Good-bye, Tony

Rush-Hour Strike Wounds Up to 1,000;
Blair Sees G-8 Link - New York Times

Political career finished. I don't understand enough about how the British system works to know what happens next. Can Tony be sacked and replaced with another Labour politician until the next election? Do they call another election and vote in the Liberal Democrats? Can it be the end of Tony without being the end of Labour?

Pity it wasn't a Conservative government. The train-bombing in Spain did wonders: consider the past wonder-year under Zapatero, blown in by the explosion. This could be a real boost for Eurosocialism as countries once tempted by Tom Friedman's fantasy "Anglo-Saxon model" repudiate everything that stinks of America.

Of course the response in the US will be the opposite: terrorism is getting closer to home--we need a strong leader. We didn't get bombed--because Bush was protecting us. And of course if we do get bombed that will be all the more reason for supporting the current regime. Bring on the ownership society, get more guns, keep women typing and filing--see what happens when the abortionists, evolutionists, feminists and homosexuals have their way?

This sounds pretty callous, doesn't it? 33 people so far are dead. Pardon me for repeating the obvious but consider how many people die in drive-by shootings in LA, get executed in Texas, die in Iraq or get murdered in South Africa. It's all the same Cowboys and Indians game.

Of course it's not going to do the radical Muslims any good, any more than 1960's radical street theater helped the American Left. In 1968 I was convinced that it was the end of the Old Order--dress codes would be abolished, drugs would be legalized, big business would collapse and colleges would be transformed into "free universities" where we would sit on the grass learning to throw pots and weave baskets. I wasn't entirely happy about this--I wanted drug legalization and the end of the dress code but I was terrified that higher education as we knew it would poop out before I could be a professor. I didn't want to live on a commune wearing long dresses, birthing babies and cooking the menfolk's organic food. But I was convinced that it would happen because there were so many of us marching and because we got on TV--we would destroy the Military-Industrial Complex.

So now these radical Muslim youths, of the age we were when we marched, imagine that they will topple the Great Satan and drive back the forces of Westernization so that they can live in mud huts (with satelite TV of course), reduce education to memorizing the Koran, put their women in burqas, and preserve their shit culture. Actually the vision isn't too different, is it? Romanticism, militant anti-intellectualism and anti-feminism.

It won't work, lads--the grown-ups always win.

The fault is in our stars, not in ourselves

Newsday.com: Fate of program is in her hands

This month, Eileen Collins, commander of the next space shuttle mission, will strap herself into a rocket ship loaded with explosive fuel and shoot from zero to 1,000 mph in a minute flat.

Meanwhile Sheila Jeffreys, a lesbian separatist described as "the Andrea Dworkin of the UK," has launched a campaign against make-up and breast implants.

I'd bet that Collins had a hard time: it isn't easy for women to get to do guy stuff. Besides ongoing discrimination there are a thousand little pushes and pulls, conventions that dictate what women are supposed to do and where the no-go areas are. To run the gauntlet you have to be talented, determined--and very thick-skinned. Most don't make it.

It's easy to cut your hair and stop shaving your legs. No one's stopping you. Why is this supposed to be radical?

"Radical feminism" doesn't challenge the external, social and institutional constraints that make it difficult or impossible to do guy stuff, in particular, to get "men's jobs." It's just another component of the cosy creed that says the fault is in ourselves, not in our stars, and that we can fix it by doing things that are within our power--thinking good thoughts, developing the right attitude, being assertive, doing things that are within our control.

And it isn't peculiar to feminism, "radical" or otherwise. It's the wisdom literature of the ages, defining the Good Life as something that's within everyone's reach regardless of their life circumstances. Look close to home--fix your head, your home, your behavior, your relationships, your wardrobe: all will be well--and you'll be too busy to notice the external constraints over which you have no control, or to kick against the goads.

Honest Tea

P.C. Tea - New York Times

The obvious question raised by a product called Honest Tea is: What, exactly, is dishonest tea? This sounds smart-alecky, but the name of the bottled tea does imply something more serious than mere thirst-quenching, so it's legitimate to wonder what it is trying to communicate. Is it healthfulness, or a tie-in to a cause, or a solution to an ethical quandary (in the way that Fair-Trade-certified coffee lets you wake up without feeling as if you're exploiting third-world farmers)?

It's also worth asking because a significant group of consumers seems to be responding. Launched in 1998, Honest Tea now sells more than a dozen varieties of bottled tea (and some bag teas as well), had revenues of nearly $6 million last year and expects to hit $9 million this year, according to the company.

Oh, Jesus, doesn't this make you sick? For all my political blueness, I can very easily understand what Reds are pissed about--this appalling New Moralism that's all the worse because it doesn't even understand itself as grossly, sanctimoniously, smugly moralistic.

Personally, I am now drinking my favorite dishonest drink: half and half Almaden white wine and store brand diet lemon-lime soda. I have no interest in being healthy. I do have a membership at Women's Fitness World but my only interest is in losing weight for aesthetic purposes. I wonder why the self-interested desire to "be healthy" is somehow supposed to be more edifying than the self-interested desire to look ok and fit into reasonable clothes, or for that matter the self-interested desire to make lots of money.

As far as Honest Tea, Fair-Trade Coffee and Politically Correct Chocolate goes, how much utility do consumers produce by buying these products? They're expensive and hard to find. Take the premium you pay for this crap (including the money for gas to take you to that health food store and the cost of your time) and send it to Oxfam

Haiku

Bloomberg.com:Top Worldwide

Bush speech, same old crap: nine-eleven; rah-rah, stay the course...Why bother?

