About Mona Gable

Recent Posts by Mona Gable

A Lesson From Barack (and Malia) Obama

I know this isn’t nice, but I was secretly pleased when the President outed Malia for getting a C on her science test. As a parent I found the news immensely reassuring. Why, the elder First Daughter has as much trouble juggling homework, sports and her social life as my kids do! I marveled.

Granted, Malia lives in a much grander house and vacations in places like Russia as opposed to spending the day at the local grubby beach. If she needs one mom and dad also won’t have to pony up $50 an hour for an algebra tutor.

But she also has the Secret Service accompanying her to sleepovers and nosing around her Facebook page (Like she probably even has one. Remember Dad’s fight to keep his BlackBerry?). And she’s under enormous pressure to succeed in school, all while living under a
microscope every second.

It can’t always be fun having a dad who’s President, a best-selling author and a Nobel Laureate. Not to mention one who occasionally spills your secrets to the entire world. (Thanks, Dad!) Then there’s mom, a crack organic gardener, international style icon, Harvard Law grad, who’s as popular as Taylor Swift. How’s an 11-year-old to top that?

Appropriately enough the occasion for this betrayal was an education speech at a charter middle school in Madison, Wisconsin. The President was spelling out what schools need to do to win grants from the Department of Education’s $4.35-billion “Race to the Top” fund. He wasn’t in a particularly forgiving mood. Referring to public schools, he said there should be “no excuse for mediocrity.”

Given Dad’s high expectations, maybe the C wasn’t entirely surprising. It certainly wasn’t terrible. (Although I would have hated to be Malia when she told her parents. You know how the President gets that stern look.) As it turns out, Malia quickly bounced back, earning 95 on her very next test.

Here’s how Dad explained her turnaround in the Los Angeles Times: “What was happening was she had started wanting it more than us.”

And that’s the real lesson I think parents should absorb from this. That no matter what your ambitions are as a parent, you can’t control how motivated your children are or what they achieve. It has to come from them.

I learned this the hard way. Despite making sure my kids did their homework in elementary school, going online to check their assignments in middle school, emailing their teachers when there was a problem in high school, all the while trying not to be the noxious helicopter parent, they occasionally did not meet my standards of excellence.

In middle school I remember lining up in the cafeteria to talk with my son’s teachers about his “progress report.” Talk about the line of shame. It was a dreadful ritual. Invariably I’d be right behind the parent whose 13-year-old had perfect citizenship and straight A’s. All of which I’d have to hear about while my son looked around anxiously and fidgeted. Knowing that he did not have such grades. Knowing that I’d be angry with his Bs and Cs and missing assignments.

I did not see then that my son, with his ADHD, his charming personality, his prowess at skateboarding and music, had other gifts. Gifts that his overcrowded public school and overtaxed teachers did not necessarily appreciate, much less have the resources to cultivate. I had to accept that he was probably not bound for Oxford.

My daughter has hit similar bumps in her academic career. Last year it was the dreaded English poet Milton that did her in. “I hate poetry,” she would fume every night, as she sat poring over phrases in Middle English. “I don’t understand it. I don’t get why we have to learn this.” Her teacher, who could not get enough of Milton, alas, was not particularly sympathetic. Thank goodness she’s taking women’s studies this semester!

This month she’s sending out her college applications. Like a good parent, I’m trying not to ask, “So, how’s that essay coming?” every five minutes. A few months ago she broke the news that she would not be applying to Berkeley, her mother’s beloved alma mater. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, mom, but I don’t want to go to a school where I’m too stressed out.” (Not incidentally, we’ve had similar conversations about the fact she will not be entering journalism, like her parents. Which only goes to show how smart she is.)

My daughter is not me. What a shock. And I suppose this goes without saying, but neither is my son. If I can get out of their way and let them make mistakes, learn from them, grow up, they’ll both forge their own distinctive paths.

Just as Malia Obama will, Dad.

Nicholas Kristof Talks About Sex Trafficking, Rape and Raising Kids

Nicholas Kristof has found himself in some pretty tough spots. Brothels in Cambodia, refugee camps in Darfur, villages in Pakistan. Still, this last one might take the cake. “The night before I was in Ogden, Utah,” says the New York Times’ columnist, as if he couldn’t quite believe he’d found himself in this remote outpost in the American West.

