9 posts tagged “feh”

Sorry, people.  I haven't had much to say lately.  I'm exhausted (new job, garden, super crap weather, son's been sick, etc.)  I used to be able to come online and get myself worked up about something and spout off--you know, back in the good old days of Gin and roses.  But I can't even do that anymore.  If there is indeed nothing new under the sun, then there is also no new illogic, no new stupidity, no new crap.  So it just doesn't bother me anymore.  I guess it does on some level, but not enough to make me want to tear open someone's jugular with my teeth, the way it used to. 

We did go to Texas over Memorial Day weekend, or at least the kid and I did (T stayed home and did manly things).  We went to Sea World and now our house has become a minor shrine to Shamu.  We spent time with the extended family.  For me, actually, the best part of the whole trip was watching my son totally hit it off with his cousins whom he hadn't seen in a couple of years.  He played basketball with Cousin Hunter, who is 14 and way too cool to be playing basketball with overexcited 3-year-olds.  He jumped on the trampoline with Cousin Conner--and that is nearly unbelievable considering Conner has fragile X syndrome and until recently had very limited social skills.  He cuddled with Cousin Lance who is also 14.  He let Uncle Pat take him to the potty, and yes this is a big deal, because he has a very well-defined potty ritual that he doesn't trust just anyone to execute properly (specifically, he is very concerned about the types of toilets, types of flushers, brands of soap, and whether or not the faucet and paper towels are automatic.  He likes Kohler and Crane toilets; he dislikes American Standard toilets because their flushes are too loud.  He likes when the flusher is present, not automatic, and shaped like a whale.  Seriously.  You can't just take him potty.  You have to remark on all these details.  It's odd).  Other than the extraordinary heat (I do so love it when the temperature and the humidity have the same numbers--90 and 90?  100 and 100?  How did I used to stand that shit?), it was a very good trip. 

I have to say, though, that I suffered without my T.  I have come to realize over the years that I need him.  His work schedule, as has probably been mentioned, is difficult, and we go for a couple of weeks with almost no family time, and by the end of that when he gets his 4 days off, I need the family time to bring me back to balance.  I get so out of whack without T around.  Anyway, it happened that we were in Texas and he was home during his 4 days off, so I never got that time with him to sort myself out, and I went off to Texas in a sour mood--a sour mood that existed mostly as a substrate.  That is to say, I had fun and was so glad to see my uncles and cousins, but at some deeper level, the mood never really improved.  Now T and I have made a pact that we're going to make better use of his limited days off so that I don't get so bent to start with.  Most of the married people I know are all about doing their own thing as individuals, getting their "me" time, getting time away from their spouses when they can.  We're not like that.  In our off time, we want to be together, we need to be together for what each of us gives to the other.  We're trying to get to a place, actually, where we'll both be working at home so that we'll be together even more.  It feels so strange to admit this, like we're the complete antimoderns.

Then again, I probably am the complete antimodern.  To hell with modernity.

I've also been thinking about Hegel.  And JS Mill a little.  It has always bugged me that Americans (and possibly people on other continents as well, but I'm not sure) get some kind of filter-down from philosophy (and lit theory to an extent) but don't actually know the source behind it and certainly don't understand it well enough to analyze and critique the ideas.  So, some half-assed version of Derrida-inspired postmodernism has filtered out into society and infected it like drug-resistant TB.  But much more insidious, to my mind, is the unquestioned Hegelian notion of progress.  Americans believe in progress.  It is a notion we have wholeheartedly bought into.  We tend to believe that the history of humanity is a progression toward something, a kind of ultimate, final humanity in which everything is (I guess) perfect.  Hegel posited the thesis-antithesis-synthesis paradigm, and while most people likely don't know what those three words mean, they mostly agree with the sentiment, and that is why anyone could take Francis Fukuyama seriously.  It has come to be--and Mill comes in here a bit--that a large segment of America thinks that any idea that is new and supported by a minority is a good idea and will constitute progress once accepted by everyone.  While I am sure hardly any Americans recognize the link between the American notion of progress and Hegel, I think that even fewer would want to know that one of the most important Hegelians is Karl Marx.  I keep asking people what they think is waiting at the end of history, the end of the rainbow, but the fact is that I reject the very idea of "progress."  I reject the idea that humanity is moving forward or even can move forward.  I was laughing at that QotD about how we can stop violence in the world, and while on some level Soup got it right when he suggested we could stop violence by just ceasing to be violent, on another level, humanity probably always will be violent.  We're animals.  That's what it comes down to.  We're animals, and animals are brutal.  I don't think that we can or should change that very fundamental fact of nature.  We don't make progress.  We go from one bad idea to another, not that anyone notices anymore now that everyone's on psychotropics of one kind or another.  We have no way at all to measure this "progress," except for money, and we take it for granted (despite all contrary evidence) that getting every people in the world on a monetary economy and getting them all into public education will be significant progress.  I guess then we can get them on Prozac, too, and the world will be supersweet.

So, I reject the idea of progress and I see no evidence that we are, as a species, making progress.  What I do see is that in the striving and the fighting to find the end of the rainbow, we're making life measurably worse on a microlevel.  Cultures and languages are dying at such a pace that it's laughable to even argue that they're worth saving.  People refuse to associate with neighbors and even family members because they hold differing political views or practice different religions or non-religions.  People are offended and angry all the damn time, about everything, even sometimes about kids who have the gall to, say, cry in public.  How has the world become better?  What is this progress? 

But of course our historical memory is so short now that we have no real way to measure what progress would be.  My husband and I think we are probably going to homeschool our son.  Most people's instant reaction is to express their concern that he won't receive proper socialization.  OK.  First, as recently as 100 years ago, hardly any kids went to public schools, and they mostly learned social skills anyway.  We seem to have forgotten that public education as the great socializing force is a new invention.  Second, and this is a big issue for me, do kids really need to be socialized to kids their own age?  Isn't the goal of education and child-rearing to teach them how to act like and someday become grown-ups?  Isn't the idea that someday they're supposed to not bicker and hit and throw sand and interrupt conversations but act the way grown-ups once acted?  How do they learn that from being around kids all day?  I'm at a loss as to how this works, even theoretically, because kids are going to mimic the behavior they see the most, and if that is childish behavior, they're going to act more childish and less mature.  I think back to when my grandma was a teenager and had her first kid when she was 15, and she was married then and for all intents and purposes, she was a grown-up.  She learned her social skills primarily from working with various generations together on farms; there were kids around, of course, but they were expected to be learning how to act like adults, and I'd say she did.  How does public school accomplish this?  I can't see, honestly, that it does.  I want my son to get a good education, one that challenges him and keeps him interested and on his toes, and I want him to learn how to be an adult.  And, really?  I'm supposed to think that somehow being around kids all day in a group where the focus is on the average is going to accomplish either of those goals?  Christ. 