The Paradox of Populism; Or why conservatives cannot pack the court

In Battle to Pick Next Justice, Right Says, Avoid a Kennedy - New York Times

Ever since the elevation of Earl Warren, Republican presidents have picked justices who disappoint the Republican faithful: William J. Brennan Jr. (President Dwight D. Eisenhower), Harry A. Blackmun (President Richard M. Nixon), John Paul Stevens (President Gerald R. Ford), Sandra Day O'Connor (President Reagan) and David H. Souter (the first President Bush).

One result is rage at what Mr. Bork sees as subverted democracy. Even though Republicans keep winning elections, he said, the court "can say that the majority may not rule" in areas where permissiveness reigns, including abortion, gay rights and pornography. Calling most justices "judicial oligarchs," Mr. Bork said they reflected "the intelligentsia's attitude, which is to the cultural left of the American people."

Conservatives: You want a small group of very smart, educated people to occupy positions of power so you select the likes of Justices Kennedy, O'Connor and Souter--who turn out not to be reliably conservative after all. You then complain that they lack "moral clarity" and do not represent the views of the masses. What do you expect: they aren't representative of the masses. They're very smart, educated people--that's why you put them on the Supreme Court--so they don't hold the dumb, simple-minded views of the masses. And, they're in for life so, unlike politicians they aren't (thank God) accountable to the masses. You can't win.

Liberals: You love the masses--you want not only to benefit them but to give them "voice." You respect their culture. But the masses detest you and reject all your dearest values--they're simple-minded, short-sighted, conventional, puritanical, sexist and bigoted. If you succeed in establishing an authentic democracy where they run the show--whether in the US or in the Middle East--they will install conservative policies that defeat your purposes. You can't win either.

I may be wrong but at least I'm consistent: the aim is to "kill the Indian to save the man." Make everyone a latte-drinking Liberal: not overwhelmingly difficult if you're prepared to spend the money on providing everyone with the security, standard of living and quality of education the elite now enjoy--and to recognize that you aren't doing disadvantaged people any favors by affirming their cultures or giving them "voice."

Welcome to Teheran, Kansas

Hard-Liner Urges Reconciliation After Victory in Iranian Vote - New York Times

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- The winner of Iran's presidential election, whose landslide victory dealt a setback to reformers, said Saturday he seeks to make his country a ''modern, advanced, powerful, and Islamic'' model for the world...The victory gives conservatives control of Iran's two highest elected offices -- the presidency and parliament -- enabling the non-elected theocracy to rule with a freer hand...Ahmadinejad, the son of a blacksmith, presented himself as the humble alternative to Rafsanjani, whose family runs a large business empire. He has promised Iran's underclass higher wages, more development funds for rural areas, expanded health insurance and more social benefits for women.

Deja vu...again. Thomas Frank imagined that working class Americans' support for a conservative religious candidate who banged the drum of patriotism and promised get-tough policies, as anomalous--something that required explanation. Hardly. The proles and peasants almost always support alpha-males (or facsimiles) who promise protection and patronage. Whether in the US or in Iran, in Zimbabwe or Afghanistan, or in medieval Europe, they back tribal war lords and charismatic cult figures--because they're ignorant, cynical, fatalistic and desperate.

The amazing thing is that for a fairly brief period of time in human history, following the Enlightenment in Europe and America , at least some of the peasants actually supported humane, egalitarian political and social policies. That's what cries out for explanation and if Democrats can figure that one out there may be hope.

Leftward Christian Soldiers

American Prospect Online - ViewWeb

Founded by Jacksonville, Florida, businessman Patrick Mrotek, the Christian Alliance for Progress (CAP) says its purpose is the “reclaim” the Christian faith from the extreme religious right...CAP’s core principles include commitments to economic justice, environmental stewardship, equality for homosexuals, effective prevention -- but not criminalization -- of abortion, peaceful solutions to international disputes, and universal health care for all Americans...

“One of the great problems of the Democratic Party,” [CAP Director of Religious Affairs Timothy Simpson] said, “is that the 5 percent or so [of its members] who don’t want any religious rhetoric at all, and who do not represent the mainstream of American political or religious life, have been allowed to call the cadence in the [party]. And when that happens, Democrats get their butts kicked. Because people in this country are believers.”

I hit the link and joined. I am, after all, a Christian and one who supports their "core principles."

I'm not terribly optimistic. I've been involved in a number of these liberal religious groups that do minor good works on the political front at the margins. Even during the heyday of liberal Christian activism they weren't a major force and nowadays, with liberal/mainline churches on the way out, these well-meaning liberal Christian operations are even less likely to succeed.

What bothers me about a lot of liberal Christianity is not that it is inimical to "traditional values"--with which I have no sympathy--but that it's often associated with metaphysical reductionism and dismissive of religious devotion. I believe what's in the Creed--nothing in there about abortion, homosexuality or sex roles much less the "ownership society" or the war in Iraq. I am a religious person: I believe that the most important things the Church can do are having daily services and keeping church buildings open so that people can visit. And, I'm a member of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament--please hit this site, contact the Secretary General for info and if you are so moved join!

