Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

I Love You, Semi-Colon (and not just on National Punctuation Day)

Today is National Punctuation Day. It couldn’t be called International Punctuation Day as it might cause friction. When I lived in England, it took me quite a while to adjust to the differing language: what I know as a “period,” for example, they call a “full stop.” What I know as an Oxford comma preceding the “and” in a series – such as commas, parentheses, and quotation marks – they don’t use at all. This of course made me wonder why it is called the Oxford comma, but I digress.

I am not indiscriminate in my romantic involvements. I’ve got punctuation I love and punctuation that gets up my nose. I cannot bear the rule that says a final quotation mark must follow the period. Makes no sense to me when applied to a phrase or fragment, such as in the paragraph above where I mention “full stop.” To me the period should end the overall sentence, not the closing quotation mark around what may be even a single word. Here’s what I mean: She insisted on referring to the opposition as “Repuglicans.” That quotation mark, logically, should go inside that final period, but most style sheets disagree.

I say it loud and I say it proud: I love the semi-colon. It serves as a bridge among thoughts, a kind of radical comma that keeps your options open much more than a period does. I relish decisions about whether to employ commas or semi-colons in a sentence with a series of clauses. As someone who likes reading her work aloud, when I have a question about it, I choose on the basis of whether I need a little bit of air (just a comma) or a deep breath after a clause; when the clauses themselves include commas, that’s a clear sign to separate them by semi-colons, assuming the more militant step of breaking them into separate sentences isn’t necessary.

I feel an affection for the dash and a sense of insecurity about the hyphen. Brackets only have mechanical – not creative – uses. I don’t like the word “ellipsis” and I find its corresponding punctuation marks overused and too often erroneously written, but it is nearly impossible to avoid the ellipsis when you are a journalist.

Perhaps because my entire adult reading life has centered around 19th century literature, I have spent lots of time in a world of prose that reads without a hitch. Take a sturdy but complex Dickens sentence or a narrative Austen sentence and you will find a superb skill with punctuation that guides you through to the end without detours or hiccups. Here are the first two unforgettable sentences of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice – all done with commas and periods:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

Warning: Microsoft Word disagrees with Jane Austen about the comma following “universally acknowledged.” I wonder how many classic novels Microsoft's auto-grammar has written, let alone one that is beloved through centuries around the world.

Punctuation Competition
If you think you have a decent handle on punctuation and want to compete, here is a contest that I am going to enter myself. It is sponsored by the National Punctuation Day folks and I’ve pasted in their instructions here:

Here are the rules for contestants competing for a box of punctuation goodies: Write one paragraph, maximum of three sentences, using these 13 punctuation marks: apostrophe, brackets, colon, comma, dash, ellipsis, exclamation point, hyphen, parentheses, period, question mark, quotation mark, and semicolon. You may use a punctuation mark more than once.
You may submit as many paragraphs as you like. Entries will be accepted at [email protected] through September 30.

And now that you have come to the end of my romantic confession, here’s an educational “rap” song about punctuation for your viewing pleasure:

 

Cape Cod Canal and Hyannis September 2011

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 17
My first stop is at the Cape Cod Canal that connects mainland Massachusetts to Cape Cod. I have many times passed over the Sagamore Bridge, one of three bridges that were part of the same canal construction project, on my way to Provincetown on the tip of the Cape, but I have neglected to understand the history of the canal underneath.

The day is exquisite, although its beauty is painfully more like the start of autumn than the end of summer. My big writing plans for this summer have remained largely unfulfilled, so this final four-day escape is important. Nothing better than to begin it strolling on the scenic bike path along this broad canal, with the electric blue sky reflected in the deep turquoise water.

Like the bike path I ride on at home from Cambridge to Bedford, there are walkers, riders, skaters and joggers, passing those who are fishing and those who are sitting at the picnic tables. The friendliness among strangers that I thought was particular to my bike path is apparently universal. I am watching a bird with a long beak floating on the water when it takes an unexpected, dramatic dive down deep, rising up to fly in a great arc just a foot or so above the water. A grey-haired woman walker stops to explain that it is a cormorant, a bird that has no oil on its wings, necessitating a wide spread to dry off its feathers after a dive.