I wonder if humans will ever get past the idea that we can do better than nature can and has for these millions of years.  We keep thinking that, whatever our knowledge of human and animal evolution teaches us, we can ignore that and do it the opposite way and it will be so much better.  If you're on the right, then you probably think big business can figure out better ways to subvert and control nature; if you're on the left, you think some combination of science and the government can.  This hubris is a kind of sickness, but that's alright because I'm sure Pfizer is working on a drug for it. 

Also, I want to say a few words about Libertarians because Colbert had Bob Barr on tonight.  I'm a libertarian (small 'l'--I'm not a party joiner), and we get a lot of flack for wanting to do away with the FDA or whatever and people are all, "But that's to protect our safety!"  To me, this is looking at the issue from the wrong starting point.  Why do we need the FDA to protect us?  Because we've allowed our lives to become ruled by centralized, unknowable corporations.  If we begin from a place where such centralization and lack of local control is a given, then the argument that we need bureaucracies like the FDA is persuasive.  But if we begin from a point where we get back to local control over education, land use, food sources and so forth, then we don't need big federal bureaucracies.  If you know the farmer who raised your food and slaughtered your chickens, do you really need a government inspector coming in to tell you it's safe?  Just go check out the operation, talk to people who eat the food from that farm, and figure it out for yourself. 

I'm always trying to teach my son that for every decision you make, whether it was the right one or the wrong one, you have to take responsibility for it.  You have to gather the information to make a decision, and then you make it, and you take what consequences come.  At his age, his decisions are mostly simple:  We can play for 10 more minutes, but then we won't have time to go to the library.  If you want to go to the library, we have to go now.  What do you want to do?  But he considers the information, and he has to live with the consequences, and that's what we want to teach him.  What we do not want to teach him is to just leave everything up to some faceless committee in Iowa and surely everything will be alright. 

Feh.  I hereby withdraw from society.  Does that mean I have to give back the economic stimulus check?

Hi, people.  I know I haven't been around and some of you have chastised me for it.  There are a lot of reasons I haven't been coming online I suppose.  One of them is that the weather has (finally!) been nice, so we've been outside every minute that we can be and we're undertaking a big yard-improvement project which, along with the veg garden, has been sucking every spare minute and bit of energy.  We also went fishing--we got our son his own fishing pole (I don't fish, but my boys do)--and it was a blast.  I do have to apologize, though, to the people and pelicans of Roberts, Idaho:  We deeply regret that one of our drink bottles flew off the pier while we were preparing to leave and we were unable to retrieve it before it got way out in the middle of the lake.  My son couldn't go to sleep that night worrying about that bottle; he was especially disturbed by the thought that one of the pelicans might mistake the shiny bottle for a fish and eat it and damage his bowels.  Seriously.  I'm pretty impressed that a 3-year-old went through that thought process.  I promised him that next time we're there we will pick up any stray bottles we can find--he's big into picking up litter.

Also, and I've said this before I know, but when I come online I end up getting angry about something or another.  If I avoid the computer, I'm really quite a happy and contented person--I cannot say I'm even-tempered because that is sooo not like me, but happy anyway.  That's no small thing.

I'm going to try this summer to keep up blogging about my gardening and canning and all that, but I can't do the rest of it.  I can no longer waste my energy reading crap that is poorly argued and is bound to upset me.  I was already thinking along these lines, but the other night I chanced to comment on someone else's blog (someone I don't know) and I posted this response to someone who stated that Americans don't apparently care about other nations:

Part of the problem seems to me to be that the mainstream media inflate certain things and completely de-emphasize others. Most of my American friends are well aware of this, and shows like The Colbert Report make it pretty freakin clear. But people in other countries are less likely to see that than they are the Fox/CNN crap which emphasizes the standard government line and doesn't focus on war protests or really anything that gets far away from the press releases they get from government and Pentagon officials. If that's all you know about America, then your view of it is pretty well screwed. But that's what you get for trusting the news. Meh.

And I have to say to karlos that I find it absurd that you think America does not care about the existence of other countries and yet more absurd that you think American voters should care more about other countries than they do about themselves. First, America--both the government and its citizens individually--is involved in projects to help other countries all over the world (in the Middle East, granted, it's only Israel). Even some liberal commentators have acknowledged how much aid the Bush administration has given to Africa. American NGOs, too, such as Habitat for Humanity and the Peace Corps are also involved in other countries throughout the world. The CDC does huge amounts of disease prevention work overseas. So, I don't think you have any substantive case that America in general does not care about other countries in general.

And I know that a lot of foreigners think that when we vote, it should be with other countries foremost in our minds. But give me a break. What country's people do this? Certainly foreign policy is an important part of this election, and we all know it. But it is just stupid to suggest that we shouldn't care about our economy. For one thing, our economy, being so big and tied to so many others, matters to the rest of the world, less now than it used to, but it still matters--China needs someone to buy all that crap. For another thing, nobody--I don't care what nationality--is going to vote for something that hurts them personally, and a lot of Americans are being personally hurt by the current state of the economy. I'm having a hard time thinking of another nation so beneficent that when some sectors of its population had longstanding 20%+ unemployment, they would care more about their nation's reputation in other countries than about economic policy. Perhaps there is one, but nothing jumps out.

Of course, we don't necessarily have to choose. Ideally, a politician will step forward with a decent economic policy and a decent foreign policy. I doubt that person is John McCain from what I've seen so far; however, so far, the Democrats are not looking like the shoo-in party that they should be. This should have been a cakewalk for them, but it isn't going to be now, unless I am much mistaken.

I then received a private message from the person I was responding to that indicated that he (I'm guessing from the name, but possibly she) stopped reading my comment after I started turning it into a personal attack.  I realize I don't always get a lot of sleep, and I'm lazy about proofreading, but I don't see personal attacks.  I did refer to his statements as "absurd" and "stupid" but unless his statements have taken on bodily presence (in which case, someone should alert the tabloids!), that isn't a personal attack. 

I do understand that the third paragraph isn't particularly strong argumentation, but lately I have been especially bothered by this notion some people seem to have that America should be held to requirements that no other nation is.  A lot of people talk about how racist America is as if racism existed nowhere else or talk about slavery as if America invented it.  I am to suppose that we are also the only nation with any other kind of bigotry, too.  I am also given to understand that we are the only people who get do or would get testy at illegal immigrants or that we are the only people in the history of the world who get testy, period.  We suck.  We get it.  We suck, we're the worst people ever, and you hate us.  Fine.  I don't personally give a crap anymore.  We're selfish, we're ungenerous, we're crazed fundamentalists, whatever.  Oh, right, and we hate the environment.  Are we done here?

Yeah, so, like I said, I'm tired of that, and I meant to point out that a) the US does sometimes do good things, b) we do actually sometimes as a nation demonstrate caring towards other nations, c) if you believe that the US is entirely defined and delimited by what you see on CNN, then (and here's your personal attack) YOU ARE STUPID.  There I've said it. 

Anyway, so then this person wrote me another message indicating--I don't remember.  If Fight Club taught me nothing else, it taught me that sometimes you have to say, "This conversation is OVER" and walk away, so I deleted it.  I did read it, but I gave it no further thought, although I believe he did ask what I thought "absurd" means causing me to violently roll my eyes.