That seems to be a problem with the Religious Right as well as the Religious Left: the whole debate has become one about "values"--and religion has dropped out of the picture. The "Religious" Right supported Ronald Reagan, a Hollywood celebrity with no religious affiliation, over Jimmy Carter, a devout Baptist Sunday School teacher who made "born again" respectable. Nobody, least of all conservatives, seems to take religion seriously. They "church shop" for churches that support their "values," or have convenient parking lots, or active youth groups, and do not give a damn about theology, liturgy or religious devotion. Conservative evangelical Protestants make common cause with conservative Catholics and conservative Orthodox Jews who agree with their notions of how society should be organized and have formed an unholy alliance with secular Libertarians. They've bought into the idea that religion cashes out as a code of conduct--they simply disagree with liberals about what the correct code of conduct is.

So I'm pessimistic on two counts. First, I don't believe that any liberal Christian movement will succeed in influencing politics: even if, per impossible, conservative Christians could be convinced that Jesus (who enjoyed his followers to leave their families and follow him) didn't support "family values" or that "Christianity is the religion of which socialism is the practice" it would make no difference. They would give up Christianity. Secondly, for all the brouhaha about religion and politics, debates about teaching evolution in the public schools (which should be about as controversial as teaching the quadratic formula) and the supposed rise of the "Religious" Right, Christianity as such is close to dead. Right or left, the majority of people who, according to the polls, say that religion is "important or very important in their lives" are interested in supporting "family values" or promoting social justice, acquiring skills for "successful living" or exploring "spirituality." And very few people are interested in the doctrine of the Trinity, or care about the Church's tradition of liturgy and devotion, or believe that God is present in holy things and holy places, or love the Church.

French

Transparent Language

I'm trying to (re-)learn French because when we go to England in August to visit family for once I intend to cut out and go somewhere foreign. And France is the closest truly foreign place.

So for $30 I got this language learning software, essentially flash cards that talk--and have you talk back. There are charts showing waves, fricatives, vowels and other things so that you can compare yourself to the native speaker and a gage that shows how close you get. I try to pronounce the words and phrases and can't come close--the harder I try the worse it gets.

I have lots of French-learning equipment--review books and all the books I inherited from my mother who minored in French. I can read French if it's fairly simple, and can dope out the rest with patience and a dictionary. Amazingly, I remember all the "little words" and can catch onto the idioms. But the phonemic component defeats me. How did English get transfused with a completely new vocabulary and still end up sounding Germanic--at least low Germanic?

I just cannot produce these fricatives, whatever they are--while the Native Speaker's chart has bumps and spikes in vivid color, mine is a flatliner.

When we were first married we took a cheapo charter flight that went through Brussels and ended up stuck there for a day, jet-lagged and lost, trying to get back to the Central Railway Station. When Roger asked a cop for directions in English he shrugged, sneered and turned his back on us. We wandered through this nightmare place, expensive shops and arcades, very foreign. I spotted a black couple and felt a little better thinking they must be American. But they gave us the same French look that the cop gave us and turned their backs on us too. Eventually we put our heads together came up with, "Ou est le guerre central?" We tried this out on someone: after a few seconds of alarm, then puzzlement, he laughed at us and started giving directions--which we couldn't follow. I hope this time is better...

Call in the philosophers
Not on Faith Alone - New York Times

Most Americans...believe that embryonic stem cell research may provide cures. They will demand that Congress act to realize that potential. If the president vetoes a bill that advances that potential, he will have to provide more than sincere religiosity to prove that human life exists as early as fertilization...The best way to test that proposition would be to employ a panel of respected scientists, humanists and religious leaders to consider testimony from bioscience experts describing when consciousness first appears, when viability outside the womb usually occurs, and how other religions treat the subject.

Does Bush seriously believe that personhood begins at conception or that stem cells have a serious right to life? I doubt it. The idea that it does is wrapped up with esoteric Aristotelian notions of "potentiality" that aren't on his radar.

The commonsense view is probably that personhood insofar as it entails a serious right to life is a matter of degree, and depends on characteristics like sentience and consciousness. There is my lab lying on the rug, wimpering and twitching as he dreams about retrieving ducks: he clearly has a serious right to life and so does any animal whose mental life is at least comparable.

Given our intuitive sliding scale I think all mammals and at least some birds, infants and late term fetuses have a serious right to life. By that intuitive criterion stem cells are out of the ballpark. Human/non-human is not the relevant cut: the intuitive distinction, and it's a fuzzy one, is between beings that are conscious and those that aren't, whatever consciousness comes to--and it is a matter of degree. That's why most Americans don't go along with the administration's line on either stem cell research or the Terri Schiavo case

Once again, the dogmatists on both sides are shooting themselves in their respective feet. No one, after watching pop-science documentaries about fetal development, seriously believes that birth is a morally significant threshhold: by digging in their heals on that pro-choice activists alienate potential supporters. No one seriously believes that stem cells have a serious right to life either and conservatives are now alienating potential supporters by insisting that they do.

So let's call in the philosophers to get clear about this. There's no philosophical consensus about personhood--least of all about this intuitive mini-theory I sketched. But on one thing we do agree, viz. that the less you claim the more plausible your position is. If you are seriously interested in supporting the interests of late-term fetuses you don't attach amendments about the rights of stem-cells and if you are seriously interested in protecting women's right to choose you don't make partial-birth abortion part of the package.