Although just such a canal had been a twinkle in the eye of Captain Miles Standish of the Plimoth Colony in 1623 and although Massachusetts had passed repeated proposals to build it after that, no one could really figure out how to tackle such a massive job. The first attempt by the private sector at the start of the 20th Century produced a narrow, shallow version in 1916, but because of its limitations they could not make it profitable. Eventually the government took it over. “The purchase price was $11,400,000, and $21,000,000 was spent between 1935 to 1940 increasing the canal's width to 480 feet, and its depth to 32 feet. As a result, the canal became the widest sea level canal in the world.” Three bridges high above the canal were also constructed.

There is a visitor center with amazing information at the side of the canal. There I learn that the bike paths along both sides were derived from the utility roads used during construction. The canal has a long history – and as I read of its final triumph, I can’t help but get depressed.

The project was part of Roosevelt’s public works vision – a Depression-era effort that changed America with its roads and bridges and parks and poems and photos. The hazards of sailing around the Cape had limited commerce. This single project employed 1,400 men (sic) who brought money back into the economy, improved trade, upgraded local security and created a recreational and commercial waterway now used by 20,000 boats each year.

Why did all of this get me down? Because as I read in the visitor center about the amazing amounts of investment by the government in job creation, infrastructure and cultural improvement projects during the Depression, I realize that with Roosevelt’s New Deal, at least there was hope. Hope that one could qualify for a government job, even for writers and artists. I find myself thinking the irrational thought that I would’ve been better off during the Great Depression than now when we have no leader or actual governing party, only an opposition being dominated by its most repulsive flank.

For those who say, but look what Obama is up against with all those crazed Republicans trying to stop him, check out what Roosevelt faced:

“Alarmed by Roosevelt's plan to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, a group of millionaire businessmen, led by the Du Pont and J.P. Morgan empires, plans to overthrow Roosevelt with a military coup and install a fascist government. The businessmen try to recruit General Smedley Butler, promising him an army of 500,000, unlimited financial backing and generous media spin control. The plot is foiled when Butler reports it to Congress.”

I return to the hotel where my request for a quiet room has been granted, but where the chair at the desk is some wonky vanity seat that when I sit down brings me about clavicle-height to my laptop. I ask at the front desk for a real desk chair and, to my astonishment, I get a marvelous specimen. Life is sweet.

I go exploring this “family” hotel whose claim to fame is a “wave pool” – yes, it really waves, with an accompanying hot tub and nearby slides (“Yes,” the 15 year old lifeguard assures me, “we even had a 400-pound old man go down them once.)

For dinner, I drive with my companion into Hyannis center to take up the recommendation of my writer friend Jeannette de Beauvoir to eat at the Brazilian Grill on Main Street. Unfortunately, we are told on arrival, the first available table is at 9:00pm – three hours hence. “I am,” I tell the hostess, “a journalist from Boston writing a travel piece on Hyannis and you were so highly recommended to us.” As we assure her we don’t mind, she immediately seats us at one end of a long table where a small party is dining at the opposite end.

The food is impossibly plentiful and delicious. There is an endless buffet of salads and side dishes of every sort, although my focus is on the fried plantains. If you keep your green “Yes” card up near your plate, the solicitous wait staff – or gauchos – bring you endless rounds of meat on a skewer – from divine beef ribs to filet mignon with bacon; from chicken wings to linguica sausage – in all, 16 different choices. When you need to take a break, you turn the card to a red “No.”

I happen to meet the owner Maximiliano – the only casually dressed member of the staff – at the buffet table and he tells me that the restaurant has been going strong for 11 years and that while the economic atmosphere has definitely had an impact, summer is still a very strong season. The buffet – without drinks or dessert – is a reasonable $28, reasonable that is if you happen to have an extra $28. We have desserts too, brought on a cart piled with abundant choices. When we leave, there is still a line out the door and it is clearly not only a tourist fave, but a local stop as well.

We saunter down Main Street, ducking into a Joke/Sex/Head Shop where I pick up some sexy greeting cards and a bumper sticker that says: “Since I Gave Up Hope I Feel Much Better.” Of course, that’s a lie. Paying for it is torture. Literally. The cashier hands me a pen to sign my credit card receipt which, when I pull off the cap, explodes. I nearly lose my cardiac ability, although the customers standing around find it hilarious. He apologizes and hands me another pen which, when I click it, gives me an electric shock. They like that too.