So, today I check in with the old Vox to find yet another message from this tenacious little person that went a little something like this:

I was going to tear everything in your reply apart in the post but a] i was tired. b] i thought it polite not to c] i stopped reading when i found the insults and your comment got off the subject and became a personal attack

d] i noticed those in your neighbourhood and i am sure that had a bearing on your desire to insult me

that's that i suppose

Grr.  Twice tonight.  Twice in one night I have, showing my characteristic lack of luck and poor work ethic (I'm supposed to be working, not trolling the archives of the Atlantic Monthly, but anyhow), stumbled upon an article that has outraged me. 

The first one was a review of The Omnivore's Dilemma written by some Atlantic editor who is clearly a vegetarian, although he failed to come right out and say that, and is the sort of vegetarian who is never going to accept for any reason under any circumstance that anyone might have a decent reason for eating meat.  His decision that, in the facile words of The Smiths, "meat is murder" puts him on a higher plane than the rest of us, those of us who are clearly in denial about what it means to take a life in order to sustain our own, those of us too ignorant and immoral to follow him.  Well, you know what, buddy?  Fuck off, alright? 

Yeah, I know, that's not a good argument, but the minds of people like this (which by no means includes all vegetarians, thank heavens) are closed already.  There is no argument that I can make, no amount of elegant prose I can assemble, no moral justification I can muster to convince someone like this that eating meat is not the original sin.  I do want to point out, though, that Michael Pollan (and others--most hunters will tell you this) says that killing for your food puts you in a different relationship with death, makes you face the inevitability of it and the cycle of life in ways that can be disquieting, humbling, and profound.  Vegetarians never seem to believe this, probably because you don't get quite the same shock of our fragility and the eternal cycling of nature by uprooting carrots, but it's true.  Anyway, the fuckwit reviewer says that actually (because he is so much smarter and well read than Pollan, of course!) psychologists tell us otherwise (since when do psychologists know shit?):  As Otto Rank put it, "the death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other."  Our reviewer does not see, apparently, that this is not the opposite of what Pollan said.  The death fear of the fucking ego (sorry for the cursing--if I don't do that, seriously, the pomposity here will make my head explode) comes from our belief that we are separate from nature, that we are above and outside of the circle of life that makes life possible.  Our fear of death is based largely on the fact that we are in denial of it.  When you face the inevitability and even elegance of it, you lose the fear, certainly.  Am I totally wrong here or is this not one of the teachings of Buddhism?  We fear death because in our self-consciousness we see ourselves from outside as if we were outside of the systems and cycles of nature that, honestly, bring death to all--without exception.  We think, in our great big fucking narcissism, that we are so great that we are the exceptions, that our "souls" are so special that they cannot possibly perish.  Whatever you think about the immortality of the soul, though, the bare, ugly fact is that your carbon-based ass is doomed. 

The person who kills her food already admits this and thus, either gradually or suddenly, loses the fear of death and admits, as Heidegger would say, death into her home.  Are people better off when they fear death or when they accept it as natural and right?  You be the judge. 

The second article made me draw one primary conclusion:  Maybe we should just elect Hillary Clinton so that feminists will shut the fuck up.  Good Christ.  If you're a man and you dislike Hillary Clinton, then you are a misogynist because a bunch of youngish women say so.  Period.  If a woman *feels* like your remarks are sexist, then you are a woman-hater.  I love how the author marshalled this evidence primarily from among her friends and none of them can *quite* put their finger on where the sexism is in the remarks of their male, Obamaniac friends--they just kind of feel it's there.  She admits that Hillary's actual policies and positions are sometimes objectionable--the more you look at Hillary's record, the more like a freakin warmonger she seems--but there is a certain rabidity, maybe, that these incredibly sensitive young women are picking up on that just has to be rooted in misogyny.  Not that they have any evidence!  Just their hunches!  Not that their male friends who hate Hillary treat actual women in their lives with any hint of misogyny.  But, obviously, the standard line is that men fear and hate powerful women, so that must be what's going on here.  Right.  Case closed.  Brilliantly reasoned.

Listen, there have been very real cases of sexism directed at Hillary throughout her career in politics.  But not everything is.  Some people have strong dislike of Hillary because they don't feel she's honest, and that is going to draw moral fervor out of some people.  Some people retain intense dislike of Bill that gets transferred onto Hillary, not least because the prospect of Bill back in the White House is unsettling as hell for a lot of us (yes, "us"--ever since NAFTA and welfare reform, I have not been a fan--that's right, I don't support NAFTA).  A lot of people believe that the Clinton White House will again be plagued by scandal and meet resistance from Congress that will hurt their chances of getting anything done--not an unreasonable fear--and this also causes some of the strong anti-Hillary sentiment.  Some of us who were against the war at the start and never believed in the "intelligence" and wept a little at watching poor old Colin Powell prostitute himself by delivering it as fact have a very strong distaste for her because she was apparently too willing to go along and believe--that isn't who I want answering the phone at 3:00 a.m.  So, there's actually quite a lot going on here. 

The problem is that the first serious bid for presidency by a woman is Hillary Clinton, one of the most divisive figures in the current political scene who happens to be married to one of the other most divisive figures.  The problem is that *some* feminists are using Hillary's run as a test case against which to judge how sexist America still is as a nation.  But not all Hillary-hatred has anything to do with her vagina, and indeed much of it has to do with her husband and his Wandering Penis, the investigation of which thoroughly distracted the nation for so long.  This isn't a fair test case, because she isn't some abstract Platonic form WOMAN--she's Hillary Clinton.  It is fair to dislike, even hate, her and still not be a misogynist.  (Yes, again, I do realize there have been sexist comments directed at her, just as there have been racist or at least racist-ish comments directed at Barack.  The question here is really whether those represent the views of a majority, and I think the overwhelming answer is that they do not.  If McCain wins in November, it is not going to be because the Dems had a woman or a black candidate--it's going to be because the Democrats will take whatever advantage they have and piss it away.  I have a silly notion that being fingered as a sexist, not for anything you said but just kinda for the way you said it maybe?, is not going to win over the white male vote.  Call me crazy.)

Finally, I have to take up with this particular sentence for a minute, or many minutes:

"Especially white and well-educated women, who are catching up to their male counterparts, if not in terms of equal pay or domestic expectations or secure reproductive options, at least in their ability to pursue the education and vocation they desire."