Gay marriage and all that stuff

What's Their Real Problem With Gay Marriage? (It's the Gay Part) - New York Times

''Lifestyle'' is a buzzword in conservative Christian circles. It's a signal of the belief, and the policy position, that homosexuality is not an innate condition but a hedonistic way of living, one devoted to partying, drugs and wanton sex that ends, often, in illness and early death...As the landscape of fear fills in, the picture comes into view. It is Hieronymus Bosch's ''Garden of Earthly Delights,'' a phantasmagoria of sin and a complete breakdown of the social order.

Remarkably, after producing a great deal of anecdotal evidence suggesting that religion per se isn't the source of anti-gay sentiment the author piously concludes that it is the source of anti-gay sentiment.

Anti-gay activists want exactly the same thing that gay activists want--basic respect and support for the life they choose to live. For the past 30 years they haven't been getting it and this NYTimes article is more of the same. The cues are hard to miss--from the description of the Family Research Council's headquarters in a "small but grandiose building" that looks as if it might have been the "onetime home of Rutherford B. Hayes or some other historical personage heavy with Victorian-era dignity" but turns out to have been built in 1996, to the rendition of anti-gay activist Laura Clark's tacky tract house in Catonsville replete with "wall-to-wall carpeting and hand-me-down furnishings." (Locals will appreciate the reference to Catonsville and Towson State, from which Laura dropped out).

The Clark's counterparts, lesbian couple Lisa Polyak and Bita Deane have hardwood floors covered with Oriental rugs and we know that if they were entertaining they wouldn't set out a buffet like the one Laura arranged for the author--"sliced lunch meats, hamburger buns, tomato and onion slices, bowls of pretzels and chips, cookies and several two-quart plastic bottles of soda"--reminiscent of a picture of Judy Agnew the Times ran long ago that showed her standing in front of an open refrigerator door holding a bowl of jello. I wonder if Laura, who has certainly read the article, gets it. I strongly suspect she does, even if she wouldn't admit it.

I'm ambivalent and, as they say, conflicted about all this. On the one hand I wonder why, even if Laura has to live in Catonsville, she can't at least strip off the wall-to-wall carpeting and get some Oriental rugs. They aren't that expensive at IKEA (and even in Baltimore there is an IKEA). And if she's doing a spread for a NYTimes reporter, why can't she hit the gourmet section at Giant and get something a little more tasty than hamburger buns and potato chips.

On the other hand. Laura likes her wall-to-wall carpeting--makes a good play area for the kids and resists stains--and pretzels, chips and cookies are what her family and friends like to eat. She likes being a housewife and homeschooling her kids. Her traditional suburban family likes being a traditional suburban family--she and her husband glory in their four kids on the porch "riding tricycles and training-wheeled bicycles in a tight circle around the adults, bashing into one another, performing for their parents and the visitor."

I've always been ambivalent: I wanted that kind of life, what I thought of as a "real Dick and Jane family" and I got it--with modifications. It seemed like an impossible dream. No one I knew in my 20s seriously considered the possibility of getting married much less having children--and most never did. No one wanted to live in the burbs--it was something they dreaded, something they were afraid they would envelop them against their will--and any sort of religious involvement was simply off the map.

I can empathize with the Clarks' worries. They sense, with good reason, that people with prestige and power are contemptuous of them or at the very least regard them as anthropological specimens--when, after reporting on the Clarks, Shorto visits the Polyak-Deane menage we get the sense that he's come back from an expedition to another country, where he's extended himself to take the local culture on its own terms, and can now relax. They also worry, with less reason, that the "lifestyle" they like and believe to be good will disappear--they imagine a chaotic, competitive, sexual free-for-all, all the world turned into the beach on Spring Break, the Garden of Earthly Delights. I can understand that too: I'm all for earthly delights but in large doses they're stressful and boring. No one wants to trade in that sexual meat market indefinitely. It's like the bazaars I've been to in Kenya and China--interesting to try out but I wouldn't want to spend my time fighting off sales people and haggling on a regular basis.

I suppose I'm intrigued by the Cultural Divide because I recognize it in my own soul. I'm every bit as awful as that NYTimes reporter--I see the Clarks and their friends as anthropological specimens and I see their culture as exotic. In fact I'm worse because I've tried to go native, or at least to fake it. And I couldn't cut it, maybe because at bottom I don't like it. I'm intrigued by the aesthetic surface--the happy families in the park, the church ice cream social, driving the kids around in a van and seeing myself as a soccer mom, the world of sunshine, the sitcom world. But I don't like real guts of the culture: the boring conversation, conventions, restrictions, boring busy work, sex roles, and pure tedium.

I don't see any resolution in the offing. This culture, like all "traditional societies" is crumby, but it isn't without value and if it disappears something will be lost, just as something will be lost if tribal warrior societies in the Muslim world disintegrate--as we can only hope they do. Of course the alternative isn't the Garden of Earthly Delights though you won't be able to convince conservatives in Catonsville or Kabul of that. But it will still be a world that's more homogeneous, colder and duller.

But there is no free ride. You can't have individualism, opportunity, freedom and equity in a traditional society; you can't have self-critical reflection or serious education. Maybe in the end to come to terms with it is just to recognize there there is something of value there while at the same time facing the fact that the costs greatly outweigh the benefits.

Congratulations, Elizabeth!

Happy day! Our daughter, Elizabeth graduated from high school today and is now, God help us, an undergraduate! She has a wonderful life ahead of her--majoring in biology.

