Oh, how I've come to loathe Caitlin Flanagan's articles. It started off so promisingly--I'm sure I'd been reading her book reviews and other articles in the Atlantic Monthly for a while before I noticed her name, but I remember the first piece I could pin to an identity. It was a review of a set of books--no, strike that, it was an essay about marriage and parenting that was located in the book review section by virtue of being loosely organized around a couple of new releases, both fiction and non-fiction. She made some really insightful connections between the legacy of seventies sexual-politics feminism, marital sexuality, and the culture of pervasive parenting prevalent in a lot of educated upper-middle-class families, and she wrapped it all up in a readable package.
Since then, though, she's been more effective at pissing me off than making me think. Her whole half-informed ahistorical riff on housewives and stay-at-home-moms had me actually throwing the magazine on to the floor. If I could have articulated my reaction more clearly (and if I wasn't reading the magazine three months after its publication date), I might have written a letter to the editor; instead I contented myself with repeatedly kicking the magazine's small papery corpse as I walked past it.
The new Atlantic came today, with a big pink-and-yellow mother-and-baby cover featuring a story by Flanagan on the nanny culture in working-professional families. Based on the first page and a half, I'm guessing that it covers the nanny culture with about as much sophistication as The Nanny Diaries. I can only hope that Flanagan manages half the humor and fun of the chick-lit classic, because I know that I'm going to be reading her piece (titled, incidentally, "How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement") this weekend, and I'd like to not do too much frothing at the mouth.
I think I must be missing something. Here's the text of the advisory opinion of the Massachusets Supreme Judicial Court clarifying their Goodridge decision. (To wit: "No, really. We meant marriage. Seriously.") It's immediately followed by Justice Martha Sosman's dissent, which includes this very confusing footnote, arguing that the distinction between a civil marriage and a civil union is merely semantic and, consequently, unimportant:
The insignificance of according a different name to the same thing has long been recognized:
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title."
W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II.
Moreover -- I'm also no literary critic -- it seems to me that Justice Sosman is rather totally missing the point of Romeo and Juliet. Juliet's soliloquy is ironic; if it weren't for the names Montague and Capulet, the play would have ended with Romeo and Juliet married and raising their canonical 2.3 kinds in Schenectady. It's only because of Romeo's name, and all the family crap that it implies, that everyone ends up all pathetic and dead at the end of Act 5.
But I don't know. Maybe Sosman's dissent is more than it appears. I'd like to imagine that she's a secret gay rights activist, writing this particularly weak argument as a form of elegant social subversion. Maybe she's subtly trying to point out the how the cultural baggage that follows from a mere difference in names can have dire consequences. Is this a cautionary tale in disguise?
I brought up below the idea of the minority imposing its will upon the majority, and I agree that this is tricky rhetoric. What I'm not talking about is a "silent majority" that supports gay marriage but can't be bothered to get active about it. I am talking about a majority that loves America on a very fundamental level, but isn't informed enough to realize why constitutional amendments like these undermine the very structure of our nation. There are all kinds of actions and behaviors that I find unsavory. Many of them are illegal, but few of them are prohibited by the Constitution. I'm okay with this, because I generally have faith in the way we make laws here.
But I don't think very many people worry too much about the difference between a law and a constitutional amendment beyond the idea that the latter is harder to pass but much stronger. So you have people thinking, "I'm opposed to gay marriage, and this is the best way to prevent it," without a rigorous enough debate on why amending the Constitution is so dangerous. At the end of the day, I believe that even many strong opponents of gay marriage would rather live in a country where the Constitution limits the power of the government rather than that of the people. I worry, though, that the debate will not be couched in those terms.
Look, it's not that I'm saying it should be easy. I understand that graduate school is, in a lot of ways, a luxury. I have the world's most flexible schedule, I get to choose my own work, I get to sit on my couch eating peanut butter toast and watching thoroughly crap television while other people have to get dressed and go to work in offices. It's not that I don't work, it's just that the work I do doesn't look like work to most people. That's fine. I expected that.
And I expected that it would be hard. That's okay, it should be a little hard. I don't have a problem with the idea that I have to make some sacrifices in order to get what I want out of this. I was expecting the part where my mother asks if I'm doing homework and wants to know when I'll get a real job like grownup people have. I was expecting the part where I learn to love the secondhand clothing store not because I have a fabulous thrift-store fashion sense but just because it's cheap. What I wasn't expecting, I guess, was to be so constantly aware of how little money I have to work with, and how uncertain the job market is going to be when I graduate.
But that's all normal. When the university tells you that you should be grateful for your fourteen thousand dollars a year, and by the way you're not allowed to take any extra jobs to supplement that stipend? That's normal. When you feel your general conversational skills slipping away and become uncomfortably familiar with the blank looks of people around you as you can't stop yourself from talking about your research? That's normal. What's not normal, and not okay, is when you get screwed out of a prestigious fellowship because your university and Fed Ex can't work out their schedules. I wasn't one of the students affected (my research takes me to places like Worcester, remember, not Paris), but I'm feeling a lot of anger on their behalf.
I should clarify that I'm not particularly surprised by the outcry surrounding Janet's boob. This is the world we live in. But last I checked, there weren't efforts underway to amend our Constitution to outlaw the public display of nipples. I think most red-blooded Americans understand that there is a time and a place for tits, and that the areas of disagreement can be negotiated outside of the constitutional process. The flag, on the other hand, seems to require protection at a more fundamental level.