Let's take a minute and reflect on those three things she mentions as places where women have not "caught up" to their male counterparts.  Equal pay?  Well, first, a lot of economists don't agree that it exists, once all variables are accounted for.  Variables includes things like the age of the workers (since the Census data includes all workers, and most senior ladies did not build up a career steadily over time, they make less money than men of the same age who put in more work years), time off for parenting (you could argue that gender inequity still exists there, sure, and I will argue that it is going to remain the case that women will more often take/need time off for parenting than men do until such time as we are either all hermaphrodites [which could happen in this great age of plastics] or that we get a kind of Handmaid's Tale society going, where some women do the reproducing and child care for other women so that they don't have to--the more nannies and surrogate moms we get, the closer we come to Margaret Atwood's fantastic utopian novel!  Wait--it is utopian, right?  Only, in our nanny version, the women aren't literally forced to do it, it's just that they have no other options due to the severe economic stratification that has resulted, let's face it, in large part from the lifestyle of the white privileged overclass, women and men alike), career choices (with more women choosing careers in lesser-paid fields and men typically doing more dangerous and rat-racey type work), and so forth.  If you look at the youngest workers in the Census data, the gap is 5 cents, i.e., women make 95 cents for every dollar a man makes, and considering some of those women are most certainly nonworking women and/or mothers, well, it's probably not as big a deal as we're meant to believe it is.  Five cents won't even buy a damned Atomic Fireball anymore.

The other issue here is another kind of economic disparity.  Men still earn most of the money, but women still do most of the spending, possibly as much as 80% of the discretionary spending.  So...so...well, I'll leave it up to you to decide what that means, because I'm once again on the verge of one of my "so, if I was a man, I would be drunk every night and would totally get hookers!" proclamations.  

OK, so the second claim about "domestic expectations."  Well, we've already pretty thoroughly hashed out the division of household chores bit, no?  I think I beat that one into the ground already.  Is there something else that is included in "domestic expectations?"  I don't know--I think it's a bit vague.  Women are expected to be more prettified and take more time with appearances, true, although men are doing it now too, and these days a lot of women are *choosing* this, so...well, so...

And finally--reproductive options.  Right!  Women are so far behind men on this one!  Let's see here:  Men have abstinence and condoms as methods of birth control--ah, and the vasectomy, let's not forget.  If pregnancy happens anyway, they have no choice about what happens to the fetus but will be legally obliged to pay child support, and if you live where I do, will be morally obliged to marry the mother.  And women have--well, it must be fewer options than that, right?  That's the implication.  Yet women also have available to them abstinence and condoms...and also pills and injections of various sorts, IUDs, tubal ligations, sponges and foams, the biorhythm method, the diaphragm, that new vaginal ring thingy, and heaven knows what else.  If unwanted pregnancy occurs, she can choose abortion, she can choose to keep the baby, or she can choose adoption.  Am I wrong?  Am I missing something here?  I think we're way ahead of men in terms of having reproductive options--we're just not necessarily any better than men are at using them.  Oh, right--she does say "secure" reproductive options.  And birth control is not securely available to every woman equally, admittedly, but with Planned Parenthood and public health clinics, it comes pretty close.  We need to close that gap, but women, it should be noted, do still have abstinence and condoms just as securely as men have them.  Available even at Wal-Mart!

So.  I know and understand that there is still sexism (and racism).  But a) her argument admits of no rebuttal--she knows you're going to say that it's just Hillary you're opposed to, not a woman president in general, and she just says that that's just the sort of thing feminism has been trying to fight, because if you really like women in power then I guess you have to accept any woman in power, right?  That seems to be the end of her story, even though she says otherwise earlier in the piece.  And b) these arguments are Simple Simon(e).  When the pay gap is diminishing rapidly, when women are attending college at the same rate as men and getting better grades, when women now share something like an equal amount of the domestic obligations with their husbands, when women no longer *have to* get married and have kids, when most women have a banquet of reproductive options open to them, maybe it's time to reassess what we talk about when we talk about sexism and misogyny.  I would have thought by now that Democrats would have fucking realized that the constant complaints at this very facile, very (let's say it) bitchy level is incredibly alienating to, wow, a lot of people. 

To some of us it seems whiny, elitist, way too feely, and essentially untrue in its major points.  There is nothing like listening to privileged white chicks gripe about the pay gap and their reproductive options to make my blood boil.  Just shutup already.  It is especially irksome to me given the fact that American feminism has little or nothing to offer to women who don't work and almost nothing for working-class women.  I didn't really notice this (I did notice the extreme elitism in most feminist writing, but not the ignoring of mothers) until I became a mother and faced the feminist wrath.  American feminism is not interested in mothers, and some strains of it are extremely hostile to mothers, unless they also work for pay.  Unfortunately, women were mothers long before money was even conceived of, and there is a fundamental bio-logic going on here that you're not going to convince most women to abandon.  That some feminists have become haters of mothers and children only serves to point up how very un-feminine American feminism often is--that you would not only deny but hate that part of who we are as women is misogyny of a far more disturbing sort than a Hillary nutcracker.  The Hillary nutcracker, at least, is meant as a joke--it is crass and unfunny, yes, but the women (and occasionally men) who loathe mothers and children are not even joking.  That's the sexism I worry about. 

This is why I should never, ever come online. 

So, there's this article rehashing the old complaint that women do sooooo much more housework than men do and so this is proof that women are ...well, whatever.  You know, because it gets said all the time.

I have a lot of problems with this.  Let's examine just this little blurb, a little blurb on which I'm sure much blood of men is going to be spilled.

1. The graph doesn't match the data in the lede.  The graph indicates that single men in 2005 do considerably less housework than married men, yet the accompanying text says that marriage saves men an hour of housework a week.  Then the text later goes on to say that married men do more housework than single men.  So, I'm guessing the graph is the correct version, in which case the opening of the article is just false and unfortunately reinforces the impression that, again, women have it so bad while men have it so good.
2. They say it's based on a time diary, yet they also did one of those fiercely unreliable surveys asking people to recall how much time they spent in the previous week doing whatever activity.  People's memories on this front are crazy unreliable.  Most Americans, for example, underestimate the amount of TV they watch per week by at least a couple of hours per day, and we know that from time diaries. 
3. If you look at the graph, assuming it is the correct representation of the data, the amount of housework done by married women and married men is getting pretty close to equal--that is NOT a 7-hour difference on the graph.  Time diary data I've seen before--as opposed to the surveys from memory--suggest this is true.  Bear in mind that this sample probably also included some people, most likely women, who do not work outside the home and it seems natural that they would do more housework than their spouses, no?
4. Why isn't gardening, lawn care, vehicle maintenance, and home repair counted?  Is that not housework, of a sort?  I know my husband does most of the vehicle maintenance and home repair, and I count that.  It's as integral to the running of our household as doing the dishes, possibly more so (If the furnace is on the fritz, we're fucked--if all the dishes are dirty, which is unlikely, we can always use paper, ya know?).  In my experience, most women do not count these activities as housework, and so when I hear them bitch about how their husband doesn't do the dishes, I'm all, "Oh, do you split the wood?  Do you fix the drippy faucets?"  Yah, some women do (I do, if I have to) but most don't.  Most seem to want their husbands to do all that work and an equal amount as they do of what they consider housework and also be sensitive and romantic and not watch football and also take them out to dinner because they are so oppressed by their housework.  God almighty.  It's a wonder more men don't crack.  And of course most men are still the primary breadwinners and expected, by society yes, but also very often by their wives, to put in long hours to make a brilliant career and pay for that goddamned mortgage.  It would drive me to drink.  (I am suddenly so reminded of some men I met in Japan, mostly Aussies but also Japanese and other nationalities who asserted boldly that marrying an American woman is akin to death.  It's not just that we have goals.  It's that we will slowly kill you with sudsy liquids.)
5. And finally, why is no attention paid to the fact that while the amount of time women, single or married, spend on housework has greatly decreased (by 10 hours a week or so for married women--and I would wager they fill almost all those hours watching Oprah), the amount of housework done by married men has increased by almost the same amount.  What sort of tragedy will befall the nation if we are forced to admit that men are actually stepping up and doing housework?  If we totted up the amount of time spent doing household repairs and lawn maintenance and so forth, I would hazard a guess there would be absolute parity here.  I also hazard a guess, though, that this survey was done at least in part with the old received wisdom that women do much more housework, even today, than men informing the survey--I am guessing, from what I've seen, that the theory drove the collection of the data, and I know for a fact it drove the way that reporter wrote the story up.  NEVER LET YOUR THEORY DRIVE YOUR DATA; IT SHOULD ALWAYS BE THE OTHER WAY AROUND.  ALWAYS.

