READER DALE LEOPOLD sends this passage from Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, which he says he’s reading at my recommendation:

He [Frank Chalmers] studied the [Arab] men’s faces as they talked. An alien culture, no doubt about it. They weren’t going to change just because they were on Mars…Their thinking clashed radically with Western thought; for instance the separation of church and state was wrong to them, making it impossible for them to agree with Westerners on the very basis of government. And they were so patriarchal that some of their women were said to be illiterate–illiterates, on Mars! That was a sign. And indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and son and so on, in an endless death spiral of twisted love and sex hatred. So that in a sense they were all madmen.

A pretty good description of what we’re dealing with, and of what must be changed.