The ceremony, in the Hilltop High School football field, was an American classic--a grand civic ritual with local politicians, speechifying, awards, brass band playing the Star Spangled Banner, and bleachers full of relatives with cameras, flowers and helium balloons. It was glorious!

After the graduation we went to the Tango Grill, Elizabeth's choice and the best restaurant in town. I don't want to eat for at least 3 days. And when we got back the house was in order--the dog hadn't eaten any books. Good.

Truly, this is as good as it gets!

Middle-Brow and Proud

Joe Strauss to Joe Six-Pack - New York Times

Back in the late 1950's and early 1960's, middlebrow culture, which is really high-toned popular culture, was thriving in America. There was still a sense that culture is good for your character, and that a respectable person should spend time absorbing the best that has been thought and said... Today more people go to college. They may be assigned Rimbaud or Faulkner or even Hemingway. But somehow in adulthood, they tend to have less interest in that stuff than readers 40 years ago.

The trouble with social conservatives like Brooks is they look back decades rather than centuries.

Brooks imagines that middle-brow culture was killed by snarky, supercillious intellectuals with the collaboration of a self-indulgent, self-absorbed middle-class public who resisted Victorian moralizing about the edifying character of Great Art. Intellectuals despised the bourgeois and the bourgeois for their part were no longer willing to take their medicine.

Au contraire. It was the Victorian moralists and their successors who made "appreciation" a moral duty who killed middle-brow.

When it came to music at least there was no cultural divide in the 18th century. Parishioners at Thomaskirche wet their pants weekly listening to Old Bach's productions. Vivaldi is so accessible that even now everyone just plain likes it--until they learn that it's "classical music." Anyone who hears Mozart or Hayden without prejudice just likes it--that's that: if you get chocolate, you like the taste. It produces pleasure because we're wired up to like it.

It was the moralizers who trained the public not to like it by drawing a line between high art, a bitter pill that had to be swallowed, and popular culture. If you tell a kid he can't have his broccoli until he finishes his dessert, every last bit of it, it's obvious what's going to happen.

"Good taste" not only in art but in food, wine and manners has always had snob appeal and arivistes have always cultivated it. There was no moralism in that--the aim was prestige and ultimately pleasure. Snobbery doesn't kill pleasure, but moralism does. Wine-snobbery was never worked over by moralists so it remains accessible; music-snobbery was thoroughly moralized, closing off an avenue to supreme pleasure for the bulk of the population. Maybe this is what the moralizers were after in the end: eliminating all near occasions of pleasure.

Now things have turned around in an interesting way and old snobberies have become new moralisms. Food-snobbery in particular has been moralized. More generally the focus of the new moralism is the package of goods that are supposed to contribute to a "healthy lifestyle": exercise, "healthy" food and various forms of abstinence. The process is the same: the preoccupations of the elite are interpreted as exercises of virtue and snobbery morphs into moralism. Maybe it's a consequence of self-deception: no one wants to admit that they eat miserable food and recycle because it's fashionable or that they exercise and diet because they want to look good.

However we may be coming full cycle. Liking "classical music" is now neither fashionable nor virtuous. In fact it's distinctly unfashionable: admitting that you listen to it marks you as a naive striver because the assumption is that you must be motivated by unfashionable moralistic concerns. A taste for the Canon, in music or any of the arts is now popularly perceived as gauche. The snob appeal is gone and the moral appeal has all but disappeared.

So I can confess that I sit on my butt listening to the local classical music station XLNC out of Tijuana all day. They play all and only safe middle-brow canonical works--musical chocolate and McDonalds. They just finished the Polevetsian Dances--who can resist "Stranger in Paradise"? They play snippets of Carmina Burana every 45 minutes. I could use a little more Haydn, and more string quartets, but on the whole the selection suits me. By the way, they're running a pledge drive--please contribute so that they reach their goal, shut up with these disruptive solicitations and get back to the music.

So ironically nostalgic moralizers like Brooks who look back to the glory days of the 1950s, may be doing us a service. The Canon will become fashionably retro. People will consume Haydn string quartets as a guilty pleasure, like fast food, and take perverse pride in supporting XLNC and PBS. And as lit-crit departments push Theory and post-colonialist literature undergraduates will sneak off to read Jane Austin for fun. As moralism about the good things in life burns itself out people we could be looking at a new era of self-indulgence and aesthetic pleasure: hedonists gorging on the Canon while the moralizers spend their spare time sorting their trash for recycling.

Sex and Religion

ACLU: Fed Chastity Program Ringed with Religion

What's so bad about this chastity? They say that a conservative is a liberal with a daughter in high school--and that's me.

Personally, I have never known anyone who felt guilty about having too much sex with too many people or enjoying it too much. From the age of 16 I've lived in a world where sex was de rigeur and your value as a human being depended on having as much as possible with the greatest possible number of partners and enjoying it. For me, marriage at 22 was a relief: I could stop gun-notching, get out of the rat race and get fat.

Yesterday was my wedding anniversary and I'm very happy being married. Here I am married so I don't have to keep working to get a date every Saturday night and I have three children to prove that I wasn't too ugly to get sex.

And what's wrong with this program? No one is being indoctrinated other than the converted: kids from fundamentalist homes get the Jesus talk; others absent themselves. And even if they got the Jesus talk, would they pay attention? Why should we think--as the fundamentalists apparently do--that these fundamentalist noises are so potent that anyone tuning in will be converted?

