30 posts tagged “judgments”

OOOOH, Emily Yoffe has brought the noise! 

Yeah, she made the outrageous claim that kids do better in a household with two married parents, preferably their natural ones (but, sure, adopted ones can stand in just fine and so can responsible and caring stepparents--that's my commentary, I guess, since I don't think she really addresses it, but given the fact that her article is so focused on the economic benefits of two-parent households, it would make sense).  I know, I know!  She's so utterly Victorian!  To even suggest that women might oughtn't (Too much time in Arkansas.  Just deal with the double modal.) conceive of children with someone who ain't going to be around come time to buy diapers!  It's so oppressive!

Or, I guess, that's what Broadsheet thinks.  But, meh.  They get a big meh and even a snort of contempt because they (where "they" equals Tracy Clark-Flory) present no actual evidence or data to counter anything Yoffe wrote.  Nothing.

The thing that bothered me most about Yoffe's piece wasn't the thesis of it or her focus on the economic indicators, because those are important.  But I thought she ignored one of the most brutal problems with kids born out of wedlock:  Not only are these kids almost certainly going to grow up poorer and with less parental involvement (duh), they are vastly more likely to be victims of child abuse.  Kids raised by two parents other than their own natural or adoptive parents are at increased risk of being abused, but that number increases higher for kids who have no father figure around at all, except maybe (and possibly worst of all) a string of boyfriends.

There are a lot of possible reasons for this, and you can peruse the Internet at your leisure to find hypotheses galore, although a lot of them have to do with economic stress and are thus related to the poverty argument, but there are other possibilities as well.  It is a fact that most fatal child abuse is perpetrated by the biological mother and most sexual abuse of children is perpetrated by a male who is not the biological father. 

There are a host of other worrisome statistics.  Kids who grow up without their fathers are more likely--in some cases, vastly more likely--to engage in all kinds of risky behavior, end up dropping out of school, end up on drugs, in prison, etc.  Most rapists grew up in fatherless households.

I have seen some research suggesting that two adoptive, committed parents of the same sex (yeah, I'm talking about the gays.  Yesterday I mentioned the Latins.  Today it's the gays.) are equally effective at preventing most of these bad outcomes (I'd say becoming a rapist is a bad outcome, wouldn't you?), leading some to suggest that perhaps it is the mere presence of two loving people who are absolutely committed to the child's best interests.  However, the research is somewhat limited due to a) that type of family being relatively rare and b) the fact that most of the gay couples who adopt/give birth are well educated and of above-average income, confounding comparison with most children born out of wedlock.  That being said, I will continue my support for gay adoptive parents--I don't know, but I have a gut feeling that the more loving and stable adoptive homes that exist for kids, the better off we all are.

It is of grave concern to me that feminism seems to care very little about what is good for kids (or men) because they are so focused on what is "good" for women.  Feminism will continue to ignore the data that kids do much better in a stable home with two parents because it suggests that women should, oh, at least consider how their choices are going to affect others.  And we can't have that.  Or at least Tracy Clark-Flory can't.  The commenters on that piece are a bit more reasonable about it.  No one--not even me or Emily Yoffe--is suggesting that women should marry men who are clearly unable to act responsibly toward both the mother and child and obviously not abusive men or men who have violent rages and make the house feel unsafe and constantly stressful.  Yoffe and I would venture to suggest, though, that perhaps women should GET ON THE FUCKING PILL before they allow themselves to get knocked up by these guys.  But, of course, we shouldn't get all judgey and preachy at women (and men, sure) who are totally fucking their kids over because it's, like, a woman's right to do what she pleases.

Every time some new report comes out that links some behavior in the mother with some outcome in the kid, every damn feminist website screams, "OH MY GOD, THEY ALWAYS BLAME THE MOM."  Well, sometimes, maybe it's the mom's fault, eh?  It's less about blaming the woman, I think, than about finding out what's best for kids, but the constant focus on the woman, the woman, always the woman, means that we can't find out what risk factors there might be for childhood obesity, for example.  Because if it's linked to working mothers, as it has been, the feminists will fucking shriek.  Similarly, there will be a shrill outcry if it is suggested that wymmins are animals and share any qualities with other female animals, including, of course, the dreaded maternal instinct.  We don't have instincts!  We went to college! 

I know, I know.  I'm hopelessly conservative and out of date.  But I warned you:  I care fuck-all about "progress" if progress means throwing kids under the bus.  I also famously hate the type of diseased individualism we have taken to celebrating in this country--hey, man, whatever you want to do as long as it makes you happy.  Feh.  As Kant said, doing your duty first makes you worthy of happiness and 'duty' implies the existence of some type of relationship.

Now, maybe I'm just engaging in pointless handwringing.  God knows, that's what Tracy Clark-Flory would say, right?  Maybe all of those differences between single-parent households and two-parent households can be explained simply by the poverty.  I don't really see how you can ferret out the differences between differences caused solely by poverty and those related to the presence of parents, because in so many cases it is precisely the loss of the one parent that causes the poverty.  So, is the loss of the parent causing the poverty, and then the poverty causes the other problems?  Or is the absence of the parent causing all of it, proximally?  And what are we to make of the fact that biological fathers who live with their children are, compared to single mothers and unrelated men, less likely to abuse their children?  And, by the way, comparisons to Scandi-fuckin-navia don't really hold up; there are so many cultural differences between the US and Sweden that it's way too hard to control for all the variables.  It is certainly possible that with their system that has come close, or so I hear, to eliminating child poverty in their countries also eliminate or nearly eliminate the social difficulties of single-parent households.  Anyway, eliminating child poverty is a worthy goal even if it doesn't, but it's too hard to say. 

Furthermore, comparisons with the animal world are not helpful here since there are no other animals that I can think of who require several years of care before they become independent of their parents.  Also, no other animal young are expected to learn language, to learn to be civilized and ethical, etc.  Human children take much more effort and care and time than any other animal young, so far as I know.  Correct me if I'm wrong--is there some rare bird in the Upper Orinoco that has young who now require 12 years of schooling before they are ready to the leave the nest?

I'm going to go ahead, since it's late and I'm tired, and go way out on a limb here.  I have, as some of you know, a special interest in sociopathy.  Of the sociopaths I have personally known, all of them came from fatherless homes (and some of them from motherless homes, too, i.e., they had been abandoned by both parents).  It makes a certain amount of sense since, while there is probably a biological component for the antisocial personality disorders, it is thought that they can be prevented in early childhood through certain parenting techniques--parenting techniques that are often more doable in a two-parent household.  I would suggest--and some others have, too--that single-parent households are more likely to push kids who already have the biological component to become sociopaths and that two-parent households have a higher likelihood of preventing it.  Incidentally, the rapists mentioned above are more likely to be psychopaths than sociopaths, though they both lie at various places on the antisocial spectrum.