Kristof is on tour for his new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. Thankfully tonight the globe-trotting journalist is in far more cosmopolitan San Francisco at the storied Fairmont Hotel.

Kristof is speaking at an event sponsored by the International Museum of Women (www.imow.org), a self-described “social change museum.” In short the museum does a lot to help women around the world connect. Kristof is here as part of their speaker series and a new online exhibition, “Economica: Women and the Global Economy.” It’s all about ordinary women doing extraordinary things to lift themselves out of violence, discrimination and poverty.

Pretty inspiring stuff.

Sort of like Kristof’s book.

But tonight “half the sky” is missing, so to speak. The other half being Sheryl WuDunn, who is married to the journalist. WuDunn not only co-wrote Half the Sky, she also shared a Pulitzer Prize with Kristof for their coverage of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square. Plus there’s the marriage and three kids.

As it happens the first question for the foreign journalist had to do with domestic policy. “People always ask, how do you do all this and stay married?” he said to the audience later downstairs. Let’s just say the books are easier to put to bed than the kids. “Books don’t play you against each other,” he said. Which the audience found pretty funny.

In person Kristof is as thoughtful and down-to-earth as he appears in his columns. For an hour and a half, he sat on stage across from Jane Wells, the President and CEO of the World Affairs Council of Northern California, genially answering questions about sex trafficking, “honor” killings, mass rape, genital cutting, and the awful things being done to women and girls in the most awful places on earth.

Take sex trafficking. Kristof said he was shocked by how prevalent the practice is. It’s even worse today than it was during the Transantlantic Slave Trade. To pay the bills many girls are sold into slavery by their own families. And if a girl doesn’t like it or is “uncooperative” she’s killed. “This happens repeatedly in brothels in the 21st century,” he said.

There were the 14-year-old and 15-year-old girls Kristof got to know at a brothel in Cambodia. He couldn’t just leave them there, right? So he called the lawyers at the New York Times. Was there a policy against buying human slaves? Apparently not. So Kristof forked over $150 for each girl, the owner gave him a receipt, and he reunited the girls with their families. One thrived, the other returned to the brothel. “There is a happy outcome, but I’m going to make you read the book to find out,” Kristof teased.

American teenagers sure could learn from these stories that there are far worse things than being grounded for missing curfew. For instance, being a 14-year-old girl in Ethiopia. There, if a man wants to marry a girl, he simply kidnaps and rapes her. But this girl was having none of it. With her father’s support she tried to prosecute her attacker. Instead the man kidnapped her again and took her to a judge, who promptly married them.

This story has a happy ending, too. But you’ll have to read the book. Or see the documentary in 2010. Or for you younger people who don’t like to read or watch old people’s TV, wait for the video game Kristof has hired some game designers to develop.

After his many travels Kristof has changed his mind about a few controversial issues. For one, he’s not so sure that we should be telling countries in Africa, where genital mutilation of girls is the norm, to knock it off. Those cultural norms are most likely to change when the community intervenes itself.

He’s also got a new perspective on sweatshops using child labor. As well-intentioned as such efforts are to end the practice, they can backfire. America’s threat to punish Bangladesh led to girls being forced out of factories and into the streets. “It ended up being catastrophic for these girls,” said Kristof.

And the better educated girls are, the better off their families and communities are. When women are educated they have fewer children and send them to school, they work and make a living. And the men who once forbid them to even leave the house alone often don’t mind at all!

Still, it was hard not to notice the irony of an event devoted to the plight of oppressed women and girls being held in a 5-star hotel. “It’s a little strange,” noted a young woman at the reception named Elisabeth. Elisabeth told me she was a history teacher at San Francisco State and City College, where the budgets had just been slashed by something like 30 percent. She said she was glad she still had a job.

But at the Fairmont you couldn’t even get a room! For a while I sat in the high-ceilinged marble lobby and watched the crowd. A parade of lawyers in dark suits, middle-aged women toting little dogs, tourists, and elderly couples strolled through. And a lot were carrying shopping bags. Talk about being out of touch! Don’t these folks realize there’s a Great Recession? When Kristof swept through the front door, no one even blinked at the world-famous journalist.