BS falls from the air: TV commercials, political propaganda, ads in mags and ads online, spam, spam, spam and spam. We swim in it, breathe it, imbibe it and are largely immune to it. Why worry if Jesus stuff is in the mix? It's all more of the same and no one takes any of it seriously.

Just the facts

Crumbs for Africa - New York Times

According to a poll, most Americans believe that the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends...just 0.16 percent of its national income to help poor countries, despite signing a United Nations declaration three years ago in which rich countries agreed to increase their aid to 0.7 percent by 2015. Since then, Britain, France and Germany have all announced plans for how to get to 0.7 percent; America has not. The piddling amount Mr. Bush announced yesterday is not even 0.007 percent.

Since November all the liberal rags I regularly read have been agonizing to figure out what spin "progressives" should adopt to get a crack at an election victory the next time around. Get religion or don't get religion? Reclaim the Center or play to the base? How to appeal to Joe Sixpack and the Soccer Moms, who to run and how to groom him or her, how to promote the Nurturing Parent over the Strict Father, how to play it.

I have a novel idea--cheaper than focus groups and effective. Get out the facts. Most Americans believe that we are spending almost a quarter of GDP on foreign aid; we aren't. Over a third of Americans believe that they are either amongst the richest 1% of Americans or will be within their lifetimes. Most believe that the rate of violent crime is rising; in fact, it's fallen steadily over the past 15 years. Most believe, falsely, that the "death tax" prevents owners of family farms and small businesses from passing down their farms and business to their children.

A picture of the Great American Illusion emerges. We believe that we are among the richest people in by far the richest and most generous nation on earth. We believe that in spite of our generosity, bad guys here and abroad are out to get us because they envy our wealth and freedom, and are viciously ungrateful for our largesse. We believe that we are a nation of shopkeepers and family farmers who, by dint of honesty and hard work, have achieved fabulous wealth and have nothing to fear but big government looking to take it away and give it to welfare mothers and terrorists.

What to do. Here's a thought: let progressives sponsor "citizenship" contests for elementary school students on the model of spelling bees at which questions about the household income of the richest 1% of Americans, the crime rate and the percentage of GDP going to foreign aid would figure. Nothing partisan about that: just the facts.

When our kid John was in elementary school he won a contest sponsored by a local veteran's group for writing an essay in response to the question, "Where would we be without the Declaration of Independence?" John argued that we'd be much better off without it because we'd be a Commonwealth Country like Canada, would have a socialist welfare state including the National Health, and more efficient toilets like the ones in his grandparents home in Swindon with the tank 8 feet off the floor and a chain to pull.

You can't lose with the facts.

Conservative Multiculturalism

When I was an undergraduate, most of my friends were convinced that lower class people were in every respect better and more interesting than their families and friends: they were, in the adolescent parlance of the day, "real."

I knew that reality very well and my aim was to get as far away from it as possible. My childhood friends' mothers drudged in housedresses all day and at dinnertime leaned out of the door and yelled for them at the top of their lungs--"An-thon-EEEEEEEEE"!!! Their fathers beat them. The adults in their lives were were ignorant, brutal, crude, dull, bigoted, cynical and fatalistic. They took it for granted that everything was corrupt--and regarded that as normal, immutable and ok. In their world, the only sin was stepping out of bounds and there were 1000 unwritten rules setting those bounds, all of them arbitrary and strictly enforced.

My college friends however wanted to be working class and lead the Revolution of the Proletariat: they read Marcuse, joined the IWW, and pretended to be poor. Most played at it for a year or two; some dropped out of school and achieved authentic downward mobility; none did anything that actually benefitted the working class. Playing at poverty doesn't benefit the poor; joining the working class doesn't make working class people, who want nothing more than to get out or at least to get their children out, better off. Professing admiration for their culture, emulating them and attempting to enter their world does nothing for them.

I think I get George W. Bush's redneck fantasy. Like my college friends, Dubya was a patrician who wanted to be a regular guy: he was simply more astute. There were no working class intellectuals in the US reading Marx or Marcuse and planning class warfare, singing old union songs or affirming solidarity with the International Workers of the World. American working stiffs believed that God, guns and guts made America great, promoted militarism and domestic get-tough policies, despised intellectuals and their subtleties, drove SUVs, hated big government, were proudly inarticulate and, when they spoke, had bad accents.

Dubya got it right and the masses loved him for it. But he didn't do any better for them than we did. The trade-off was the same: trade real benefits for psychological goods--material improvement, economic security and exit opportunities, for cultural affirmation. It was the same old multicultural story: you beat us--don't try to join us; we love your culture--don't ask to belong to ours.

The Heroic Age

Starting on my light summer reading I've been at Thomas Cahill's pop history of Greece, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea.

Cahill begins with a rhapsody on the Illiad including quotes of the juiciest passages. It's hard not to be moved by Achilles rage and Hector's death, the pathos of Priam begging for his body and the tragedy of Troy.

But what is really going on here? Essentially gang warfare over a woman--blood and guts tricked out with burnished helmets and shields, violence and plunder in the name of honor, Iphagenia sacrificed like a child caught in a drive-by shooting. This is East LA in the high literary style. Homer worked with the materials at hand, and what he had was a brutal slave society that glorified violence and waste.

I understand it and am moved by it, this world of high drama at high stakes, honor, achievement, sacrifice and revenge. I can see myself in the fight. But the story under the literary surface always intrudes: butchery and waste.