I was just thinking about this the other day, how in this country we put children in their own beds as soon as we can get them to sleep there.  We have a host of experts telling us how to fight the baby's natural instinct to cry like hell when they are left to sleep by themselves; we have to send the message, of course, that in this life, kiddo, you're on your own.  I think attachment parenting gets some stuff wrong, too, but how can we expect kids to grow up feeling part of a deeply loving relationship, feeling that other people's feelings matter, feeling connected to other people when we ignore the kid's needs from infancy.  Not all the kid's needs, yeah, just the need to feel safe with his parents while he sleeps.  I figure that as human emotions and relationships have evolved, sleeping was probably a dangerous time.  A lot of predators are nocturnal, and a baby left alone in a crib all night would have been easy prey.  It seems at least plausible to me that we evolved to prefer sleeping with our loved ones (and this is still how it's done in many places) because it was safer.  (We had our kid sleep in his own bed in our room--our bed when he was very young was too damned fluffy to be safe for an infant--but we got up with him every time he cried.  He now sleeps in his own bed in his own room without any trouble, but if he wakes up in the middle of the night and needs us, we let him sleep with us.  To me it is more important that he know that we are always there with him and for him than to promote a very false independence.  He's 3, man, he is not independent, although he does go potty all by himself.  woot!)  It isn't just the sleeping thing.  I know parents who don't think twice about keeping their baby essentially confined all day long--in cribs, playpens, high chairs, car seats--forcing the baby to conform to the adult's schedule and needs and utterly ignoring the need the baby has to play, move, rest, eat when hungry, etc.  Not to mention that the kid is basically alone most of these times, experiencing the world without the touch, voice, smell of a loved one.  Working parents have come out and admitted in national magazines that they don't enjoy and cannot force themselves to enjoy playing with their kids, so they work instead and hire out the play, as if the kids won't get the message.  But to kids, "love" isn't a word or a feeling--it's an action.  They don't think you love them because you say it, because the word itself doesn't mean much to a 2-year-old.  They learn what it means by associating it with actions and with time spent (the currency of love is time).  A child whose parents are there, making that child their first (not only, but first) time and energy commitment, obviously enjoying the time spent and actively joining the child in their engagement with the world--that child knows it is loved and is lovable, and that child conversely learns to do love to others.  "Do love" is an odd construction, I know, but we adults have come to think of "love" as just a feeling, not an action.  I accepted that without thinking about it until I met T who doesn't like to say "I love you" but is always sure to act in such a way that he doesn't need to; he gives me the time and energy that are love.  We give that to each other, and we give that to our son. 

Love is an action.  The currency of love is time.  Do your duty by your spouse and kids.  Take responsibility--yeah, of course, fathers that goes for you, too, but fathers have less reproductive choice here, having no birth control pill and no say in the abortion question--for the life you create. 

I'm too tired to proofread this now, and tomorrow is my darling son's birthday, not to mention the community Easter egg hunt, and I have a ladybug-shaped cake to frost (coconut cake, and man, it is some fabulous cake--Martha Stewart's recipe, even!) and presents to wrap and gather and blah blah.  Ha.  It's 4:00 a.m.  Awesome.  So, if there are places I should have edited, grant me a modicum of latitude, I beg of you. 

Oh, finally, don't get all up in my face with cohabitation being as good as marriage.  In America, at least, cohabitations are much more likely to break up than marriages are.  In their first 5 years, 20% of marriages will break up, but 40% of cohabitations will; in the next 5 years, the numbers jump to 40% for marriages and 60% for cohabitations.  So, in terms of commitment and stability, they aren't equivalent to marriage. 

Right now, I am not up to the task of turning this into a coherent post.  There are just a variety of related things that have been rattling around in my confused, oxygen-starved brain for a few days, and I need to lay them out here. 

• I've read several articles, in print and online, lately that suggest that "guilt" is something unnecessary and that judging others for their decisions is always (or at least usually) wrong (nevermind the judgment inherent in that).  Guilt is a way that we recognize that we've done something wrong.  There exist people who feel guilty all the time over every single little thing, I know, and those people may need therapy.  But I don't think that is most of us.  If you're feeling guilty, it is possible that your conscience is attempting to communicate to you that you have done something wrong, harmed someone, violated the moral code.  As for being judgmental, why is it wrong to have standards that you expect yourself and others to live up to?  Since when did we decide that any choice is equally OK, as long as that choice does not involve spanking your children, an act which is clearly the worst thing any human could possibly do?  Charles Taylor gives a very good accounting of why all choices are not equally valid or good, at least not in a society that wants to maintain some sense of morality.  Unfortunately, it's not the kind of thing people will generally listen to.  Hmmm, I think there's an essay in this month's Harper's that also touches on this, how we are now meant to respect any idiotic belief, so long as it is sincerely held.  *Note to self:  Reread that essay and also Charles Taylor and make little Invader Zim-like hand gestures of frustration because you are the only person alive who still cares about this.  (I know, that last is an exaggeration.  I know.  I've had pneumonia, and I'm feeling bloody sorry for myself.)
• Stay-at-home dads are kind of awesome.  But what's even more awesome is when people, like Kimura and some hippie dude commenting on this essay, recognize that the supremacy of WORK is fucking bogus.  I've said before that one of my problems with most mainstream types of feminism is that it completely buys into the capitalist hegemony, the superiority of paid work and conspicuous success.  Some of us say fuck all of that, I am SOOOO not giving my life over to some asswipe who gets to decide what my time is worth, I am SOOOOO sick of all the time you people fucking waste in committee meetings that accomplish nothing.  I guess if you like doing all that, well, someone needs to keep the stock markets open, so go for it.  But don't sit around and tell me how much meaningless work I do in a day because I actually change my son's diapers by myself (or used to when he wore them) and wash dishes and such.  You do at least as much meaningless work in a day as I do.  A lot of the work of life is tedious and crappy, whether it's paid work or unpaid work.  Just because you get paid for your time (in units of currency that are gradually decreasing in value, too, you human slave) doesn't mean what you do is inherently more valuable in moral terms than what I do is.  Conclusion:  Fuck the corporate hegemony!  I could totally make a rap song out of this.
• On a related note, I am disturbed by something I have seen on several feminist sites lately--I'm calling them feminist, incidentally, because they call themselves that.  I have no idea if this represents any kind of majority of feminists or not--I hope not.  There is a set of work, mostly that work associated with the house and raising children, that many people find tedious, frustrating, and not important enough to do for themselves.  Their careers are more challenging, interesting, exciting, important, satisfying, etc.  And yet if you suggest, even a little, that middle class, American white women only have the "freedom" to choose the career over the housework because they step on the backs of the colored and the poor, those white women will cry out in rage at you.  The general thrust of their cries will run, "That work isn't inherently demeaning."  Ummmmm...am I the only one who thinks maybe someone is contradicting herself here?  If it's too tedious in comparison to your thrilling career, if you find it mind-numbing and stultifying, do you mean seriously to suggest that it's only that way to you and to no one else?  Do you mean to actually try and tell me that all those impoverished women, some of whom have left their own children and families in their home countries to come here and take care of yours, have done so because nothing thrills and satisfies them more than raising someone else's children?  Are you the most disingenuous bitch ever put on the face of the earth?  The point of noting that white American feminism steps all over the colored and the poor is not to say that white women should all, therefore, go back to being housewives.  The point is--well, there are several.  A)  As in Western Europe, families (including single-parent households, of course) should receive more support in general, including universal health care and all of that, so that all women and men have more choices and better options.  B)  The implication in the economics of these nanny and daycare situations that we currently have is that raising children is not valuable work.  We Americans, as a society, do not value it.  C)  Uh, well, personally, I think it's quite classist and a tad bit racist to say that work that is too tedious and demeaning for you to do is perfectly fine for the underclasses.  Because, um, they don't have the same high-powered mind that you have?  Or...I'm struggling here to find a way to make it better...because you have some kind of rich-white ADD and can't tolerate the mundane tasks of existence that the poor cannot escape, but because the poor are not subject to the rich-white syndrome, they don't get bored the way you do?  WTF?  Grrrrrrrrrrrr. 
• Pneumonia sucks. 
• I really, really hate it when people automatically assume that most people can't "afford" to choose to be stay-at-home parents.  For one thing, the expenses of holding a job if you have children often make the job next to worthless.  Daycare is expensive (and often, let's face it, shitty) and nannies even more so.  Commuting is increasingly expensive.  The extra meals out of the house, the more expensive wardrobe (yes, I am assuming that work clothing generally costs more than at-home clothing--however, unless you wear your work clothes all the time, even cheap work clothes cost more because they entail having a work wardrobe and an at-home wardrobe, in addition to the fancy clothes for dates or whatever--also, work clothing often seems to entail the extra irritating expense of dry cleaning)--all this crap adds up.  After taxes and all this crap, working can be expensive.  I actually can't afford to work outside the home; I can't afford not to work, either, so I work part-time at home, although I resolutely maintain my self-identification as a stay-at-home mom because that's how I mostly think of myself.  Anyway, for another thing, some of us have made the decision that there are any number of expenses we will just forego so that we can afford to stay home and raise our kids.  We don't have satellite TV, for example, which basically means we get only ABC.  Yay, ABC!  We don't have cell phones, iPods, or any other gadgets at all.  We keep our housing costs in check by living in a tiny, old house in the boondocks.  In other words, if staying home with your kids is the most important goal to you (and, it should go without saying, I am NOT talking about single-parent households where there is no choice), you find ways to cut back on what you spend so that you don't need as much income.  In our case, we never realized how much we would have to cut back when we made this decision, because we naively assumed that America's economy was just and sane, but we both agreed that children should be raised by their parents, not by (under)paid help.  And so we make do.  I know I bitch about our poverty mightily on this blog, but most of the time, it's alright.  I bitch here because this is my space to bitch.  In real life, we're OK--at least, thank God, we never ever fight about money.  We made our choices, we take our lumps.  Alls I'm sayin is there are a lot of other people who could easily "afford" to stay home if that was their priority.  That it is not says more about them than they apparently like to think it does.
• That being said, we cannot afford to have another one.  Sad.  That makes me sad.  The last time I was pregnant, I lived in an idyllic land where health care was affordable (pregnancy is oddly not covered by the Japanese national health insurance, but the prenatal visits were still affordable).  I also lived at that time in a land where the assumption is that families will live off of only one income, and most jobs seem to pay accordingly.  Here in America--and this is partially related to the success of '60s feminism and also related to our misguided economic policies more generally--we assume families will need two incomes, and jobs pay accordingly.  This system forces the choice either not to have kids or to come up with ways to manage kids and careers--except for those of us who say "fuck off" to capitalism and consumerism and instead stay home and garden with our kids.