I know I used to take it as truth that women today still do much more housework than their husbands.  I took that as fact, without any evidence to back up my belief, until I took a seminar called The Philosophy of Daily Life.  It was inexpertly named, but expertly conceived and taught.  Albert Borgmann wanted us to think about daily life in philosophical terms, to use philosophy as a way of thinking about quotidian and pedestrian things, to talk about the Good Life and what it meant and how to get there in terms of actual life.  He was distressed that philosophers tend to ignore the philosophical meanings, for example, of central heating (without a hearth, the focal point of the home has become the television, and the television tends to discourage familial interaction, while the hearth encouraged it) and the absolute state of disrepair that the family meal has fallen into.  One of the books we read was a survey of how Americans actually spend their time, and it was based entirely on time diaries.  That means that for every, say, half-hour segment of every day, as they were doing it, people wrote down what they were doing.  One thing they found was that, by and large, women are not doing nearly as much housework as they fancy they are, and in general, everybody has vastly more leisure time than they think they do.  They also, naturally, found that most people spend most of that time watching TV but think that they do not.  It's an interesting book and, no, sadly, I cannot find it anymore and cannot remember the name.  But I was shocked.  A theory I had held forever had been undermined by data.  I found myself forced to give up my belief.  If only others would follow suit.

No, ladies, I think it's time we moved on from this and found some new drum to beat.  This one is old and stinks really badly.  Unfortunately, articles like this one just perpetuate myths that we apparently desperately need to believe in.

You people have no idea.  This kind of thing suffocates me.  That's why I started the Vox, that's why I come across with so much vitriol sometimes, because when I read things that I know from data and from checking out the world around me to be totally untrue and ultimately harmful, the rage smothers me.  If I don't get it out, I can't breathe, until all of a sudden out will come a huge, explosive breath of anger, probably at T, and he doesn't need that.  He's certainly not responsible for this shit. 

I admit to also being greatly frustrated by the fact that when you actually try to converse with quotidian people about their pedestrian lives in philosophical terms, they typically become bewildered and hostile.  No one cares, no one wants to talk about it.  The only thing they can offer up is the accusation that you hate modernity and want to turn back the clock.  When you assert that actually what you want is for humanity to find new ways to keep what is valuable and adapt both modern life and tradition to each other so that we can retain the good things from both, eyes glass over.  Seriously.  It's frustrating and kind of soul-deadening.

Actually, since I'm here and roughly on the topic, I'm going to write about Heat by Bill Buford.  Why is this topical?  Hang on.  I just finished that book today, and I enjoyed it, although frankly it did nothing to ameliorate my opinion that Mario Batali is a bit of a prick (a prick who constantly mispronounces 'piquant' which irritates me).  But it's a good book, and I heartily recommend it.  Stephens, I believe I will be sending it your way.

Anyway, at the end, after his apprenticeship in meat with the butcher of Tuscany, Buford finds himself lamenting what has become of food in our modern times.  He laments the demise of the great Tuscan beef, the disappearance of great handmade pasta, the disappearance of certain traditions and foodways.  He also keeps asserting that the romantic Tuscans are somewhat insane, living without electricity and so forth, to pursue these nutty ideals.  He also goes on to say that he is totally not against global capitalism and blah blah blah.  It's just the food that worries him, how few people will know in succeeding generations how great food is supposed to taste, how it is supposed to connect us with ancestors and landscapes, how it is meant to communicate stories, legends, great epics of life to the eater.  It is not just dinner, and he seems like he's starting to get that...but then he doesn't really.  He doesn't seem to get that it's all connected.  No, you don't have to give up all the trappings and conveniences of modern life, but certainly the global economy and the constant striving for money above all other things of value are major forces in the undoing of food.  He's right that you can't simply blame the supermarkets--it's much more complicated than that.  But he is misguided in judging that people who care more about the culture of food (what Borgmann always calls the Culture of the Table) than they do about money are insane or deluded.  The pursuit of money above all other things means food--and other things, like family--take a backseat.  In the American case, it's not just a backseat; it's been dumped out onto the highway.  Oh, sure, we worship our celebrity chefs, but this is just a symptom of the problem.  We worship them because food has become mysterious to us, handed over to professionals whether they work for Kraft or Babbo or the school cafeteria.  It is only one of the many things we no longer seem to know how to do for ourselves, but it is among the greatest of losses, perhaps the greatest.  We can't get it back by visiting and deifying a great butcher in Tuscany but simultaneously saying that we still want everything else to be the same, with the McMansions and the cheap Chinese imports and the commitment to television.  That is unrealistic and fundamentally misses the point.  If food is culture, then this culture is getting the food it deserves, which is "convenient" and processed and generally pretty cheap (contrasted to the very expensive food in great restaurants) and disconnected from culture and landscape and reality and overall kind of disappointing, if you know how really great food can be.

That's why I don't think that becoming a proficient home cook is merely a matter of cooking being one pasttime among many and those who enjoy cooking should do it and those who don't shouldn't.  It's more important than that.  More is being rejected by those who don't cook and more is being lost--the stakes are much higher here than they are if someone doesn't like football, say, or parades.  That's one place, too, where I agree with Tony Bourdain:  To say up front that you will never eat meat is to reject a vast array of cultures and their traditions and their soul, often including your own--in many cases it is to reject your own family, though it is perhaps not surprising given that we are already often disconnected from our families in profound ways.  It is to assert yourself, as an individual, over the social (except in cases, such as in India and among Buddhist monks, where the society is overwhelmingly vegetarian).  Imagine someone going to stay in monasteries in Japan and refusing to eat vegetables--it would be offensive, an outrage. 

I know.  I'm hyperbolic, I'm judgmental, I'm no doubt making too much of it all.  I'm the one standing on the deck of the Titanic asking why people don't care about saving this incredibly beautiful heirloom deck chair.  I know.  But you know, in my little corner of the world, I'm going to keep that deck chair.  Hopefully, it floats.