I'll be honest: I have a pet peeve. Only once in our history has the Constitution been amended to curtail the rights of citizens. It was a mistake, and it was rectified. It should never happen again.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court clarified its November ruling on gay marriage today, in case you were napping. Yay! President Bush, in response, "clarified" his position on a Constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage. Hmm.
It's not that any of this is unexpected. It's that it's happening. Constitutional amendments are the last refuge of heroes and desperate killjoys. This is about gay marriage and flag burning, but it's about much more. It's about a minority who will alter the fundamental direction of our history with the assistance of a majority who don't have the resources to care. And this will get ugly. But it could get pretty good.
In the meantime, Joe bless America.
Disrespect for the flag is an old Easterbrook favorite -- he employed a similar critique in a TMQ column from 2002 when Richie Sambora played during a halftime show with a flag wrapped around his waist:
Now maybe somewhere in Richie Sambora's fuzzy cranial cavity the idea of wearing an American flag seemed like a 9/11 gesture. Or maybe it seemed like a way to get attention. Or maybe Richie Sambora was trying to tell us he thinks the American flag can kiss his butt. At any rate, this was a huge violation of flag protocol, and TMQ was distressed that the ESPN announcers said nothing, gushing about Bon Jovi while pretending the flag-on-the-butt wasn't happening.
There's a good deal more about the American Flag Code and whether it had been superceded by a local code in New Jersey (where the game was played).
Easterbrook employs the tone he usually reserves for when he thinks he's educating, so he at least would seem to think that few people care about these incidents because few people know the rules. If asked to generalize broadly, I'd probably agree, and further theorize that many people would think that differences in intent would justify wearing the flag like a smock, Kid Rock-style, but not burning it (even though that difference in intent is part of what protects the latter as speech). On the other hand, my parents -- who for many purposes can be considered ex-Hippies -- taught me not to disrespect the flag by letting it touch the ground, so who knows what people think.
I was wondering that about the Kid Rock thing too. Were people just too distracted by the Cabaret-meets-Rollerball constumes of Janet's dancers (and, I know, The Incident) to remember the flag thing, or did they just not care?
What I think is more likely is that the kind of people most likely to make a fuss about disrespect of the flag are too busy worrying about people disrespecting the country. In that mindset, anything you do with the flag is okay, as long as it can been seen as a sign that you like the country too. Stick a flag on your car radio antenna and let it get raggedy-edged and faded? Cool, you've got a flag on your car, you're a patriot. Cut a hole in the middle of a flag and stick your head through it? At least you're showing pride.
So the thing is, I've been listening to Dr Laura. I know, I know. I should know better. But I have a long-standing fascination with advice columns, and advice call-in shows are even better, because you get more back-and-forth. And Dr Laura is pretty entertaining, for an advice show. I don't even mean the controversy. I think I might mean the opposite of the controversy. At least once or twice an hour she makes a statement that reminds me how far apart our ideological bases are, but they're usually kind of toss-offs. A lot of what I find interesting about this show is how it's mostly just pretty good advice.
That said, it's pretty good advice that comes from a very unyielding point of view. I don't even mean the strict code of right and wrong behavior. I'm thinking more of the message that people don't change. If your father or wife or co-worker is a bad person, they're always going to be a bad person, and you can adjust your behavior around them accordingly, but you can't make them change and you shouldn't wait around for them to do so. It's a fairly common thing to hear her say, something like "I'm sorry that you married a jerk, but now that you know he's a jerk, what are you going to do?"
Even more interesting, although far less common, are the callers who are clearly seeking comfort. From Dr Laura. They all sound like they're really familiar with the show, so I'm never sure what they're thinking. You get the woman who calls in practically in tears because her eleven-year-old daughter asked her to not come to the school play, and while she's talking about how bad she feels about being rejected by her daughter, Dr Laura is just pushing ahead with "well, what have you done to make your daughter not want you there? Are you very critical of her? Do you make her feel bad? Stop doing that and maybe she'll start being interested in having you around. No, I don't want to hear why you do it, just stop doing it. Of course you feel bad, this is your fault."
Easterblogg points out what was, to me, the most offensive portion of Sunday's entertainment: Kid Rock was wearing an American flag. Not a flag-like shirt, mind you, but an actual, honest-to-Joe Old Glory with a head hole cut in the center. Isn't that, um, disrespectful?
Now, I'm all in favor of people treating the flag with exactly as much respect as they hold for it. And I'm not particularly bothered by the FCC investigation of the halftime show. For better or for worse, that's why we have an FCC. But I'm surprised there hasn't been far more public backlash against Kid Rock for his incredibly questionable taste. Can't we at least get him on record with a quote as good as "wardrobe malfunction?"
William Saletan writes an epitaph for the Lieberman campaign:
He started out the race with a presumptive seniority that might have been called, in the parlance of his campaign, PrimoJoeniture. But on the stump, voters found him Joematose. He had trouble rustling up Joenations. Antiwar Democrats in Iowa found his support of the Iraq war Joefensive. He went into a Joesdive. He was Joewhere....
Joe-for-7. Joe-miliation.
Joe revoir, Joe. Joerivederci. Hasta Joe Vista.
I'm going to start working on Bush puns right now.
Hasta la... uh....
Sayona....
Au rev....
Aw fuck it.
"CBS apologizes for exposure of Janet Jackson's breast"
Is it just me, or does this make it sound like she got frostbite?