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 18
Again on Jeannette’s recommendation we head for the Cape Cod Central Railroad which asks riders to “Step Back in Time for a Never-Forget Experience!” I wonder why they don’t just use the ready-made word Unforgettable, but climb aboard nonetheless. The train was saved from erasure in 1999 by a private entrepreneur. The majority of the people involved seem to be retired women.

There are brunch or dinner rides to choose from, although we take the non-food scenic train with the edifying commentary by a guide named Madonna. She talks us through the 40 mile route from Hyannis to Buzzards Bay and back at 15-30 miles per hour. A retired kindergarten teacher, Madonna (left) tells me that this job is no different: give them some useful information in an entertaining way so that they will stay in their seats and behave.

We learn about the 365 kettle ponds on the Cape, dug out in the glacier age by ice; about the beautiful golf course we pass early in our journey that is the oldest on the Cape and has an intimidating waiting list; about how the early white settlers depleted the original forests, leaving the area with almost no maples and too many ugly scrub pines; and about the fascinating process of growing and harvesting cranberries as we pass numerous bogs. She explains the ecology of the copious marshlands we pass. Madonna also tells us of so many tempting attractions in Sandwich, where she now lives, that I put it right on top of my must-see list: from a church designed by Christopher Wren to a glass museum to the Dunbar Tea Room.

I chat with the conductor Kay, a life-long pilot, who is spiffy in her handsome uniform. She’s been involved since the 1999 save of the railroad, apprenticing as brakeman and conductor. An air force brat, she started flying with her father in 1945 after WWII and after finishing her education (MBA), she began buying into planes. The role of conductor, she explains, is like that of the captain of a ship: She is responsible for whatever goes on. The brakeman, on the other hand, is like a co-pilot, responsible for switching couplings when the train reverses direction on the way home.

When the ride finishes, I set out to see the JFK Museum in Hyannis, but once inside I find myself less than motivated and satisfy myself with the lovely bronze statue outside of a young JFK strolling barefoot through the dunes.

I lunch at the execrable Spanky’s Clam Shack down at the harbor where I have, late in life, my first face-to-face confrontation with a non-Kosher hot dog, paler than beige and too gross to bite. The reconstituted french fries can only go down on a stream of ketchup and even the view of the harbor is less than impressive. The much-publicized “artists shanties” turn out to be pre-fab boxes where commercial artists try to make a living serving tourists. I ask one what happened during Hurricane Irene. “They made us remove every last thing from inside,” she explains in some disgust, “and they lifted up the shanties and stored them in a parking lot away from the water. And nothing much happened. Just some wind and rain, nothing out of the ordinary.”

For dinner with friends, I take the safe route of a salad at the hotel, and back in my room I catch the end of the Emmy’s where everything seems bland and tame, other than Jane Lynch’s great line (paraphrased): People ask me why I am a lesbian… And now, the cast of Entourage.

MONDAY SEPTEMBER 19
Finally, after lunch on the hotel’s porch with friends consisting of untastey wraps bought at Traders Joe’s in one of the many strip malls in the neighborhood of the hotel, my dream comes true. This Cape Codder Hotel, at the blighted corner of two busy box-store roads, bills itself as a “family” destination with all sorts of entertaining extras. I have been dying to try out the wave pool and the water slides – two experiences my rich life has been lacking. Unfortunately, the wave pool is a bit underwhelming, although perhaps if I were 6 years old and a slip of a girl I’d feel like the waves were significant. But I do like those water slides – both the curvy one and the straight-down faster one. Ten minutes in the hot tub settles me down and I return to the hotel room to dine on an apple and pistachios while watching the season premiere of Dancing With the Stars. Go Chaz!

The evening is bittersweet as I know that tomorrow morning I need to pack and return to the real world of selling my labor for far too cheap a wage.

Thanks to Barry Hock for all photos (except Depression-era and wave pool)

Elizabeth Warren: Could her Announcement be Any More Disappointing?

A number of my Facebook friends are very excited about Elizabeth Warren's announcement that she will run against the obnoxious Scott Brown (R) for the MA senate seat. They feel she's a fighter who gives a damn. Those who have heard her pre-campaign speeches were impressed.

So I listened to the announcement clip, expecting something fresh, something from the heart. Instead, it sounds like a message any tired Democratic hack might give.