This began life as a comment on mcco12's post about ebooks and books, though I tried to edit it to make it more freestanding.  But you might want to read his post first--it's a good post, anyway.

I had an argument a few years ago with a musician named Danny Barnes about putting more music online.  He made the point that putting it online takes it to a wider, less elite audience by making it more affordable, and I'm not sure that it has.  It can, if you have a computer and a reliable connection and the necessary memory and so on, of course (and especially if you pirate it, but I doubt that's what he had in mind!).  But we tend to forget here, on Vox because we're all online, that there are people who can't afford an iPod, can't afford a computer, can't afford an Internet connection.  I only have a computer and a DSL connection because I use them for work; otherwise, I probably couldn't afford them.  I bought a computer in college with student loans, loans I still haven't paid off, and I used it long enough that it was no longer compatible with anything and then kept using it because I couldn't afford a new one; I certainly couldn't have downloaded music on it with its 10 MB hard drive (yeah, I think it was bigger than 10 MB but not very big.  Floppies, man, it was all on floppies). 

I can, however, afford a dollar or less for a used book or 5 bucks or less for used CDs.  The equipment necessary to use those are cheap and basic (light, in the case of books; a cheapie CD player for the CDs).  If I spend a dollar on a book, it can just sit there peacefully until I'm ready to read it, requiring no further input from me--no upgrading, no extra memory, no check of its battery--and it will keep sitting there as long as I keep it for re-reading for the same dollar.  Not to mention that downloading books is probably going to require a credit card, and I fucking hate credit cards.  I hate the whole culture around credit cards.  Yes, I have one and I am forced to bow the great credit god in the sky to maintain my Blockbuster queue and a few other things, but we're cash people.  We want to use credit as little as possible, and, of course, there are many people for whom using credit cards is either impossible or just undesirable.

Now, I'm not opposed to ebooks--not at all.  I just doubt.  I'm a doubter.  I'm a doubting Thomas.  I doubt they will be less elitist in the end than books are now because they introduce another device that must be bought, maintained, upgraded, etc.  I doubt that most of the unpublished authors will be worth bothering about, particularly because blogs already provide a similar outlet, and I'm underwhelmed by the quality of most blogs.  I doubt that ebooks will ever be as enjoyable to me as book-books.

You're undoubtedly right about the value of portability and searchability.  It also *may* help some authors publish their work, and I think that's worth exploring, even if I'm not interested in their work (with music, I think this has been a pretty mixed bag).  But I can't see that a preference for real books is akin to being against the printing press.  I'm not against bringing the masses more information.  Quite the opposite, actually.  I just do not see that this is going to make books more affordable or accessible in the foreseeable future to people who can't currently access books.  Technology does tend to get cheaper over time, of course, so maybe someday. 

Also, the argument that third space makes in the comments about photos (which I agree with), I would make about books, too.  They do take on meaning and intimacy as physical objects.  They *can* be mere carriers of information, but they don't have to be.  When you're doing research and need the searchability functions, ebooks are perfect, but for some of us, they're just never going to be adequate to replace that intimacy with the book as its own signifier.  For people who don't care about that, fine, use ebooks.  I'll go buy up your used books when you get rid of them.

Gah, I'm sounding like Albert Borgmann.  The object can be just a device for carrying information, and electronic devices do that just as well as paper ones and maybe better.  But there's a loss there, too, of our relationship with the object, the human feeling of paper, the smells of books, the flipping of the pages (that does not give you trigger finger), the appearance of handwritten notes in the margins, the inscriptions from the person who gave it to you or who gave it to whomever sold it to the used bookstore, etc.  Maybe those things aren't important to you or to anyone else but me, I don't know.  But to me, books can tell a lot more stories from their histories than just the information the author consciously put there.  A notebook can, too, in the right context.  I love looking at my old notebooks from college with my sarcastic little notes about classmates and so forth.  The information--the lecture notes--is kind of boring now.  But there's just so much more in there. 

And, yeah, children's books...no, that's just not the same.  Yes, my son rips up his books sometimes and gets sticky syrup on them and so forth.  But I love watching him interact with them, and he loves it too.  The pictures!  The touch-and-feel books!  I don't see how an ebook would serve these purposes at all.

Also, while everything in contemporary society is supposedly towards more convenience, more accessibility, and more choice, life appears to be becoming more stressful, less convenient, more hectic, etc.  Why would the addition of one more "convenient" device be different? 