But that quickly changed. At the reception he was mobbed by the crowd of international policy wonks, academics, social activists, college students and gray-haired feminists. (Oh, and a few San Francisco philanthropists.) In the midst of the admiration fest, I managed to pull him aside for a few seconds to ask, how did he and WuDunn decide which stories to leave in, which to leave out?

Here’s what Kristof, who was sipping a glass of red wine, said: “We wanted the book to be fundamentally hopeful. We wanted to show the power of women’s work and have stories emphasizing empowerment and opportunity, not just tragedy.”

Later his face lit up when Wales asked him about a certain Pakistani teenager. It started off as the usual horrific story about rape, but then turned into a Lifetime movie. Only in this case the plot was true.

The girl not only prosecuted the man who raped her, she went on to found a legal counseling center for women, build a school, launch a 24-hour-hotline to rescue kidnapped girls. And she wants to be a lawyer. Not everyone is thrilled about her work. She could be killed at any moment, said Kristof, but that doesn’t seem to faze her.

As for his own kids, Kristof and WuDunn are educating them too. Last Christmas the whole family went to Cambodia and Thailand. (So much for skiing in Utah or visiting the Happiest Place on Earth!) At one point during the vacation they confronted a novel decision: Should they take the kids to go see the brothels Kristof had written about?

Oh, why not? they decided. It might reinforce to the kids how lucky they were. It might also encourage them to get with the cause.

As Kristof said of the effect on his 11- year- old daughter, “You may encounter Caroline out there trying to raise money for a school in Cambodia.”

Obama Going to Talk to Kids: Yikes!

I’m so glad my children aren’t in elementary school anymore. Otherwise I’d be spending the whole Labor Day weekend fretting over next Tuesday instead of cleaning the ashes out of my ears.

Tuesday, as you all know, unless you’ve been preoccupied with your house burning down or ominous mushroom clouds like we have here in LA, is when President Obama is set to give his “socialist” talk to the nation’s schoolchildren.

Mind you, no one has actually seen a copy of the president’s speech. But that hasn’t stopped right-wing crazies and Republicans from insisting that Obama is going to brainwash our kids with his radical ideas about health care, banking, and taxes. All in the span of a few propaganda-packed minutes.

Some parents have demanded that their children be excused from hearing the president speak. I’m taking a wild guess, but I’m pretty sure that African-American parents won’t be joining them.

You’d think Obama was showing kids on live TV how to slip a condom on a banana.

Clearly, none of these people has ever never taught a group of squirming six-year-olds like I have, much less a class of smart-mouthy fifth graders or opinionated 16-year-olds in AP U.S. History or they wouldn’t be so alarmed. I know this comes as a shock, but students don’t hang on every adult word. They’re also curiously able to think for themselves.

But tell that to Jim Greer. Greer, the chairman of Florida’s Republican Party, has been the most vocal, if not the most literate, opponent of Obama’s speech. (An aside here: Notice how it is always Florida and Texas that cause such a political ruckus?)

If you didn’t have the pleasure of seeing the Senate hopeful on the news, here’s what Greer said in a press release:

As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology. President Obama has turned to the American’s [sic] children to spread his liberal lies, indoctrinating American’s [sic] youngest children before they have a chance to decide for themselves.

Asked repeatedly where he got the notion that Obama was going to talk about health care and other policy matters when he hadn’t actually read the text, Greer strangely couldn’t answer.

But strangely Education Secretary Arne Duncan could. And here’s what he said about the content of Obama’s speech in an interview with AP:

What’s so fun about working for the president is this is so personal for him. He did not grow up with a silver spoon in his mouth. His father wasn’t around much….And here he is, the president of our country, the leader of the free world, because he received a great education and worked so hard. He’s challenging all of us, but he is absolutely going to challenge students and parents to take their education seriously, to really have personal responsibility.

Now critics are saying that it’s not the phantom speech that has gotten them riled up. But the lesson plans the Department of Education sent to teachers suggesting, among other ideas, that younger students write Obama letters offering how they can “help” the president. Or that high schoolers answer such cult-of-personality questions as, “What is President Obama inspiring you to do?”