I find it terribly disappointing that she is only concerned about the "middle class" - not about the working class or the poor - and this coming right after figures have been released that 49 million Americans are living below the poverty line. Don't forget that they've set this imaginary "line" at about $11,000 for singles and about $22,000 for a family of four! So if you consider a family of four living on say $30,000 to be in dire straits, remember, they are not included in that number.

Warren said she grew up "on the ragged edge of the middle class." How contorted does descriptive language have to get to avoid the term "working class"? And now her tag line is "A Champion for the Middle Class." That counts me out and a lot of other working class folks, not to mention the 9.2% of Massachusetts residents below the poverty line.

And why is she only concerned about "families." Some of us aren't in a family, thank you. In fact, some of us think the nuclear family is a problematic institution. She even uses the big union phrase "working families" - about which nonsensical feudal-sounding term I recently wrote. Her dumbed down message about big corporations and lobbyists isn't exactly awe-inspiring or creative either.

I know Elizabeth Warren has done some terrific things in her career and that she is respected by a lot of progressives. But I am sick of rhetoric that fuzzes the issues, that erases the reality of class in this country and that gives even the most promising new politician the look of a cookie-cutter candidate who toes the (increasingly losing) party-line.

Here's the 1 1/2 minute announcement. What do you think?

 

Film Review: The Guard

“The Guard” (shouldn’t that be, The Garda?) is a terrific Irish film that showcases Brendan Gleeson, a wry and splendid actor who plays a small time village cop, Sergeant Gerry Boyle. (The film was a critical and popular hit in Ireland.) When three drug traffickers make their way to his area, he suddenly has to deal with the rather up-tight FBI agent Wendell Everett played with fitting cultural confusion by Don Cheadle.

I imagine for some the film is about crime and cops and shoot-outs and IRA gun stashes, but I loved it for its upfront and witty dissection of conflict. The village versus the big city (i.e. Dublin) coppers; the Irish versus the English law enforcement; the British Isles versus the American FBI agent parachuting in. Ultimately, it’s about how much the world knows of America and how pathetically ignorant America is of the rest of the world.

The FBI agent cannot, for the life of him, figure out when Sergeant Gerry Boyle is playing the bumpkin idiot and when he is an outright racist. He cannot fathom, as he tells Boyle, whether the Irish cop is very smart or very dumb. The American has a laughable lack of awareness about how he is perceived, as he attempts to go by himself from house to house to investigate a murder only to find all his questions answered in Gaelic.

As always, I miss having women in a movie. There are only two women minor characters – one the pretty widowed wife of a slain cop and the other Boyle’s dying mother, played movingly if much too briefly by Fionnula Flanagan. (Oh, and a couple of fleeting sex workers.) Why can’t there be a key woman cop, a cruel woman drug dealer or a bewildered woman FBI agent?

For American viewers, the writer/director John Michael McDonagh seems to have taken Irish English and made a wonderful main character of it. There are laughs from start to finish – the amused audience in the theater where I saw the film seemed to have little trouble adjusting to the accent or to the ironic wit. If you like your heroes working class, cocky and subversive you’ll like Gerry Boyle. If you like your films fast-paced, full of barbs and based on their own kind of peculiar if not admirable principles, then go see this one.

Here is the trailer:
  

Unions! Stop Hiding the Working Class

I love me my union (National Writers Union / UAW) and I love me my union talk (Sisters & Brothers; continue the struggle; Solidarity), but the mainstream unions have become infected with language I find unbearable. And rude. And inaccurate. Let me confine myself to two glaring examples:

The Middle Class
I spent my youth dissecting class using Mao’s models. How many evenings did my revolutionary collective sit around deciding whether school teachers were part of the new working class despite their college education; whether mom & pop stores (i.e. petit bourgeois) were more aligned with the working class than the middle class; how to distinguish between the experience of a working class person going to college (loans and scholarships) and privileged people going to college (parental checkbook).

Now my unions are trying to call everyone “middle class.” Like if you have a union card you belong to the middle class. Factory workers? Truck drivers? Nurses? All middle class, say the union leaders. So who is working class, in their eyes, I wonder. Does it leap from lumpen (poor) to middle class to the ruling class?

Although now that I think about it, when was the last time the union people talked about the ruling class? You hear about the “wealthy” but you hear nothing about the owning classes. The term “ruling class” contains a political observation – that the “wealthy” have power and use that power to control our lives. A lottery winner could be wealthy – but that doesn’t make them ruling class. Let’s use language that is more precisely descriptive and helps us pinpoint who is on which team.