There is also the concern, that I see now someone else has brought up in comments, about our relationship to texts.  I used to work on texts that had been transcribed from a nonliterate culture for my grad school work, and it was interesting how writing things down made the texts different.  It made people quibble about little details that formerly could change from speaker to speaker, so that each storyteller could make his/her own mark on the text.  It made people quibble about accuracy and lose sight of the larger narrative thread.  I see this happen online already.  People read an article and pick up one tiny fact that is inaccurate and thus dismiss the writer and the article, losing sight of the larger picture of the article as a whole.  It's brought us greater attention to detail and less ability, as far as I can tell, to focus on the argument or history as a whole.  It is possible that the physical properties of the book and the human scale of it draw us into them and give them a human face, which is harder to summarily dismiss than the relatively inhuman presence of type on a screen.  I am not arguing against literacy and for a return to oral storytelling, mind.  I'm just wary of these changes to our interactions with the text and, via the text, with the author.  I similarly have concerns about the value of online, unedited texts.  Srsly, dood, have you seen the grammar and spelling, not to mention the narcissism and lack of logical coherence on a lot of blogs?  srsly.  Yes, yes, I do fear that ebooks are going to sound like the LOLcats.

Hmmm, I think my last paragraph there lacks clarity.  I'll work on it.  But, I'm supposed to be working, like, at a job.

There has been a running theme to my intense irritation and weariness with people lately.  It has come up obliquely in some of my posts (or rants, whatever) about feminism.  It again reared its head covertly in my disgust with that post about racism that I discussed earlier.  Now, it once again comes sneaking round the corner, only this time the proximal issue is religion and atheism. 

The silent beast that so fatigues me is this:  YOU (whoever you are) ARE NOT SUPERIOR TO ANYONE BASED ON THE COLOR OF YOUR SKIN, YOUR GENITALIA, THE COUNTRY YOU LIVE IN/WERE BORN IN, YOUR FAITH OR LACK THEREOF, YOUR SEXUAL ORIENTATION, OR THE LEVEL OF EDUCATION AND/OR WEALTH YOU HAVE OR HAVE NOT ATTAINED.  FULL MOTHERFUCKING STOP. 

Sorry to shout, but this really rankles.

I know a lot of you probably assume, and it's a fair assumption based on my constant ranting, that I think I am superior to a lot of other people.  But I don't.  I am better educated than most people.  I am far better read than the average person.  I am more intelligent than most people--indeed, if the various standardized tests and grades and all that are an indication, I am more intelligent than 99% of Americans.  I have other strengths, and I know them and use them. 

However, I will be the first to admit that I am lacking in other areas.  I am not forgiving.  I am not gentle or kind, and I lack empathy.  I am moody and temperamental.  I can be utterly asinine.  I know this.

The point is, of course, that this means that no matter how smart and well read I know myself to be, I also know that other people have strengths and goodness-es that I lack.  I admire people who are genuinely kind and forgiving.  I admire people with the spatial intelligence that I sorely lack.  I admire people who exhibit more control over their temper.  My husband is one such person, and I admire him greatly.  We are different, but we both see each other as equal.  EQUAL.

On the racism post I ranted about earlier, I was bothered deeply by the fact that she posited that the experience--both historical and contemporaneous--of "POCs" is more important than that of "whites" whom she indiscriminately lumps together.  This struck me as a simple reversal of the old paradigm, i.e., previously "whites" thought their stories mattered and those of POCs didn't, and that was a form of asserting their superiority.  It dehumanizes the other.  That a black woman would sanction such an assertion in reverse, i.e., sanction an attitude that one group deserves dehumanization, wearied me greatly. 

With feminism, it has long bothered me that there is a strain of vocal feminism that takes as its goal (mostly covertly--most of them would not say this outright, but then neither would the racist discussed above) the repositioning of women as superior with respect to men.  Interestingly, Doris Lessing just commented on this and was dissed by Broadsheet as being in line with the views of the rancid reactionary, Ann Coulter.  Doris Lessing as Ann Coulter...just...no. 

Anyway, there is evidence that this repositioning is happening in certain areas.  For one thing, men are being demonized as likely rapists and pederasts.  Police officers advise children to, if lost, find a woman to help them--not a man.  Nevermind that it is actually a tiny fraction of men who abuse children in any way.  Nevermind that child abuse (though not sexual abuse) happens as often at the hands of a woman as a man and that most children who are killed through abuse or neglect are killed by a woman.  No--kids, find a woman!  And fathers are reporting being subjected to questioning from the police for merely taking their daughters out for lunch.  Young boys are being punished for sexual harassment for touching girls in nearly any way--pinching and hugging are apparently sexual now among the kindergarten set, but only if the pincher or hugger is male.  Men who complain about this obviously want to return to a day when they had the legal right to beat and rape women.

Another strain of feminism asserts that working women (mothers or otherwise) are superior to women whose only work is taking care of their households and children.  But you've all heard me gripe about this enough, I think.

And then just yesterday, this came to my attention.  So, some "freethinkers" in Wisconsin gave a talk called "Religion Kills" and put up a billboard that had an anti-religious message.  That leads this Christian (oh, so Christian!) blogger to broadcast her ressentiment thusly: 

This freedom from religion group pompously struts around, asserting that christians all believe blindly and unscientifically, which is laughable, especially if you've ever debated or listened to a christian / athiest debate. They make a point to prey on human pride that drives us to reject conformity, they are full of charming sarcasm and wit and they are like the cool kid at the party - they exude confidence and intelligence, but inside they are just scared little boys (and girls) who desperately do not want anyone to find out that they can't look themselves in the eyes in the mirror.

This is the voice of a person who thinks she is superior to them because of her faith. (If you plow through the comments thread, you will later find her asserting that you cannot have any morality outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition, among other things).  True, there are atheists who feel superior to her because of her faith in Christ, but as with the racists and the feminists, NO GOOD comes of reversing the hierarchy. 

It's so classic, really.  Let's take a little refresher course in ressentiment. 

Ressentiment is a sense of resentment and hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, an assignation of blame for one's frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration. The ego creates an enemy, to insulate itself from culpability.

I'd say asserting that atheists are by definition immoral (or possibly amoral--she isn't clear) and incapable of looking themselves in the mirror is a very classic case of ressentiment, and it masks a fear and also an inability to admit what the real fear is.  A person who knows herself to be strong has no need of ressentiment or this kind of deep hatred against a group.  It has always amazed me when Christians assert the profound strength and truth of their faith in one breath and then show great delectation in how nonbelievers will be punished in the Last Judgment in the next.  That is a revenge fantasy, and in some of the early American Christian sermons (Cotton Mather and that ilk), the excitement at imagining this revenge is palpable.  If your faith is strong and you honestly believe Christ is your savior, you ought have no special desire or need to hate others or delight in their damnation.

Anyway, the connecting thread here is a consuming need and desire not for equality but for a mere reversal of the traditional paradigm.  Being a person of color becomes superior to (in moral terms) being white.  Being female becomes superior to being male.  Being Christian becomes superior to being "freethinking."  (Actually this last one is exceptional because that already is the dominant paradigm in North American society...so...whence the ressentiment?) To me, that's just a different side of the same oppressive coin. 

In contrast to these positions that I find reprehensible, I am for equality.  Legally, there should be absolute equality, although this is often easier to postulate than to achieve (what does it mean for men and women to have equal reproductive rights, for example?).  In personal terms, I try to see each individual as an individual rather than thinking, "Oh, he's a (member of X group)."  I try to live by the ethical positions elaborated by Heidegger, Buber, Borgmann, and Charles Taylor with a healthy dose of Camus, Aristotle, and Nietzsche thrown in (incidentally, many of them didn't specifically write works of ethics--but I believe that ethical principles are derivable from the ontological frameworks, i.e., knowing our relationships with one another and the world implies an ethics.  Of course, I also believe ethics are implied by such diverse sources as the poetry of Rilke and contemplation of the night sky, so....I could be a little crazey).