That’s it. I am never sending the teenagers to school again.

Since the Education Department’s lesson plans caused such a fuss, I’d like to propose my own essay questions that teachers can use in conjunction with the president’s speech. (Caution: They are not organized according to grade level.)

1) Who is Jim Greer? And why doesn’t he know basic rules of grammar?

2) What is a socialist? (Parents must answer this question, too.) Name a current leader of a socialist country or one from the 20th century. (Hint: It is not an American president.)

3) Why do you think Obama gave this speech to the nation’s students? What was he trying to say?

4) What did you think about it? Did you like it? Why? Why not?

5) Write your own speech as if you were addressing the nation’s students. (Hint: Avoid all socialist rhetoric or points will be deducted.)

6) Why do you think some students’ parents (not yours, of course) wouldn’t let their children watch the president speak? Do you believe they had that right? Why or why not?

7) What is the high-school dropout rate in Texas and Florida?

And finally, for extra credit: As a young person, what can you do to make America better?

Health Care Reform: White Like Me, Oh, Dear!

I have to say it’s really embarrassing to be a white person these days. Talk about behaving badly. Who would have ever thought that nice white people from Missouri and Pennsylvania could get so riled up about the Weimar Republic, say, or the Founding Fathers? Especially when the topic at hand has nothing to do with Germany or the Revolutionary War.

At her town hall meeting in St. Louis, Sen. Claire McCaskill seemed genuinely hurt when the mob (I mean crowd) shouted “We don’t trust you!” She tried to shame them into quieting down but they were so loud they couldn’t hear her. Senator McCaskill, unlike her Show-Me-State constituents, is so polite she practically apologized in interviews later for inciting a riot.

I can’t remember now which town hall it was, but a lot of the screaming white males were quite overweight. (I could have said fat, but my mother told me it’s not nice to call people names even if they’re yelling at you.) Did you notice that, too? I kept thinking it’s a good thing the topic is health care because if one of these angry men has a heart attack there’s probably a doctor in the crowd.

But seriously. If we’re going to talk about health care, they should really consider cutting their carb intake.

All this brutish behavior. It’s enough to make me renounce my European roots and claim my tiny Chickasaw heritage.

Granted, the whole discussion around health care is complicated. Which we could have easily solved if we’d just adopted a single-payer system, rather than confuse people with plans that call for government control and socialism. (Oh, we didn’t? Never mind.)

But does that really call for gangs of white, white-haired people to scream at members of Congress? Or to liken our hard-working representatives to Nazis? (And please, pretty please, can we stop with the unpleasant and inaccurate historical references?) Or for a certain white female ex-governor who quit her job and seems to have a problem discerning rumor from reality to assert that seniors are going to be facing death panels?

I think not.

Plus, now I’m worried that my 85-year-old mother-in-law thinks I plan to kill her. And the teenagers are imploring us every night with cries of “don’t kill grandma!” and “don’t pull the plug!” Thanks, Sarah Palin!

What plug? Can we have a reality check here? Their grandmother lifts weights, doesn’t drink or smoke, and gave up sweets to lower her blood pressure. I don’t know where the kids get this nonsense. Unless they were listening to Charles Grassley.

Earlier this week the senior Iowa senator told a group of elderly white folks that they had every reason to fear some government bureaucrat putting them down as a way to cut costs.

Clearly, we’re in trouble when one of the key senators in health care reform is this out of touch with the proposals. Or so desperate to get re-elected that he has no qualms about terrifying his elderly constituents.

As if that weren’t enough, yesterday Grassley announced that he and a few other senators had eliminated any provisions in their plan that would have provided the chronically ill with a say in their care. Now people won’t have to be tortured by listening to their doctors blather on about hospice care and living wills. Unlike Europe and Canada, where patients also have to wait months to see a doctor if they’re sick or need glasses or dental care.

Oh, wait, that would be here.

This week thousands of people lined up outside the Forum in Los Angeles — some arriving at midnight — for a free health clinic being run by Remote Area Medical, a nonprofit group in Tennessee. Most were from poor and working-class neighborhoods around the Lakers’ former home. The first day alone 1,500 patients were seen. But the need was so great that 500 others had to come back the next morning.