Why debase a term and therefore an identity – working class – that we should instead be infusing with pride and energy? Why debase a concept of the fighting workers in favor of the language of the capitalists? I cannot imagine getting all hopped up at a demo yelling, “Middle Classers of the World Unite.” In fact, perhaps this is American exceptionalism. This is distinguishing “our” working class from those of other countries. I refuse to buy into the myth that if your union gets you decent wages and conditions, you are thereafter part of the middle class. To the contrary, it just means that the working class is scoring victories. But of course, those days seem very long past.

Working Families

This is a nonsensical notion. It takes me back to pre-union days when whole families would toil as near-slaves in the fields, in the dankness of feudal workshops or in poor countries’ industries where unions have yet to win child labor laws or 8 hour workdays. Why would we talk about working families instead of workers? What about workers who are single?

The politicians have adopted this phrase too. I’ve written many times about the shock I experienced when the then-acting-Governor of Massachusetts went on TV immediately following the 9/11 attacks to promise that she would protect “Massachusetts families.” Ah, excuse me? I’m a resident, a citizen, a tax-payer and I am most emphatically not a member of a Massachusetts family. So do I have to sit outside the bomb shelter?

Obama too is always going on about fighting for middle class families. This is offensive to non-family folks. Besides, a huge chunk of his constituency is working class and another chunk is poor. What about us? Does he mean to include us in that rhetoric as if it were a compliment? “Middle class” is never a term I have seen shouted to the roof-tops. It is not a unifying concept bringing together people in a movement. It was once, perhaps, a state for working class folks to aspire to – with all its promises of education for the kids and a mortgage in the suburbs and a few bucks invested in mutual funds. But now impossible tuition fees, incomprehensible education loan systems, the evaporation of many scholarships, foreclosures of homes, investment rip-offs on a world-wide level and massive unemployment have surely by now erased those dreams.

Workers of the world unite. What more could you lose?

How I Spent my Labor Day

I decided against wearing my National Writers Union / UAW t-shirt with the great logo on the back saying “30 years fighting for freelancers,” because it is one of those wretched boxy male t-shirts and ill fits my body. I wish the unions would get some style – or some women thinking through these marketing decisions. But my companion wore his NWU/UAW t-shirt and I added a nice union button to my linen shirt, so I felt we were covered.

It is Labor Day and we are on our way to the once-thriving, now-limping industrial town of Lawrence, north of Boston for its annual Bread and Roses festival that celebrates the famous 1912 strike, led by courageous women. You can read about here. My only direct relationship to Lawrence is that it is the hometown of my old college chum, the writer Ray Mungo, who was also one of the founders of the Vermont community I call home in many ways.

As we’re speeding up the highway, a rattle and a noise arise that can’t be ignored and we pull into the breakdown lane with a very flat tire. We hop out with our cell phones ready to call AAA when a pickup truck pulls over, backs up to us and out bounces a man, probably in his 30s, white, freshly pressed clothes. “I’ll change your tire,” he says.

“Oh, we can call AAA,” I answer.

“I wouldn’t want my parents to wait on the side of a highway for two hours to get their tire changed.” He rummages in the trunk and finds the various parts of the tire jack and the spare and gets to work. It is a very hot day and feels even hotter out on the road. He is sweating like crazy, but gets the job done as swiftly as if it were for his folks – his mother recently passed away, his dad is in rehab “not doing very well” – and won’t even take the grapes I offer him. He bounces back into his truck and is gone.

I can’t get used to being so old that younger persons perceive me as an object for their helpful attentions. After all, I teach senior fitness and am more used to being the youngest in the room, hearing comments all the time like “Oh, you just wait.” Now, no one challenges me when I ask for a senior discount and I am too often addressed with the dreaded “Ma’am.”


BREAD & ROSES FESTIVAL
We found a parking spot right on the commons and headed into what appeared to be a pretty decent-sized and union-loving crowd. We cruised the food stands first, as one does, and I was torn between the baklava and the hamentashen and the southern ribs dinner, so I didn’t get anything. A number of community groups had booths including, unfortunately, two I could have done without. LaRoche had a stand with posters of Obama wearing a Hitler mustache and featured a small group of singers with operatic-type voices. The next kiosk belonged, oddly enough, to the local H&R Block tax service. Otherwise it was union groups (Yay UAW) and social justice groups and friends of the Lawrence library and Amnesty International.