But, you say, but!  You, GinBaby, are a known misanthropist!  Yes, this is true.  I dislike nearly all people and think that we probably are, in fact, a virus with shoes.  Mostly I dislike people because I find most of their little weaknesses and insecurities and petty competitiveness to be tiresome.  I don't mean weaknesses of the sort that, say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez characters have, which are charming, or the general sort in which we are not all equally good at all things.  By "weaknesses" here, I mean the incapacity or unwillingness to know oneself completely, to stand strong in the face of opposition, to question received wisdom and authority, to be free for rather than merely free from, to face uncomfortable truths.  These things--jealousy, ressentiment, envy, petty bickering, ego stroking--I just do not have the energy for--or rather I don't have the will to give energy to these things. 

We would be a better society--both nationally and globally--if we all were strong enough to give up our little prejudices and hatreds and insecurities because then we might stop feeling such a pressing need to treat other people like shit.

I apologize for the length of this post. But your brevity does not make you superior.  Wink. 

What modern book do you think will be read in high school by the next generation of kids? 
Submitted by Tom.

This QotD has been under my skin for a few days now, because I keep thinking two things:  1)  Who says the next generation of kids will still read books or be capable of careful, difficult reading?  2)  The more interesting question is really what modern books should they be reading? 

Am I too grumpy?  I think I'm too grumpy. 

I am not one of these apocalyptic types who thinks that books and reading are bound to disappear from our lives.  There will always be bookhounds and bibliophiles around, I suspect, at least well into the foreseeable future, just like some people still enjoy their vinyl records.  Hell, I still have my old Duran Duran and Camper van Beethoven records on vinyl, and I like their scratchy analog-ness. 

But I can't help but think that serious literacy is on the decline (at least in America--I can in no way speak about literacy in other countries, not even Canada).  I don't mean that fewer people are able to read or capable of the kinds of thought that have to go into serious reading, although I think that both of those things are true, as well. 

Reading serious books, though, of the sort that I think one ought to read in school to learn something from requires sustained and focused mental activity.  It takes a kind of concentration and analytical thinking that no television show, video game, or web page is ever going to require. 

Listen--I've heard and read the arguments that shows like The Sopranos and whatnot and some role-playing games require focus and thought to keep storylines and characters straight.  That is likely true, although I would counter that it's not really different from keeping storylines and characters involved in neighborhood gossip straight, because it's more a feat of memory than sustained, focused concentration.  Video games and television and the Internet may be making people better at certain types of intelligence (in my admittedly pessimistic view, though, they are primarily making people smarter in ways that really only pertain to those same media), but that doesn't mean that people are getting all-around smarter or--to get back to the QotD--better at reading.

I taught college-level composition at a university for a while, and I hated it.  College freshman these days (I obviously can't speak about previous generations) are barely literate.  Their vocabularies are very limited, and they are way too lazy to look words up that they do not know--and when presented with an article from, say, The New Yorker, the vocabulary words they have never apparently seen before add up to 25% or more of the total word count.  They have no idea how to figure out what the thesis of an essay is--they have no idea what a thesis is or what the purpose of an essay is.  They are flummoxed by the rigors of complex sentences and baffled by the notion of lexical precision.  They complain loudly and make bitter scenes when they are told that it is not the fault of the author that they don't know what Plato thought or what 'inchoate' means, that finding these things out--that knowing things--is the responsibility of the reader.  They have no way to judge, when doing research, if a source is trustworthy or not, as they possess no critical thinking skills at all (and this skill, of judging the worth of a source, is particularly necessary when using the Internet--any gibbon can publish his opinion on the Internet, but that doesn't mean it's a useful or fact-based opinion and thus able to support your thesis when you're writing a research paper).

This makes assigning reading and writing homework a dicey business.  If it's difficult or serious, they just won't do it, and you will have a class full of students who cannot discuss the assigned reading because they have not read it.  If it's very difficult, though, then they are highly likely to take up the entire hour of your next scheduled class to list reasons why it's "unfair" to expect them to do college-level reading.

No, I'm not bitter--not at all.  Why do you ask?  This is why I fled to ESL teaching.  Foreign students were refreshingly prepared for adulthood and the rigors and unfairness of college life.  My ESL students only complained once, and that was when I had given them a New Yorker article to read, and then they were probably justified--it was a truly difficult article--and they all calmed down after I explained to them that I had not expected them to understand it fully on their own, that we were going to spend extensive class time breaking it down and figuring it out together.  Beautiful people, you Japanese and Malaysians and Finns and Russians.  How I adored you all.

So, what of that experience would make me suspect that the next generation of high school students will even be capable of reading books more difficult than Harry Potter.  I'm not knocking Harry Potter, because heaven knows I love them, too, but they aren't exactly on the same level of difficulty as a Don DeLillo novel or Cormac McCarthy.

I think I will save my defense of literacy and difficult reading for another time--it's a fraught question and persistently dogged by objections from people who think that reading books is just another among hobbies, when it isn't exactly.  Literacy is at the very core of what we usually think of as "being human" in a sense that differentiates us from other animals.  Reading is not just a hobby, although it is that, too; it's both root and sustenance for a complete way of thinking and being.  You think I jest?  I do not. 

Anyway.  Some modern/contemporary books I think high-school students should read, at least the ones who remain capable of doing so?

I guess I also have to assume that their parents and teachers would let them read these, as Americans are really fond of banning books.  It isn't just the Christians, either--Huck Finn, one of the greatest American books ever written, has been banned from time to time because of its use of the word 'nigger' for example.  Americans are very suspicious of books.  I suppose part of it is our Puritanical history--is that also why Americans tend to interpret books so literally, with no imagination?  Probably.  The Puritans had fabulous imaginations for ways to punish the nonbelievers, but not so much in other things.

Oh, right, a list.  Sure, here are some modern books I think are important enough that they should be read by future generations of American students:

White Noise by Don DeLillo.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (not contemporary, perhaps, but modern--and not difficult, perhaps, but very serious).

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

The Things they Carried by Tim O'Brien.

The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forche (warning:  this is poetry)

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh

Hmm, well, OK.  I don't know that those are going to be considered appropriate for high-school kids although none of them really deals with any themes or events that are necessarily more shocking, difficult, or adult than those of Hamlet--incest! suicide! murder! indecision! --and Hamlet is often considered appropriate for high schoolers.  It should also be noted that I'm purposely skewing the list to reflect issues that I think are important for contemporary American high schoolers to consider.  Thus, this is heavy American writers (and also regrettably heavy on war novels, but war does seem to be a continual fact of American life). 

Alright, then.  Happy reading, kids.

It occurred to me today, after reading some comments on other people's lists of deal breakers, that I had automatically taken the word "relationship" to mean long-term relationship--not necessarily marriage, but reasons I would break off a long-term love relationship.  That is an unnecessarily limited understanding of the term, though.  Obviously, a person has to pass through many gates before they reach the inner circle of GinBaby, and there are multitudinous deal-breakers all along the way.  I'm a hard, cold rock of a person, disinclined generally to like people.  Friends and loved ones who have persevered find that deep down inside I'm totally a giant pink marshmallow.  But, seriously, there are many perils along the way.