It was like that all week. Long waits. Families camped out in their cars so their kids could get their teeth cleaned or their eyes checked. In contrast to the angry white folks repeatedly acting out on TV, no one screamed. No one shook their fists or shoved anyone or had to be escorted out by police. No one mentioned “death panels.”

Just crowds of grateful people that they were finally getting the health care they need.

Or as Lourie Alexander, who cleans houses for a living, told the New York Times: “What I liked about it was that everyone was so sweet. You know when you haven’t seen a doctor in so many years you have a lot of questions.”

On Nancy Pelosi and Michael Jackson

I’d like to thank Nancy Pelosi for nixing the resolution to honor Michael Jackson. It’s not like Congress doesn’t have anything to do. (Health care, anyone?) But it was a spectacularly bad idea from the start. And now with revelations about the late singer’s drug problems, the coroner’s office subpoenaing Jackson’s medical records, and questions about Jackson being the biological father of his children, what if this had been brought to a vote? Can you imagine the nastiness that would have ensued?

Hopefully this means we’ll be seeing less of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, the Texas Democrat who introduced the resolution. Jackson Lee attended the memorial at the Staples Center. And for reasons that are unclear, she chose the occasion not only to give a stump speech but to push her resolution. Classy!

For the millions of people around the world who wished they’d been in Los Angeles for the event, count yourself lucky. Traffic in the Valley and near Dodger Stadium was a mess. I had to leave early for work because the freeway was closed for Jackson’s motorcade. Even our normally media-happy Mayor left town to vacation in South Africa.

I hope he’s back because now we’ve got to pay the bill. Jackson’s memorial cost L.A. $3 million, and some of us (okay, me) aren’t happy about it. This includes more than $40,000 that was spent on police lunches from a deli 80 miles away. What’s wrong with our local taco trucks? I enjoy eating in new neighborhoods, too, but I try not to on the taxpayer’s dime.

Talk about priorities. This year summer school was canceled because city officials deemed it a great way to close LA’s $26-billion budget gap. The last time I checked the high-school dropout rate in LAUSD was almost 50 percent. So now we have thousands of students sitting at home watching The Hills or roaming the streets. Terrifying.

Councilwoman Jan Perry told CBS she’d “love it” if the Jackson family helped pay for their loved one’s memorial. But so far, Joe Jackson has been mum. He did, however, pull aside a reporter the day his dead son lay in a gold casket to talk about a record deal.

Maybe Kobe and Magic, who praised Jackson during the Staples celebration for helping them be better at basketball, can chip in?

Don’t get me wrong. I loved Jackson’s music. I’m actually old enough to remember when the Jackson Five appeared on Ed Sullivan. In my 20s, during a brief and unremarkable stint as a jazz dancer, I performed “Beat It” at a gospel church in Oakland. (Thank god for no YouTube then!) The other night my husband dug my old Thriller album out of the closet and we danced to it in the living room.

Michael Jackson was undeniably gifted. But he was also undeniably tragic. And contrary to that gratuitous remark Al Sharpton made to Jackson’s children at the memorial, I think most of us can agree on this: the singer was a little “strange.”

How many grown men wish they were Peter Pan? And then build a multimillion-dollar fantasy world called Neverland with zoo animals and carnival rides? Or name their child “Blanket”?

Jackson’s friends have been appearing endlessly on the talk shows burnishing his legacy. That’s not surprising. What is is how they profess to have been so close to him yet apparently didn’t notice his devastating drug problem. The Hulk was training the emaciated singer for his “This Is It” tour. Yet when asked about Jackson’s health by Larry King, it was all good!

Well, it’s all coming out now. Just this morning, a senior law enforcement officer told ABC News that Jackson was “heavily addicted” to OxyContin and taking daily doses of the painkiller Demerol.

During the memorial CNN.com paired with Facebook so that fans could express their grief. For a while I watched the comments scrolling down the screen. Many of them simply said “MJ: RIP.”

One can only hope.

A Word from Anderson Cooper

Of course there had to be a question about the tea-bagging remark.

“On April 15th, as many as 700,000 Americans gathered to protest government spending in what were called tea parties,” a young man in the audience begins. “Now, you dismissed these voices with a crude sexual joke saying, and I quote….”