Nowadays most people have better things to do and satisfy that yen for honor, violence and romance in art and sport. The Heroic Age only survives on the margins, in urban ghettos and the Third World--the global slum. We can read about in in detail and see it in high definition--suicide bombers, ghetto youths, white supremists: these are Homer's heroes.

There's no mystery why people do violence--it's what people like to do, and will do if there are no opportunity costs. The idea that their behavior has to be explained by reference to ideology, religious zeal, poverty, nationalism or even tribal loyalty gets it exactly backwards: these are rationalizations after the fact. I suspect that people who think senseless violence demands an explanation have never read Homer or else that they're so denatured or self-deceived that they don't recognize the impulse in themselves.

People want to fight, and that is what they'll do unless they have something better to do.

The Third Rail: Stem Cells and Social Security

Bush Would Veto House Bill On Stem Cells - New York Times

When it comes to stem cell research conservative politicians can't win. Most Americans, including religious conservatives, have little sympathy for embryos and much as their leaders hint that at a nightmarish future in which soulless zombies are cloned for spare parts, they are not impressed.

Spokesmen for the Religious Right have to take a conservative line on stem cell research to appear consistent, cover their tracks and maintain their alliance with conservative Catholics. Their constituents however are not on board.

The Catholic Church has a coherent if not entirely plausible position on these matters teased out of subtle Thomistic doctrines and a long tradition of casuistry--and its position on stem cell research is part of a "seamless garment" which includes opposition the death penalty and a body of teachings on social justice that makes conservatives gag. When Catholics talk about the "Culture of Life" they mean it.

Most conservative Protestants, "values voters" and their right-wing camp followers do not. They have no interest in the rights of fetuses, much less stem cells: they want restrictions on the availability of abortion because they want to deter people, particularly young girls, from having sex--or at the very least to discourage casual, recreational sex. But the conservative leadership doesn't dare admit it so they're obliged to cover their tracks by claiming a commitment to the Culture of Life and taking on commitments to unpopular views on euthanasia and stem cell research.

Stem cell research forces conservatives hand in much the way that Social Security does. Very few Americans have any serious interest in an "ownership society" or believe that the government should cut public services and income transfers as such. They just want to see to it that benefits do not go to the undeserving poor--particularly the non-white undeserving poor. They firmly believe that the respectable elderly should live well.

No conservative politician dares to articulate the de facto conservative creed and very few of their followers can admit it, even to themselves. Who wants to confess: "We believe that people should have less sex. We believe that the government should support parents' efforts to control their adolescent children and, in particular, see to it that there are penalties for sexual activity. We believe that people should live in the style to which they're accustomed, that actors, pop musicians and athletes should be fabulously wealthy so that we can admire their excess, that the poor here and abroad should work hard and live meager lives because they're used to it, and that the respectable middle-class should own their own homes with the full complement of motor vehicles and household appliances. We look for the life of the world to come, where all adults are straight and married with children, where men do men's work and women do women's work, where everyone plays their designated role and everything looks right. Amen."

How Family Circle Messed Up My Family

Family Circle Total Know-How Archive

I caved in and bought the latest issue of Family Circle from the supermarket check-out rack: I couldn't resist the "The Whole Family Guide to Getting Organized" advertised on the cover.

I've been reading Family Circle, Women's Day and, less often, other women's magazines since the age of 11, devouring the Helpful Hints and features on decorating, cleaning and organizing. About two years ago I decided to kick the habit: the decorating schemes were never to my taste; the tips on household organization and maintenance were always the same and never worked.

This month's feature (not yet online) was no surprise:

Clean-sweep as a family Each night before bedtime, clutter-bust for 15 minutes. To avoid arguments, take turns choosing the pick-up music (Dad's Otis Redding or Junior's Jay-Z) and race to see how much debris can be raked before the song is over.

I don't know who Otis Redding is much less Jay-Z. I've tried to stage these communal clean-up projects and got nothing but resentment. Are there really women out there who get their family picking up clutter to music as a jolly bedtime routine?

Share chores with neighbors Child care, bulk grocery shopping, even lawn-mowing during vacations can be rotated with neighbors to save time and build your community network.

Where are these bucolic villages where neighbors chat over the backyard fence and exchange chores? I've never even borrowed a cup of sugar, or known anyone who has. I know people want to live this way and believe that they should--I certainly do--but does anyone really?

Hire a local student Have him run occasional errands for you--the small expense may turn out to be a big bargain.

Where is this pool of students available for baby-sitting, errands and other casual work? Students old enough to work are flipping burgers or, in the case of the girls who live next door, selling Avon.

Forget about Martha Stewart, the impossible ideal: does anyone really live according to Family Circle standards--covering coffee cans with contact-paper, cutting up greeting cards with pinking sheers to make gift tags or using egg cartons and shoe boxes for 100 different purposes? I used to save egg cartons and tried to use them to organize paper clips, screws and "other small items" as recommended but it made a complete mess. Now that we have curbside recycling I feel a little less guilty about trashing those coffee cans, egg cartons and margarine tubs, but I still feel inadequate.