Here are some, but by no means all, of the deal-breakers that will immediately end our relationship, whatever stage it might happen to be in--from having just met to becoming friends or going on a first date:

• Quoting Forrest Gump.  There is no reason to do this--ever.
• Moral zealotry, dogmatism, fundamentalism, nationalism, being overly ideological, evangelical veganism.
• Racism, sexism, homophobia.  This includes comments like, "I'm not a racist, but I think the Indians/blacks/whatever should..." and "I'm not a homophobe--I love Will and Grace."
• If you're a man:  Wearing mock turtlenecks or capri pants.  There is simply no excuse for these things.
• Boasting of your own incompetence, as if incompetence were ever a good thing.  Girls:  You are not cuter because you cannot do math, and you are not more "feminist" just because you can't cook.  These are not things to be proud of.  Guys:  I have experienced this phenomenon less with men, as men seem to have more of a tendency to boast of what they can do, or sometimes what they merely think they can do.  But guys, your inability to cook is also not appealing.  Learn.
• An inability or unwillingness to appreciate the manifest beauty and richness of English vocabulary.  You don't have to use the fancy words all the time, but you should at least learn to appreciate the incredible precision and expressiveness we have available to us as English speakers.  This doesn't necessarily pertain to my non-English speaking friends.
• Touching me without warrant.  Once we are established in a relationship of some sort--good friends, family, dating, what have you--I will gradually relent in this case, and I will signal you in some way that I am now permitting touching.  In general, though, most people touch me long before I'm ready to be touched, and it FREAKS ME THE FUCK OUT.  I don't mean "touching" here in a necessarily sexual or dirty way--I don't want your hand on my arm or a hug or anything until we know each other fairly well.  I am fully aware that I have serious personal space issues that I perhaps should deal with at some point.  Until then, just don't touch me.  I will make some allowances if you are a Southerner, as I know you can't help it.  Anyone else:  I will take you down.
• Inability to write in cohesive paragraphs that are properly punctuated.  Paragraphs, sentences, and clauses are logical units.  If you cannot construct paragraphs of more than one or two sentences and there is no connection between your paragraphs, it is likely that the root problem is your inability to think coherently.  I'm fine with some fragments--heaven knows I do that, too--for stylistic reasons; however, if all your writing is in fragments and little broken pseudoparagraphs, I will have no truck with you.
• Reading self-help books for dummies.  I don't mean the ones about software or something else complicated that you might need a quick and easy reference for.  Oh, no.  I'm talking about things like Dating for Dummies and the previously scoffed at Meditation for Dummies.  Are you for real with that shit?  Because....no.  Look, if you are such a dummy that you need Dating for Dummies, you no longer belong in the reproductive pool.
• Illogic.  An inability and unwillingness to draw conclusions from evidence.  See also moral zealotry, etc.
• Baby hating.  Yeah, I know:  Babies can be loud and irritating in public.  On the other hand, so can adults.  Babies are too young to yet know better; adults are not.  Babies have few ways of communicating other than crying; adults have language.  Babies are asking for food or love or warmth or some other basic need; they are not polluting the airspace with details of their most recent sexual conquest/business deal/airplane meal, none of which do others need to hear about.  Babies make smelly poo-poo; yes, and so do you.  As for the breastfeeding--yeah, you fucking stop eating in public, and then we'll talk.  I'd rather see a baby placidly sucking away at her mama than watch you stuff your gaping maw with French fries--the baby needs the calories and nutrients, see?  You, on the other hand, likely do not. 
• Blaming the patriarchy.
• Insisting that there are no American movies worth watching. 
• Relying too heavily on television shows for your conversation content.  It's not exactly a problem with you, although I find that generally such people are nitwits.  The problem is really that, because I am an infrequent and erratic viewer of television myself, we will likely have difficulty conversing--similarly if the only thing you can discuss are video games.  I have even less of a relationship with video games, and I will be completely unable to follow you.  You may consider this a failing on my part if you wish, but it will kill the relationship.  Zack, Lokii, Kimura:  All of you can converse freely on other subjects, so you're all golden.
• Believing that you understand a foreign country because you went there for, like, two whole weeks.  If you're not American, then America is a foreign country to you, and so this goes for you, too.  Also, if you're foreign, you do not necessarily understand America just because you wear Levi's and watch Tom Cruise movies.  I will get just as tired of your lengthy treatises on American culture as I am now of hearing my grandma (love you, Grams!) tell me all about Chinese culture after she went on a 2-week tour with a bunch of other elderly Americans. 
• False humility.  Intellectual laziness.  Moral cowardice.
• Being religious will not inherently destroy a budding friendship.  However, it may be difficult as I am not religious at all and will not be converted.  I have tried being romantically involved with religious men (Buddhists, all) in the past, too, and it does not work.  There is a fundamental disconnect here.
• A frequent urge to talk to me on the telephone.  I do not care for talking on the telephone, in general.  Sgazzetti, this doesn't apply to you, as it's been far too long since we've seen each other.

Ah, well, you get the idea.  As I said, it's a bumpy road, full of potholes and pitfalls.  Yes, I'm judgmental.  Yes, I'm a misanthrope.  I'm also insensitive, or so I'm told.   I am completely unapologetic for these things. 

Things that will get you in like Flynn:

• Use of arcane vocabulary, particularly if it is in reference to unusual things, such as Scottish headgear or cocktails no one drinks anymore.
• Bibliophilia.
• Loving art, creating art.  Recognizing that fashion is art.  The Balenciaga shoes?  It is irrelevant if they are impractical for daily use and cost $3000.  They are art.  They are art for the feet.  They should be treated as such.  I know I am in awe of them.  Beautiful things should be everywhere--not just shoved off in museums.
• Not just reading, but actually enjoying poetry.  If you can recite Rexroth or Stevens from memory, so much the better.  Extra points for liking of somewhat less famous poets, like Brautigan or Carolyn Forche.  As noted above, beauty matters to me, and poetry is beautiful. 
• Irony.  A robust sense of the absurd.  Much laughter at anything and everything.  Laughter is good.  It is the staff of life.
• Witty banter, snappy comebacks, stylish flirting.  I love a good conversation, even if it is ultimately about nothing important.  I like verbal intercourse and rapidfire wordplay.  Bring it.
• An ability to sit comfortably in silence, even if (especially if!) there are other people present. 

Mmm, there are probably other things, but that's a start.  Not that it matters.  My friends are already my friends, anyway, lists be damned.

I don't usually write about celebrities, and, honestly, I don't really keep up with celebrity gossip and whatnot.  Nearly everything I know about celebrities comes from The Fug Girls, The Superficial (which is written in such a way that you never know if any of it is true), and the occasional piece on Salon.com.  Oh, and I read the headlines of all the tabloids and People and all that while I'm waiting in line at the grocery store.  So, I am by no means an expert on what I'm about to rant about.  Yet, still, I will rant.

Because, see, I've about had it up to here (slapping underside of chin forcefully and repeatedly) with bloggers who write condescendingly about Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and all these other little chickies.  The jokes you make about them are easy jokes to make; the material is all there, laid out for you like a cheese tray.  Making the jokes does not prove your wit or your great intelligence--all it proves is that you will take the easy bait and make the easy joke.  Calling Paris Hilton a slut or any sort of word like that requires no critical thinking skills at all. 

In other words, it's stupid, and you appear stupid when you scrape the bottom of that particular barrel.  You appear no smarter than Paris when you write these kinds of things.