So, I was a lit major for quite a while, until I discovered linguistics.  I was always chronically irritated by my lit classes because, for the most part, there was no rigor there.  People would stroll into lit classes and just sort of say whatever they wanted to say and, by and large, as long as what they were saying reflected the accepted "politically correct" view, they skated by with it, no matter how stupid or unrelated to the text.  In short, it was everything I hate, except that I like to read novels.

In the course of my literature career, I had to read Kate Chopin's The Awakening several times.  It's an alright novel, though I am of the opinion that it is famous mostly because its writer was a woman.  It's certainly not a bad book, but I'd rather read Carson McCullers any day.

But what really irritated during all those tedious class discussions is that people consider this a "feminist" book and the main character--I hesitate to say "protagonist" because I find her not very sympathetic--a sort of heroine.  I don't see it.  The woman isn't oppressed; she's bored.  There's a difference.

It's been a while since I read it, but let me see if I recall the details.  She is married to a reasonably wealthy man.  She has "octoroon" nannies for her kids--weren't they octoroon, or maybe quadroon?  (What a great word!  I want to be an octoroon!)  She doesn't have to work at anything, really, since she doesn't have to make money, take care of her kids, do her own housework, cook their meals or any of it.  Her husband even goes so far as to permit her an affair.  Sooooo, she's oppressed how exactly?  Oppressed by ennui, no doubt, but there is a good reason why that is a reflexive verb in French--she is boring herself. 

I was just reading something, maybe on Salon, that again referred to this damn novel as a feminist novel.  Feck!  If that is a feminist novel, making some huge statement about bored upper-class women, then little wonder I never seem to find myself having anything in common with "feminism."  Meh.  I'm crying a river for bored ladies everywhere.

Incidentally, since we're talking about my infamous career as a literature major, there are two things worth pointing out.  The first is that in a heated discussion about WEB DuBois I was, in fact, labeled a "racist" by my (very white) professor and the majority of the class, virtually none of whom had read the text.  I would later be labeled a "racist" by all the white people in my Harlem Renaissance class but NOT the African-American professor who actually knew what I was talking about and saw my point, even if she didn't 100% agree.  Besides, WEB DuBois was totally a tool of the Japanese imperalists.  Booker T Washington FTW!

The second is that I did finally find some rigorous lit classes.  Freudian interpretation was *extremely* rigorous and I worked my ass off for that class, and then the Literature of American Imperialism seminar was also very good and rigorous although my viewpoint that I really didn't care whether every novel had serious female characters and was fully comfortable with some novels being focused on men--we were talking about Heart of Darkness at the time--was scoffed at because I guess every story needs great female characters even if it would be a detriment to the plot line or realism or whatever.  Are there enough good female characters in the canon?  No.  Does Heart of Darkness need one or more?  No.  Does it offend me to read novels that are all about men doing manly things?  No.  Better than reading novels that have nothing to say except that rich housewives are bored.

Anyway, by the time I found a couple of professors who did not accept this kind of laziness and made students actually consider what they were saying, I was already lost to linguistics.  Oddly, my linguistics professors could talk about literature more competently than some of my literature professors.  The clear difference was that in linguistics, if you hadn't read the text, you couldn't really bullshit your way through it (although some people certainly tried) and we talked about data and evidence and syntagms.  It was awesome.  And we managed to get through entire semesters without anyone being labeled a racist or a misogynist, which I found admirable. 

I think I mentioned once before here that I gave a paper at a conference that the audience entirely failed to understand.  It was the paper I wrote for Literature of American Imperialism, and it wouldn't have been so difficult if the audience--mostly lit majors with a few creative writing majors just to throw everyone's game off--were accustomed to rigorous thinking.  What I was saying was definitely not the approved perspective on the politics of The Other, but I could have been talking about why monkeys like potato chips for all they knew. 

Rigor, people!  I want more rigor!  Not stories about upper-class ladies who are bored!  I prefer the women who, like, do stuff.  Stories about bored people are usually, prima facie, not very interesting.  Stories about chicks who kick ass, now that is a different kettle of fish altogether.  But most of all, if you're going to claim something as "feminist" at least make that claim reasonably defensible.  OK?

I've had the Mormons* over a few times now--you know, the earnest young men in suits who come around trying to convert you, like the Jehovah's Witnesses, only Mormon instead.  T thought I should have shooed them off a long time ago, but I like having company.  They've been putting my lack of faith to the test, and it's been interesting.

No, no, I'm not converting, not at all, but it was interesting trying to explain to people who clearly have a lot of faith in God what it means to have none at all and how you could come to be like that (to be honest, I don't know how I came to be like this--I just am and always have been, though certainly living with an archaeologist and a physical anthropologist has not helped). 

Anyway, it got me to thinking about atheism.  I've been an atheist as long as I can remember, but for me it means exactly what it says--a lack of belief.  Nothing more, nothing less.  It has never meant to me that I'm absolutely dead certain that no god exists or has ever existed.  It does not profess some alternate belief.  It does not define me or anything about me.  It only means I don't believe in God or any other god (and, OK, it also means that when confronted by that heinous song, "Our God is an Awesome God" I am prompted, unlike Christians, to ponder whether any of the other gods implied by the phrasing are more awesome or at least equally awesome--the song does not rule out such a possibility, which I think would really piss the Old Testament God off a lot.  Ahem.)

The point is that I was always somewhat confounded by the accusations occasionally hurled by Christians that atheism is a religion, too.  But looking around at other atheists, including but by no means limited to the Atheist group on Vox, I can kind of see their point.

Atheists, let me ask you this:  Whence the fucking moral superiority?  I understand you think people who believe are stupid and intellectually inferior because they have just not seen the light understood the wonders of science as deeply as you have.  Also, you think "religion kills" which is akin to saying "guns kill" or "silver hammers kill"--the point is that none of those things kill in the absence of people (and specifically, people named Maxwell). 

Let's start there.  The first point is obviously falsifiable.  Stupidity has plenty to go around and it does not spare those who do not believe in God.  Some of the smartest people I've ever known have been religious.  The rest of the smartest people I've ever known haven't been.  There has been no discernible difference in quantity or quality of intelligence between the two groups.  It seems to be true that more educated populations tend to be less religious, but that doesn't say anything about the intelligence of any given individuals, and even in less religious societies you will find intellectuals who believe in God. 

As to the second point, "religion" does not kill and cannot, being a concept rather than a concrete thing.  Certainly, all manner of craziness and slaughter has been perpetrated in the name of religion.  On the other hand, there has been all kinds of craziness and slaughter perpetrated by humans that had nothing to do with religion or had to do with religion in name only.  The current quagmire in Iraq would be a case in point, I believe.

Furthermore, just as we insist that you cannot prove the existence of God (and you can't--if St. Thomas Aquinas failed, if Descartes failed, then so, surely, will you), neither can we prove the nonexistence of God.  It is generally held to be logically impossible to prove nonexistence, but even if this were not the case--if nonexistence of a thing can be proven--and even if we thought we had proved that the Judeo-Christian God does not exist, this does not demonstrate that no other god or gods exist, and so the work of disproving "god" is not ever really going to be done, even if it were theoretically possible (with an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters...). 