We don’t really need to repeat the joke, now do we?

Anderson Cooper, the globetrotting anchor of CNN (or, as my daughter prefers to call the dapper journalist, “The Silver Fox”) is fielding questions from some students at UCLA. Cooper uttered the infamous line in a conversation with David Gergen one night. And the journalist, who, in addition to his nightly anchoring duties, also reports from vacation spots like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Iraq, has been getting flak ever since.

Is that kind of tasteless remark really the best way to promote discussion, the young man wants to know.

Cooper says he wasn’t trying to belittle the tea-baggers or discourage them from protesting. And he’s sorry if anyone got that impression. Or took offense at his “stupid, silly one-line aside.” When you’re on TV as much as he is, sometimes you say things you regret.

On the other hand.

“I do think, in this case, it’s odd and mildly humorous that this one phrase happened to be adopted. And if a group is going to adopt a term that has an alternate meaning already established, it’s not completely out of the norm that you would comment on the fact that there is an alternate meaning to the phrase.”

Well! And with that the audience bursts into applause.

Cooper is at UCLA giving the 7th annual Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture, in honor of the Wall Street Journal reporter who was brutally slain in Pakistan in 2002. The Daniel Pearl Foundation, the Burkle Center, and Hillel, a student group devoted to Jewish culture, are sponsoring the event.

Cooper actually has a photo of the late journalist on his bulletin board at work. As he talks, that same iconic image of Pearl appears behind him on two screens. It’s the one where he’s wearing a dreamy beige suit, white shirt and gold tie. And smiling.

“I’ve been made a different person because of Daniel Pearl,” Cooper tells the crowd, “because of his life and his strength, and his ability to love and laugh and to seek out understanding wherever it may be.”

About 900 people are packed into the auditorium. Ruth and Judea Pearl, who invited Cooper to speak, are sitting in the front row. LA’s media-happy mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is here too, introducing Cooper. (Not to nitpick, but why not a journalist? Especially considering that Villaraigosa thinks the show is called Anderson Cooper Three Hundred Sixty Degrees!)

Needless to say the 41-year-old Cooper is quite popular with the young people. (Last year’s event with the smart but notably un-hip David Brooks didn’t draw half as many.) At a reception before the lecture, when the small, slender journalist strolls in wearing a dark pinstriped suit, you’d think he was Jon Stewart. The students swarm him. Snapping their cell phone cameras. Begging to take their pictures with him. When he comes to the podium, they shower him with hoots and hollers. “You’re gonna go there already?” Cooper quips.

He pokes fun at himself, too. When Cooper recently interviewed President Obama, it was his first time in the Oval Office. Which apparently the president likes to keep as humid as Miami. Within minutes the impeccably groomed anchor was “more drenched in sweat than Albert Brooks in Broadcast News.”

Then there’s his famous mom, Gloria Vanderbilt. Who is a “remarkable lady, and a very talented lady, but practical she is not,” he says. When he asked her what he should do after graduating from college, she told Cooper “follow your bliss.” A phrase that was actually coined by Joseph Campbell, and which his mother had heard on a Bill Moyers special.

“So basically my mom’s big life advice was cribbed from some guy on television,” Cooper jokes. “I’m thankful she wasn’t watching, you know, Montel Williams.”

But Cooper isn’t all witty repartee. He despairs over how the decline of newspapers and the closing of foreign bureaus means that many stories aren’t being told. For instance. Did you know that one of every five children in Niger dies of malnutrition before the age of 4? “It’s not the kind of thing that make headlines anymore. But it’s the kind of thing we ought not to accept.”

Or that more than 5 million people have died in Congo in the last decade, making it the deadliest conflict since World War II? Or that in the last few months hundreds of thousands of Congalese have had to flee their homes? Or that tens of thousands of women have been violently raped? Including girls? “Virtually no one in the media or in Washington has paid much attention to this horror,” says Cooper, who did a little-watched special on the rape story for CNN.

“It’s very easy I think in this day and age to look the other way, very tempting to ignore the sadness of others, the reality of their lives. But I think it’s very important that we not turn away.”

Sure, it’s not as exciting as watching the finals for American Idol. Or covering Lindsay Lohan. But, people, can we at least try?