And I will go you one further.  I do not like the music of Britney Spears--indeed, it is repugnant unto me and violates in the most gruesome way every musical ideal that I stand for.  I'm not sure what Paris Hilton even does to like or not like, and I have never seen a Lindsay Lohan movie (I know--miraculous, isn't it?).  In other words, I am not invested in the reputations of these girls. 

I do not, however, find it just and proper that you assault them so.  From what little I have read, all three of them have, like Drew Barrymore and others before them, been pushed, pushed and more pushed by parents eager for fame and money.  They have been sexualized by their parents from extremely young ages--Britney was playing the virgin/whore dynamic long before she could have possibly known what that was (I don't know if she really understands it now).  They have been told--at least implicitly and possibly also explicitly (as in the very creepy case of Jessica Simpson's dad and his explicit appreciation of her boobs)--that the road to money and fame and happiness is their bodies, hypersexualized and shoved in everyone's faces.  These girls have been told from the time they were very young that their job--nay, their very reason for existence--is to shake it, work it, tease, and so forth.  They were made into virgin-whores by their parents, the very people who were supposed to protect them and nurture them. 

Yeah, of course, at some point they might have rejected this.  Actually, Britney did for a while there, during her breakdown.  Getting ugly tattoos, shaving her head--maybe she was doing that to say "fuck you" to all the people who have told her for years and years that she is only as good as her looks, only worth what someone will pay to watch her soft-core videos.  And good for her, or anyway it might have been good for her, except I think maybe she had some serious postpartum depression going on, which isn't so good.  Anyway, now she is apparently going back to her old self, and more's the pity.  I thought maybe we were going to get an Ani DiFranco-ized Britney there for a while, which would have at least been interesting.

Sigh.  My point is that enough people have already told them that they're sluts, whores, vaginas, whatever.  It's enough.  Adding your version of it isn't going to help them or help our besotted and besmirched society.  Of course they represent a throwback notion of femininity (but does any man or woman that you would actually want to befriend/date/screw/whatever actually accept that notion of femininity?  seriously?  because none of the ones I know do).  Of course they play the dumb girl (or perhaps are dumb girls--who would even know? who can now separate the real from the act in the cases of such celebrities?).  Of course they have lurid, publicity attracting affairs.  They have been made this way by unscrupulous parents and a society--that includes you--that wants that love-hate relationship.  You, too, want a whipping post; you, too, want to feel so superior to someone, and especially someone who has so much money and fame.  If you didn't, you would just ignore them.  If you had no need to make yourself look better, then you wouldn't write about them at all.  If you had the self-confidence you claim to, you would have no need to rant and rave about these chippies.  They're not ruining our society.  The people who pay them any mind are.  They're not turning our nation of innocent little girls into harlots, at least not single-handedly.  They are just cogs in a big wheel o' raunch.  If you don't like that Ferris wheel, then fucking jump off of it, but don't blame the people sitting in the other cars--no, not even the hot chick at the top who is squealing in fake fear of being stranded up there.  Just pack your superiority complex into your purse and exit the ride now.

And now for a laugh:

When was the last time you interacted with any sort of wildlife?
Submitted by warpedreality.

I'm undoubtedly being an asshole, but I'm having some difficulty with this question.  What is meant, exactly, by "interact"?  I'm going to get all huffy for a minute here and say that if the wildlife in question is really wild, you shouldn't really interact with it at all, at least not in the way that I usually think of interaction.  I see all these fucking tourists from the cities trying to pet the bison in Yellowstone or feed the mountain goats in Glacier or try to get just a little closer, just a little closer to take the picture of the moose.  You shouldn't be doing that, you fucking urban hillbilly.  They're wild.  Not only could they kill you without straining a muscle--yes, even the mountain goat--they are meant to be wild.  They live, see, in the wild.  If you keep giving them your little bits of hot dog and Dorito, not only are you setting them up for the same ill health you enjoy, you're teaching them to hang around the humans and eat human food, which does them no good at all, since they continue living out there in the wild even when you and your fat cracker kids are no longer car-camping nearby.  Also, harassing animals by getting so close to them to take their picture or try to pet them is just that:  Harassment.  Leave them alone.  They want nothing to do with you.  Do you see how they're trying to, oh, eat their lunch there?  Would you want a bunch of clumsy assholes trying to take your picture while you were eating lunch?  See how it runs away from you?  Yeah, that means it doesn't want to be near you.  Take a hint, fucker.

Ah, got that off my chest.  Damn people. 

Otherwise, I see/watch/photograph from afar wildlife on a pretty regular basis, I guess.  I kind of live in the middle of nowhere and have most of my life, and I hike a lot and all that and have had the great good luck to gawk at and enjoy all manner of wild animal.  I don't think I've really got close to any since I lived in Alaska last summer, though, where there were moose living right in town, and they would just sort of pop out and scare you once in a while.  Moose are awesome.  Oh, and the bald eagles.  And the salmon flopping themselves up on to the beach.  There are few things more awesome than having a king salmon flop himself nearly right into your hungry little hands.

My parents have two llamas that are pretty ferocious; does that count?  I'm just kidding.  They're very cool animals, and we interact with them all the time.  My last interaction with them involved my toddler running after the one called Red Wolf, squealing happily, and chasing the poor llama into the ground.  Then we fed them.  They needed it after the terror.

And of course my two puppies (a 5-month-old and a 10-month-old, both half-Lab mixes) are pretty fucking feral.  My last interaction with them was just this morning and involved catching them at destroying the greenhouse and scattering impatiens seedlings far and wide, and narrowly preventing myself from killing both of them.  Actually, I didn't want to kill them, but I don't think I have ever quite wanted to kick a dog so much as I did...and, yet, I did not kick them.  Fear not, judgmental intarweb inhabitants.

First there is some important business to attend to.

When the MSN homepage came up today, it informed me of two extremely important events:  Chris Cornell has a new album coming out, and Paris Hilton has been sentenced, apparently irrevocably, to jail for 45 days.  Either of these two things alone is enough to delight me; in conjunction, they are manna from heaven.  Perhaps there is a God.

Also, I read this today, and all I can say (besides the fact that it is obviously very true) is I really wish I had written it.  Damn. 

Now, onwards!  To the 5ive!

5 Things that Have no Right to Exist (Music):

1. "Soft rock."
2. "Adult contemporary."
3. Albums made by television stars.  Yes, even Bruce Willis.  I will make an exception for Leonard Nimoy.
4. The entire oeuvre of Billy Joel.
5. Any music from Scandinavia save The Sugarcubes/Bjork (wait? Is Iceland part of "Scandinavia"?  I shall consult Wikipedia.  Ah, it appears it can be considered Scandinavia but isn't always.  So, Bjork is saved.), The Cardigans, and hilarious Scandinavian death metal.  Rock on.

5 Things that Have no Right to Exist (Food):

1. Brazil nuts.
2. White chocolate.
3. Mild salsa.  Just use some tomato sauce or something, people.
4. The "Wild Consomme" flavor of Pringles potato chips that they sell in Japan.  There is nothing wild about consomme.
5. Pizza with what is essentially potato salad on top (potatoes, boiled eggs, mayonnaise--hell, maybe even a little corn).  Yeah, that's right, Japan--I'm looking at you again.  The potato salad pizza is an abomination.