There are good arguments that gods generally and God specifically are inventions of the human mind.  Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Julian Jaynes put forth a whole slew of direct and indirect arguments that this is so, enough that I find their logic compelling.  It is worth noting two things about that, though.  The first is that I was already a person lacking faith.  The second is that the fact that we invented god/God does not mean God didn't or doesn't exist.  Hear me out.

If the notion of "god" is a product of human imagination, this would have to mean that no god exists independently of humans, that the gods we usually think of, and certainly God as written in the Bible, do not exist in the absence of human consciousness.  But to say that something cannot exist if it is the mere product of our minds is, again, patently false.  We would have to say, then, that music does not exist, that language is not real, that consciousness itself is nothing.  It's true that there are differences between language and God or music and God, yes, but there are also similarities (not the way Christians think of God, as a being who created us and exists completely independently of us, no, but in the way that I think gods came to be).

To me, faith is a beautiful thing and belief in God is not essentially less worthwhile than sincere appreciation of music or linguistic art.  That's not to say that I believe in God or any god.  I don't.  While I do appreciate music and especially linguistic art, my faith component is missing.  I look to other sources to explain the same things that people who believe explain via gods (or I just don't explain them and let things be all cool and mysterious), but I don't think this makes me a better or smarter person than someone who has the faith that I don't.

Back in the grad school days, when I was taking a lit seminar called The Literature of American Imperialism (one of the best classes I ever took, by the way), I wrote for my seminar paper an essay about otherness.  Obviously, the class was permeated with opportunities to curse Privileged Dead White Men--it was an excellent survey of the peculiar sorts of horror that colonialism and even just the imperialist attitude can perpetrate.  "Other" was a term that got tossed around a lot, too, and in the wrong hands even such a simple word takes on an air of jargon, but generally speaking, it means someone who is not like you, but particularly someone who is oppressed in some way by you and people of your ilk.  The idea in such seminars is that the Other who was once objectified and silenced is now given space and respect and individuality and Thou-ness (to borrow somewhat obnoxiously from Buber). 

But apparently that meant that the former objectifier--the aforementioned Privileged Dead White Man--became the objectified, the vilified, the silenced.  Now I am not so silly as to have tried to argue that the Dead White Man was right in his opinions and actions--certainly not--but I was naive enough to venture the argument, just occasionally, that these Dead White Guys were Other to us now.  Even though we're white (we all were in that seminar, go figure) and think we are therefore similar, we are actually not.  Not only has the elapsed time made us think much differently than they did, the changes in religion vs secularism, changes in science and education about the world, et cetera, have made us so different from those guys (OK, sure, not the guys who perpetrated the Vietnam War, but from Columbus and Cortez?  Uh, yes) as to make them unknown and Other to us.  We think, because of our skin color, that we know them, but we don't and if we silence them, we never will--and that means not understanding our own history as well as the histories of the Others (because those histories are intertwined, see?).

It was a long essay, and I'm oversimplifying here (the actual essay was apparently so complicated, and so infused with Heidegger, that when I presented it at a conference, some of the audience confessed to me that they hadn't understood it at all--okayyyyyyyy), but the point is that it's become commonplace for atheists to denounce Christians as stupid bigots, and maybe you think that since they are the majority there can be no serious bigotry against them (which would mean you don't believe in "reverse racism" and so forth either, probably).  But I say that that is wrong--wrong and immoral.  The fact is that since everyone is Other to you in some way, everyone deserves identical respect as an individual and an equal, fair hearing.  Bigotry is bigotry, no matter what college it went to.  And I'm having no more of it.

Obviously, my general contempt for humans remains.  Sure, I can think we all suck equally and still provide everyone, no matter their race or creed, an equal opportunity to suck.  We suck as a species, and the general self-righteous bigotry from all sides just kind of supports that thesis.  A few days ago I was sad about William Buckley's death because I had a lot of respect and admiration for him, even though we obviously disagreed about many, many things.  Doesn't matter, see?  It isn't only the people who are like you already who are worth listening to.

*By the by, is anyone else surprised to hear that Mormons and Jews each constitute approximately 1.6 percent of the US population?  I would have thought there were many more Jews than that and certainly more than Mormons, but apparently it is the case. 

**A lot of this post probably needs further development to make it really coherent and sound.  But it's very late, and I'm getting tired, so it will have to wait.  No doubt my brilliant commenters will have things to add, too, that I never even thought of.  I hope so.  The era of my moderation is still in its infancy, and it could use some help growing up.

Feh.  I kind of feel like just leaving it at that.  Just "feh" is what's going on, how I'm feeling, what's new.  Feh.

Which is why I haven't been writing much.  "Feh" doesn't make for great posts.

But today, I ran across something (thanks again, Broadsheet!) that I have to comment on.  I mean, I could just say "feh" again, but dammit I get so sick of things sometimes that even though they probably do not directly affect me, I just get my panties all in a bunch.

The post is about a book called The Daring Book for Girls.  I totally have to get this book, because I love this sort of thing, but this is the first time I've heard of it.  Tracy Clark-Flory (on Broadsheet) says she fears that a book like this is irrelevant, a mere nostalgia trip for girls who are way past their tweens, girls who learned from their classmates how to summon Bloody Mary and how to fight off boys' cooties.  She thinks it is likely, and she cites at length (and links to) this column that says the same thing, that in this age of media saturation and girls obsessing over their hairstyles and weight, these simpler pleasures just can't compete.  They think it is unlikely that parents can fight the rising, overwhelming tide of tween pop culture with all its fucked-uppedness.

Fortunately, some of the commenters on the Judith Warner column are sane enough to realize that, yes, you can, if you're a reasonably attentive parent.  I know when I was a preteen girl, back in the debauched '80s, my parents fretted over the messages sent by Madonna and Daisy Duke and Motley Crue.  They thought MTV would probably lay waste to my cognitive skills.  They reckoned the Atari was the second coming of Satan (yes, I'm exaggerating).  They knew they couldn't keep me from all those things forever, but they also knew that they were the parents and they could damn well control what came into their house.  We didn't get cable, and we didn't get an Atari.  What I got were books and lots of them--oh, and a chemistry set that was the coolest thing ever.  Once I was already idolizing Marie Curie and Sandra Day O'Connor (and dressing about as fashionably), my parents stopped worrying about me.  There's no coming back from nerdiness that severe.

I did watch MTV (and sometimes HBO--ooh, hot!) at my grandma's house and at my father's house, and it was always engaging to see what Prince was doing to his guitar now, or to gawk at Madonna's latest getup, or to try to puzzle out what exactly Def Leppard and Whitesnake were insinuating ("pour some sugar on you?  did I hear that right?  I am not sure why you'd want that, but alright--and also, I'm pretty sure those pretty girls in the video are just there for the money, just so you know"; "slide it in?  slide what in?  huh?  ewwww, gross.  and are you wearing makeup?  ewwwwww.")