There were three performance stages with a good mix of music and dance. As we came in, on the stage closest to us, we caught the Boston Raging Grannies, who were quite lackluster, but then TenTumbao played some great Cuban music. 


THE TOUR
We missed out on the 3:00 political tour guide, the one who was really into the 1912 strike and passed out the words to Bread & Roses for a sing-a-long, and instead we got the 4:00 pedantic Harvard graduate – masters in history – as he was so generous to convey, who gave our trolley what I might call the Ghost Tour of Lawrence. “There stood the such&such headquarters for the such&such industry,” he would say pointing at an eyesore of an empty lot, “and over there in that overgrown patch used to be a famous paper mill.” He noted the only remaining factory housing upscale row-houses – built for the engineers. Later he pointed out one of the few rows of factory-worker houses. But he never in any way described what made one better than the other and what one might find inside.

He had a full head of catastrophes and pointed to where a certain factory burned or another exploded. The problem was he never explained the context for the fires et al, nor the period, nor why it has meaning today. He pointed to giant textile factories long out of use but did not tell us when and why they closed or what is going on in them today. “And here is the State Park,” he said, pointing out a big parking lot. We longed to know how Lawrence is coping and what kind of economy they might build for themselves now.

He actually had a co-tour-guide, an older guy who sat with a mic in hand and a large sheaf of print-outs. On rare occasions Mr. Harvard would say, “And now John is going to tell us about the baking factory that blew up right here in this empty lot and spewed flour over everything making a god-awful mess.” And John would shuffle his paperwork and read, “In such&such a year a bakery factory blew up right at the corner of This and That and covered everything with flour. And back to you Mr. Harvard.”

Lawrence reminded me in some very sad way of Detroit, which I visited recently. A Ghost Town more remarkable for what it had been than what it is. A place with a giant industrial history left almost without industry. Outsourcing and union busting, coupled with the finance industry’s greed seem to have crippled both towns. The Lawrence factory buildings seem ripe for transition to condos, mainly because the windows are all huge, presumably so that the sweatshop girls could work as long as the slightest hint of sunlight remained. But if you could find an investor for the project, where would you find the buyers? Where would they find work?

There was one perfunctory mention of the strike on this lame tour, when we came to a crossroads where, he told us, “Anne from Methuen was shot dead here on this corner.” We never found out if Anne was a child or an elder, a striker or a passerby. So much for an Ivy League education.

ENTERTAINMENT
We returned in time to hear Zili Misik, a women’s band playing Haitian, Afro-Brazilian and Cuban music. I last saw them earlier this summer at the Dyke Pride March. As soon as they finished, the inimitable Bread & Puppet Theater Company performed with all their puppetry and wit and Vermont politics and youthful high energy. They and their wild props are as delightful and shabby as they were many decades ago – and apparently they’re operating on the same shoestring as always. Too cheap to pay $3 for a glass of lemonade, I was becoming too dehydrated to stay, so we set off back to Boston tired but looking forward to the 100th Centenary of the 1912 Strike next year. Will we see you there?

Thanks to Barry Hock for all the photos.

And a treat:

 

Hey BBC: Where the Hell are the Women?

Watching television with me is, as my friends will tell you, a trying experience. For me, television is an interactive medium: they do what they do and I chide them, murmur my disapproval or scream my frustration.

This morning I am watching BBC America’s early morning news as I always do. In fact, I am watching it twice – first at 6:00am and now again at 7:00am. They are reporting on Libya. They tell us, “One family mourns five missing brothers.” But are there no women in this mourning family?
 
Next we see an institutional hall where the walls are filled with snapshots. “In hospitals families put up notices with details of their loved ones,” BBC tells us, but we see only men in the frame.

Switch to a shot of the large table around which the interim leaders are meeting. Make that male leaders.

The camera moves to the countryside where rebels are surrounding Gaddafi strongholds – all men.

Finally, we are told, “The Libyans have to queue for petrol,” but none of the drivers are women.

BBC cannot change the reality of this supposedly woman-free Nato-sponsored “movement,” but it would be nice if they noticed. They could, after all, seek out the women activists (see photos) sometimes seen at the street demos. It would be nice if they marked the absence of women. It would be appropriate for them to be asking the question – of western and Libyan leaders alike – where the hell are the women?