5 Things that Have no Right to Exist (Language):

1. Umlauts.
2. Especially gratuitous umlauts.
3. Alright, all diacritical marks, except the tilde.
4. Vocative case.
5. Chomsky's Minimalist Program.  That's really more to do with linguistics, I guess, since it clearly has nothing to do with any actual language spoken by a human being.  I think that sometime between 1986 and 1994, Chomsky was abducted by aliens, or perhaps Republicans, and he lost touch with the way actual humans produce actual human language.  It's disappointing.  Besides that, it's an utter dickbong to wrangle your way through the incredibly complicated and obfuscatory prose to find that the underlying argument means nothing at all that would matter to you. 

5 Things that Have no Right to Exist (Politics):

1. President George W. Bush.
2. Vice-President Dick Cheney.
3. Secretary of State (no...that can't be right?  oh, yes, it is) Condoleeza Rice.
4. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
5. Justice Clarence Thomas.  At least Scalia is funny, you prique. 

The reason I said "things" instead of "people" is that I mainly mean they have no right to exist in their current political positions.  If Cheney was just some grumpy old duck muttering to himself as he tended to his suburban lawn in Woodsdale, Colorado, I wouldn't question his right to exist.  Indeed, I imagine his sotto voce paranoid ramblings would make excellent fun for the neighborhood children, particularly given the innately hilarious quality of his voice.  Oh, yes, if I imagine him in his dark socks and sandals, spraying his lawn with fertilizer and blaming the dandelion invasion on shadowy Middle Eastern men, and then shaking his raised fist at the kids down the street who assault him with pebbles, then I can see his place in the world.  Every suburban neighborhood needs such a man.  What we don't need is for the crazy old man down the street to become our vice president.

5 Things that Have no Right to Exist (Art):

1. Pointilism.  That shit irritates me.
2. Thomas Kinkade.
3. The colors collectively referred to as "beige."  I'm going to go ahead and throw the "taupe" category in as well. 
4. The motherfucking Family Circus.
5. Tom Hanks movies, especially those that also feature Meg Ryan.

Alright, I don't really tote guns, unless I'm going to the shooting range or I'm hunting.  Still, I do have two guns (both rifles), which makes me, apparently, some sort of freak--because I don't just have guns, but I also do things like vote for Nader.  I'm a liberal, yes.  I'm also a libertarian.  And I have guns.

The feisty Aussie known locally as Shades_Of_Grey contends that guns have no use other than to kill.  There is of course sport shooting, such as skeet shooting and target shooting, but overall he is correct.  He says, much like an anti-abortion activist, that to kill is immoral (ergo, an instrument whose only purpose is to kill is also immoral).  As a blanket statement, though, that is unsupportable.  Anyone who has ever taken an antibiotic would be immoral by such logic, and those of us who occasionally squish mosquitoes and flies would certainly be damned.  But let's assume he means it is immoral to kill people and larger animals, and especially the "charismatic megafauna," and especially with guns. 

It is not always immoral to kill people, though, and I will argue that it is not always immoral to kill animals.  I have never killed a person and have trouble imagining doing so, but I would almost certainly do it in self-defense, and I would absolutely without question do it to protect my son (if circumstances warranted, it should go without saying).  I think you can also muster moral defenses of killing in certain other cases such as, say, fighting the Nazis in WWII. 

And it is not always immoral to kill animals.  There is euthanasia, of course, of pets whom we deem too ill to live.  Ah, and then there is meat-eating.  Carnivorality.

If you're not going to be a vegetarian, then animals are going to die for your diet.  How those animals live and how those animals die are somewhat up to you (I realize this is less true for those who do not live in or near areas where hunting is permitted and who cannot afford "free range" hippie meat).  The animals can live free in the wild, eating a natural diet, for all their days and be taken down by a bullet suddenly and with little pain, for example.  Or they can be crammed into a feedlot with thousands of others, unable to escape their own feces let alone their imminent doom, fed until they are fat and shot full of antibiotics and hormones, and then slaughtered in assembly line fashion.  If you've ever read Fast Food Nation, you know it isn't pretty.  Which is the more moral?  Your choice.  My family, we choose the hunting (actually, my mother is a vegetarian, but my stepdad, husband, and I all hunt).

It's a little difficult to write philosophically about hunting for those who do not.  I was raised to hunt by the Fair Chase guidelines.  Fair Chasers are conservationists, the sort of people who admire Teddy Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold.  The hunting fees they pay are only a small part of what they do to preserve habitat and healthy animal populations.  Organizations like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and Ducks Unlimited are full of hunters who are doing good work and giving lots of money to save wildlife and its habitat.  Is that self-serving, because they want to hunt that wildlife?  Yes.  I don't see that that makes the project any less worthwhile, though.

But how to explain why I hunt?  I don't even really love meat--I could be happy as a vegetarian as long as I could also have bacon.  There is something more...fundamental, more spiritual, about hunting that I find humbling.  If you haven't hunted, that may seem paradoxical.  But, you see, when you hunt in the wild, you are part of the circle of life, part of the food chain.  You are not just buying shrink-wrapped and sanitized food from the local supermarket.  You are out there, primitively looking for food in its natural state, the food that sustained our ancestors.  You are not only a predator; you are also prey.  I have come over a ridge while hunting and found myself faced with a grizzly bear or a mountain lion.  Sure, that can happen while you're just hiking, but it's more intense when you're also a hunter.  There is a faceoff of sorts.  You don't want to kill this animal, certainly, but you could.  The mountain lion staring at you commands great respect.  You are, for a moment, his equal.  He could attack; you could attack.  You could both, facing each other, decide to back off.  The decision has to be mutual if you're both going to live.  It's a feral feeling, certainly, a wild feeling, a feeling I'm not sure civilized humans are supposed to feel anymore. 

But when he backs off and you back off, you're both so alive.  So free. 

The deer or the elk, too, commands your respect.  To see them in their native habitat is, for me, to love them, and I mean love.  It does not make me happy to kill a deer.  Not happy, no.  More humble and pensive.  Pensive because you realize what it means to take a life.  This awe-inspiring creature was just moments before fully alive, and now you have killed it.  This blood is on your hands, literally even.  If you have a modicum of respect for life and nature, that gives you pause.  You stop.  You thank the deer, or the forest, or maybe God if you're so inclined.  It's animistic; it's primal.  You think about what it means to be human and mortal.  You think about the efficient cycle of energy that nature has provided us--something always must die so that others can live, always.  Humans recoil from that fact and fear death, but it is so.  It is so simple and pure and true.  You cannot live if something else does not die.  Your life depends on death, and yet you push death away and cover it up with flowers and frills and eulogies.  Death is not nice.  Death is terrible, but it is necessary--it is life.  In some sense, the only gift you can ever give to the world is to die.  I have stood in the forest and stared that fact in the face.  I think it has made me a better person, because I have learned to respect it.  I have learned to accept my place in the world, that I am no different from any other living thing in my most basic feelings--I want to live, but I will die.  And this is very humbling.  It is a humbling thing, indeed, to accept that.  What I do in my lifetime matters so little, really.  What anyone does really ends up mattering so little.

I don't think of this as futility.  I think it makes me appreciate the time I have here more.  It makes it easier to look on the simple things and be grateful for them, just as they are.  It has made it easy to drop my "career" and devote myself to children and flowers.  Am I immoral?  Are the guns immoral? 

Do I need guns to hunt?  No, I suppose.  I could hunt with a bow and arrow, as my stepdad does and as many hunters do.  I don&