Anyway, the point is that my parents exercised quite a bit of parental control over what I was exposed to.  To take it an unnecesssary step further, my mom would often engage mortified me in "discussions" over images of women in the media and blah blah blah.  While I was carrying on an internal monologue that mostly consisted of "Damn if she says 'breasts' one more time, I am totally going to puke," I didn't really participate in these discussions, but (and I hate to admit it) it did make me think.  Mostly it made me think I didn't want to be one of those girls, because all the time spent on beauty maintenance would totally cut into the time I could a) read, b) play army, c) produce noxious gas with the chemistry set, or d) ponder the existential significance of David Byrne.

It's always convenient to have someone else to blame for your own shortcomings, but I wonder what the dialogue in these people's houses is like when Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama (or, God for-fucking-bid, Oprah--or even Tyra, crazy Tyra!) is on the TV.  They're all in the news (Michelle Obama much more than she wants or needs to be) and on talk shows and otherwise getting mass publicity.  Do these parents whose girls are obsessing over Lindsay Lohan watch the news with their kids?  Do they talk about current events with their kids?  If they do, do they keep bringing up the fact that Hillary is a woman and Barack is a deferential husband (and therefore, a total pussy), or do they keep it focused on the issues that matter?  That you talk about Hillary matters a great deal, but how you talk about Hilary also matters, like she's the first girl to try out for the football team and this stunt she's pulling is just her way of getting attention. 

Or, wait, let me guess.  The kids don't want to watch the news and talk to you, so they have TVs in their rooms and watch their own things.  They spend yet more hours with their iPods and their Facebook and their video games and their txt msgs.  You're busy, too, and so you guys hardly ever sit down for meals as a family and talk about stuff, whether mundane or important.  And you're stressed from your job so you let your kid watch whatever on TV because it's easier than fighting with her.

Yeah, well, in that case, I guess you can't fight it. 

I don't know, I think I'm crazy old-fashioned.  I think that once you sign up for this parenting gig, you kind of have to keep up your end of the bargain.  The fate of the world doesn't lie in it, no.  The fate of even this particular individual, your child, doesn't hang on every little decision you make--sure, we all make mistakes, and, yep, for the most part, your kids will survive those mistakes intact.  But it seems to me like there are some parents out there who are totally abdicating responsibility.  For those parents, man, the TV could be filled with nothing but Laura Ingalls and all video games could have the psychological complexity of Pong, and their kids would still be screwed up. 

Damn.  I think I need to get another chemistry set.

Alright, little dude.  I see you looking at me.  I know--I'm in my 30s, I'm pulling my kid in a wagon.  I look square, conservative.  I know. 

I also see that little sneer.  You think you're pretty cool with your piercings and all that.  You think I'm not, because the categories "mom" and "cool" are mutually exclusive in your tiny little world.

Fair enough.  But listen up, son.  I see you're a fan of NIN.  You know, I first bought Pretty Hate Machine when you...oh, by the looks of you, I'd say you weren't even born.  The point, of course, is that if Trent Reznor ever really shocked anyone (actually, he shocked my parents--fucking Baby Boomers, man), that time is long since past.  I still like NIN and some of the other music you listen to, but it's not shocking, even to a square mom like me.  The only shocking thing about some of the music you like and listen to it is its unbelievable banality. 

And, hmmm, you like violent video games, you say?  The fuck, man?  Who cares?  Oh, sure, no one in my generation has ever seen violence before...of course.  You can't seriously be that stupid.  And it might have occurred to you at some point who was writing those games--for the most part, they're closer to my age than yours.

Yes, yes, you look at some terribly shocking sites on teh intarwebs.  *rolling eyes*  I remember back when there was just a rudimentary system of bulletin boards, I found (on one of the classier boards) a rather startling short film of a woman doing, well, very eye-catching things with a Coca-Cola bottle.  So, yes, it was in 1992 that I realized that the Internet would exist primarily for porn.  I wasn't shocked or even terribly surprised back then, and I am not ruffled in the least by this fact some 15 years on. 

I know--you think you guys invented this "socializing" online, the violent games, the porn, the scandalous music.  I suppose to some extent it is youth's prerogative to believe they have invented everything anew.  But, oh...how little you know.  I could make some trite quip about how I don't judge you by your ill-placed piercings, so you shouldn't judge me by my stroller and mama-gear.  Perhaps I should hand over my little iPod knockoff and show you that NIN's cover of "Get Down, Make Love" is playing on it right now, while I'm out taking a merry stroll with my toddler.  Maybe I should tell you what it felt like seeing the Amok catalog for the first time, or my first nauseating encounter with rotten.com.  Perhaps I should recount for you the thrill of my first online affair--back in, goodness, 1995? 96?  Something like that.  In other words, the oldsters like me, well, we've had some time to get used to these things already.

No, kid.  You little shits didn't invent any of this, and as far as I can tell, you haven't really done anything new with any of it.  I've seen all this before.  Oddly, my parents hadn't, so it's possible that my generation actually did some new, shocking things, but your generation is utterly failing to live up to the promise of youthful revolution.  It's kind of sad, really.  See, it's your duty to shock the older generations, but to do that you need to come up with some level of depravity heretofore unthought.  Maybe you could all stop listening to Eminem, you could all stop having sex, you could all stop underage drinking, you could get no tattoos or piercings.  You could run off and all become devout Buddhist monks or something.  That, at least, would raise my eyebrows.

Also, the clothes you're wearing are totally from Hot Topic.  Hot Topic is in the mall, man.  Clothes that come from the mall are by definition not shocking.  If they were shocking, all the old ladies who powerwalk here in the mornings would start dropping off from heart attacks.  If the old ladies can handle it, I'm pretty sure I can too. 

So, for some damn reason, my husband was watching the evening news tonight, and there was a SPECIAL REPORT about TERRORISM ON OUR SOIL. 

It seems there is a new WARNING that there are SLEEPER CELLS and TERRORISTS and TERRORISTS IN TRAINING right here in AMERICA.  They are planning to ATTACK at any minute. 

Huh.  Terrorists?  Like Timothy McVeigh?  Or the Unabomber?  Or Alberto motherfucking Gonzales?  Or perhaps you mean the "pro-life" bombers? 

Sleeper cells?  You mean, like the Militia of Montana?  Or maybe like the KKK?  Or maybe like the Jehovah's Witnesses?

Terrorists in training?  I assume this is a reference to the School of the Americas? 

I'm so glad I watched the news.  Now I know to be very AFRAID.  Now I am grateful that the last time I flew on an airplane, the surly "security" guard confiscated my toothpaste.  I am so glad Bush has had the foresight to go with the wiretapping and the Gitmo.  I am so very grateful, you see, because clearly Americans are NO LONGER SAFE IN THEIR OWN HOMES.  It all makes perfect sense now.

Dammit.  If it weren't for my generally sedate nature, I'd be really worked up about all this.