration, David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a neo-Nazi, and the head of an organization called the National Association for the Advancement of White People, finished first in an open primary for Louisiana’s eighty-first legislative district.” John Ganz, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.