Then there’s the problem of covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Which has gotten a bit more challenging what with bombs exploding and journalists being targeted and needing big beefy guys with guns to guard them. It’s hard to wander around Kabul or Baghdad and interview people unnoticed when you’ve got a security team in tow. Or to get out much at all.

To wit: “You can’t eat in a restaurant. You can’t see a movie or hail a taxi or go out at night. You can’t stand in a crowd. You can’t stand in one spot too long. Or use the same route or get stuck in traffic. ”

You get the picture.

As for Cooper’s chatty colleagues and the rise in cable news of liberal and conservative anchors to attract viewers, don’t get Cooper started. He thinks it’s an awful, awful trend. Not only because it divides people and slants the news and encourages, say, right-wing viewers to believe that Nancy Pelosi is a socialist. But because he believes in the quaint notion we used to call facts.

And really. “The last thing this country needs is more overpaid, blow-dried anchors screaming at the top of their lungs.”

Amen!

With new media taking over the world, Cooper says he doesn’t know where journalism is headed. He thinks the economics of newspapers don’t make sense anymore. Though he’s not sure what will replace them.

Lest you forget, the anchor’s not one for giving advice. “That’s Sean Hannity’s job,” he quips, “and he does it very well.”

But in this age where we’re confronting unfamiliar ideas in other parts of the world, it would be good if we were all more open to various points of view. Even those of our enemies.

“That of course is something Daniel Pearl lost his life trying to do,” Cooper says. “Trying to understand. Trying to help us all understand.”

Question: What Do Christiane Amanpour and Afghanistan Have to Do with the Prom?

I really wasn’t planning on writing about my daughter going to her prom. But sometimes the most unexpected occasions take on political meaning.

Don’t get me wrong. It was priceless, one of those moments you hope your teenager will eventually appreciate you showed up for. Before the dance my daughter and about 20 best friends and their “dates” convened at someone’s house. The guys looked impossibly awkward in their dark, shiny suits. The girls looked like they’d just finished a shoot for America’s Next Top Model. Proving, once again, how much sooner girls mature than boys.

As for me I pretended I was Annie Leibowitz and annoyed my daughter no end by insisting on taking photos. The horror! (In one shot she’s reaching out toward the camera, glaring at me like I’m one of the paparazzi. I probably won’t upload that one on Flickr.)

So what does a high-school prom in Los Angeles have to do with Christiane Amanpour reporting on Afghanistan? Just how different a young woman’s life can be by virtue of geography.

Cut to a few nights later. I’m sitting in a packed ballroom at the Beverly Hills Hotel at the Global Women’s Rights Awards held by the Feminist Majority Foundation. Mavis Leno, who has been advocating for Afghan women and girls with the group long before Kabul became cool, is being honored. Jay is here too, making political jokes, including one about Obama’s much-covered 100th day. (“George Bush didn’t spend 100 days in office!”)

Also getting an award is The One Million Signatures Campaign, a group of brave Iranian women who are fighting to end laws in Iran that discriminate against women. They don’t have an office or a staff; it’s all done by volunteers in different countries. They aren’t ideological, either. Unless you consider fighting for women’s rights to be particularly radical. Which I guess many people do.

Because of their campaign, nearly 50 women have been held by Iranian authorities on such nebulous charges as “activity against national security.” Other activists haven’t been allowed to travel or had meetings in their homes broken up by police.

Then we have Afghanistan, where life for women and girls has gone from horrific to even more horrific under the Taliban. Forget about the prom. For the simple act of going to school, girls have had acid thrown in their faces. Female teachers have been murdered and hundreds of girls’ schools burned.

In terms of women’s rights Hamid Karzai hasn’t exactly been Hillary Clinton. In March Afghanistan’s increasingly unpopular president approved a law that would have made it a crime for Shia women to refuse having sex with their husbands. (Essentially we’re talking marital rape here.) They also couldn’t work or go to school without their spouse’s permission. Or leave the house without a male escort.

Naturally, a lot of Afghan women weren’t thrilled. When scores of them protested at a rally in Kabul, they were pelted by an angry mob with stones. Nice!