Some of the projects featured in Family Circie are clearly idiotic. Every year or so they run a story on women who save thousands of dollars on groceries by couponing. Typically, they feature a Couponing Queen who spends a year clipping coupons from packages and women's magazines, maintains elaborate coupon files, meets with other couponers from her neighborhood weekly to trade coupons and then (with the author of the article in tow) uses her coupons to buy $500 worth of brand name groceries for pocket change. Why on earth would anyone do this? Anyone who can tolerate this kind of drudgery could make lots more money as a secretary--part-time.

Still I worked hard and unsuccessfully to achieve the Family Circle lifestyle--with disastrous results. My husband was chronically furious about my household organization schemes and attempts to save money; my kids have never forgiven me.

Three years ago I gave up. Now I never even ask anyone to pick up or flush after themselves much less help with the housework--they never did, and now at least they don't yell at me. I don't try to save money: I buy whatever the kids want immediately, no questions asked. It's depressing: one of the central goals in my life since I was a child was to have a beautiful, completely organized house and to save as much money as possible. At least I have my job, which I like.

Does anyone ever manage to follow the recommendations in women's magazines? Are there really women out there who make the egg carton system work? Who make monthly menu-plans or freeze the week's meals in advance? Who have family calendars with schedules and assigned chores that people actually do stuck to their refrigerator doors? Who are they? Where are they? How do they do it?

Wow I am done!

I have sent off a revision of a paper due tomorrow and cleared my email box, commenting on second, third and fourth drafts of term papers. I've been at this for three weeks now since getting back from my last conference. I did 4 conferences in 5 weeks and have been catching up ever since. I'm not going to do that again.

Not exactly done though...the term papers will be coming in tomorrow and I give logic exams on Thursday and the Tuesday after. Oops--just got some more term papers. I'm too wiped out now to do anything seriously productive so I've been commenting on more student papers, running errands and sorting things out. Tomorrow exam week office hours, department meeting, and I start on a paper I have to get in for a May 25 deadline. Another for June 15. Then back to the book and all summer to do research!

This is the best job in the world! After 22 years I still can't believe I'm working. I can get almost any paper online. I download the pdf's, open on one side of the screen and on the other side take notes, and write papers. Every month I get notice that a paycheck has been direct deposited to my account. I still can't imagine why. I'm not punching a clock--other than teaching classes 9 hours a week and keeping my office hours. I'm not typing and filing or scanning people's groceries. I set my own goals, prepare my own classes, read papers, go to conferences and write--I'm not stuck in an office sorting paper clips to look busy, waiting for the end of the day. There's something to see when I'm done. I'm not doing repetitious tasks. I'm not bored. How can this be work?

One of those counterfactuals...

I wish I knew what conservatives believed would happen if liberals had their way--and I would be most grateful if someone would tell me. In fairness, I should give an account of what I think would happen if conservatives were able to push through their agenda.

Suppose that conservatives had a free hand and reorganized things in the US so that there would be less bureaucracy and regulation, lower taxes and less support for public services, and much of what government delivers in other affluent countries would be the responsibility of individuals, families, churches and other private organizations.

Life would be much, much riskier: the kinds of lives we lived would depend far more on dumb luck. The luck of the draw--whether we were born rich or poor, black or white, male or female, smart or dumb, able or disabled--would play a greater role in determining our lot in life and at every stage of our lives we would be vulnerable to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Those of us who could afford it would be able to save or to buy into insurance schemes to protect ourselves, but the ability to afford these hedges would itself be a matter of dumb luck.

If conservatives have their way, most of us will be more dependent on the good will of others. Workers will depend on the good will of employers for reasonable wages and decent working conditions, and employers who are morally committed to treating their employees decently will find it hard to compete: nice guys will finish last, and the Walmart model will triumph. The elderly will depend on their children for housing and financial support and the poor will depend on the voluntary contributions and support of those who are better off.

Public facilities will become a last resort for the poor. Outside of wealthy suburbs, where very few of us can afford to live, public schools will become charity institutions for the destitute and near-destitute. As middle class parents opt out of the system, public schools will increasingly become holding tanks for the "unsalvageable."

Society will become increasingly fragmented and tribal. The rich will live in gated communities patrolled by private security guards, send their children to private schools, generate their own electricity and drink bottled water as they do in other Third World countries. The white working class, attracted by affordable, segregated housing will increasingly migrate to exurban boom towns floating on a low-wage, low-skilled service economy (like Surprise, Arizona). Urban areas will become the exclusive property of the very rich and the very poor--the urban elite, gay and straight, who neither marry nor are given in marriage, living and working in glitzy high-rises, in a world without children, surrounded by squalid slums where the non-white underclass, new immigrants, and all the disabled, chronically ill and elderly who have no families to look after them, live in fear of violence and crime.

As opportunities and support services for women diminish, educated women married to high-earning upper middle class men, who can afford to stay home, will drop out of the labor force. At the same time, as wages and benefits for working class males decline, more working class women will be squeezed out of the home and forced into dead-end pink collar shit work in the expanding service sector. More women on net will enter the labor force but sex-segregation and the wage gap will increase as women become a permanent class of drudge workers.

On the bright side, as we become poorer, less educated and willing to accept less desirable work at lower wages, off-shoring and out-sourcing will decline. Firms, both domestic and foreign, will increasingly exploit cheap, largely female labor to do tedious tasks for low pay. Maquilladoras will move across the border to the US, sweatshops will flourish and Indian firms will contract work to American call centers. The declining dollar and exports of sweatshop products will diminish our trade deficit and, as we take our place in the Third World, people in other poor countries may resent us less and even forgive us.