But fortunately bad news travels fast. Thanks to an international outcry by women’s groups, human rights activists and Sen. Barbara Boxer, among other scary opponents, Karzai was forced to back-pedal. A few days ago he promised to amend the law so that it respects the rights of girls and women.

Which brings me to Christiane Amanpour, the fearless CNN correspondent. At the event, she was being honored for her coverage of Afghanistan, and had recently returned from filming a documentary there. Before dinner I had a chance to speak with her. And she was surprisingly optimistic about our involvement in Afghanistan and its potential to improve women’s lives.

(A disclaimer here: This was before the American airstrikes that reportedly killed dozens of civilians in Farah. Not to mention Obama’s meetings with Karzai about cracking down on the Taliban.)

“I strongly believe it’s not a hopeless case,” Amanpour said of Obama’s new push in Afghanistan. But U.S. military officials also told her that troops won’t solve the situation alone. Amanpour said we also need to honor the promises George Bush made — and then broke when he got obsessed with Iraq — to rebuild the country.

“The correct involvement by this administration could be critical. It’s about developing. This is the critical element toward making a success out of what’s going on there.”

This will take time and patience, Amanpour said. But then the Afghans really aren’t asking for much. “All we want is to feed our families and to send our children to school,” they kept telling her.

Coping with Sexting

Now that we’ve gotten those infernal tea-bagging parties out of the way, let’s get to what’s really important: sexting and teens.

I hope I don’t need to explain what this trend is, because I’d just as soon leave that to Urban Dictionary or to Good Morning America, which recently held a no-holds-barred Town Hall meeting with parents and teens on the issue. One of those parents was Cynthia Logan, whose 18-year-old daughter was named Jessica.

Maybe you remember the story? Jessica sent her boyfriend a nude cell phone image of herself. After they split up, being the generous guy he is, he decided to pass the photo on to 100 close friends. Faster than you can say Facebook, Jessica’s life became the modern-day equivalent of The Scarlet Letter. She was taunted, shunned. Called vicious names. The abuse was horrific. Trying to do something positive, the Ohio teen appeared anonymously on a local news show and talked about her plight. It didn’t help. She was so torn up she took her own life.

GMA deserves kudos for the show. I’m always impressed when you can get teenagers to talk about anything, much less a topic as awkward as sex on national television. Experts are always suggesting that if only parents would “communicate” more with their teens about uncomfortable topics, like the wisdom of using their cell phones to share topless photos, life would be as breezy as The Cosby Show. Believe me, we do plenty of that around here and it usually involves me blabbing while the teenagers groan in horror, flee the scene, or cut me off. But you can’t let that stop you, right?

Just this week I tried to initiate a conversation in the car with my daughter about sexting. And she couldn’t have been more enthusiastic! Had many of her friends been sent these kinds of photos? “Of course!” she sniffed. “That’s awful,” I said. “Yeah, but there’s nothing you can do about it,” she said with the unique certainty that teens have.

So just how much a problem is sexting? I guess it depends on how you define big. According to a recent survey by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a third of teenage boys and a quarter of girls have seen nude or semi-nude cell phone images that were meant to be private.

This is one more example where we’re scrambling to catch up with the unpredictable ways of technology. Who would have ever imagined that teens would use their cell phone cameras so creatively? Clearly not the legal system. Currently teens 18 and under who are caught sexting can be prosecuted as sex offenders, even if it’s consensual. Which seems a bit excessive given how severe the penalties are. Vermont thinks so, too, and hopes to change the law so that the worst teens could be charged with is a misdemeanor. Let’s hope other states follow.

But we also shouldn’t close our eyes. We should treat sexting the way we do other risky behaviors teens engage in: by making them aware, and by creating programs in middle schools and high schools where it’s treated as an ethical issue. Perhaps it could be part of a curriculum on sexual self-esteem? Perhaps students who’ve been victimized could share their experiences?

As we say around here: Don’t ask me, I’m just the parent.

Teenagers do stupid and impulsive things. (Not your teenager, of course.) It’s part of growing up. It’s also part of what makes them so infuriating and bewildering for parents. How can you have done that? you think. But sometimes teens’ stupidity has consequences they don’t foresee. Consequences so terrible they shouldn’t be enforced.

I think sexting is one of them.

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