The Following Songs Go Out To....

To Mitt Romney, for his courageous leadership on women's rights:

To Paul Ryan, for his dedication to volunteer work:

Cafeteria Catholics and the Free Exercise of Religion

A few days ago, in a column entitled "Defining Religious Liberty Down", Ross Douthat attempted to reinterpret the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution in a manner that, in essence, would allow anybody who shares his religious beliefs, as well as a few others whose beliefs don't offend him, to do and say whatever they believe their religion demands, with no response or push-back from even a single individual. Anybody who does not accept that, Douthat lectures, "then don’t tell religious people that you respect our freedoms."

Douthat gets off to a weak start by attempting to reinvent the Free Exercise Clause,

[T]he Bill of Rights guarantees Americans something that its authors called “the free exercise” of religion.

It’s a significant choice of words, because it suggests a recognition that religious faith cannot be reduced to a purely private or individual affair. Most religious communities conceive of themselves as peoples or families, and the requirements of most faiths extend well beyond attendance at a sabbath service — encompassing charity and activism, education and missionary efforts, and other “exercises” that any guarantee of religious freedom must protect.

That is to say, Douthat finds the words "significant because as he understands them, if he claims to have been inspired by religion, they shield his every word and action from criticism. Not just from discrimination, not just from state actors, but from the responses of private citizens who happen to hold different values.

As I previously stated, Douthat is not speaking in defense of broad religious liberty. He is speaking out for his own beliefs, and other beliefs that he finds acceptable. He does not even consider that you might oppose his words or actions on religious grounds. If you so much as whisper a protest, you're violating his religious liberty - with his faith, or perhaps its his narcissism, obscuring that he's displaying the very arrogance he ascribes to anybody who disagrees with him.

Beyond the sheer arrogance of his position, Douthat overstates his constitutional case. In upholding the state's right to prohibit sacramental use of peyote, Justice Scalia, also a Catholic, has attempted to explain the Free Exercise Clause,

The Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, which has been made applicable to the States by incorporation into the Fourteenth Amendment... provides that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...." U. S. Const., Amdt. 1 (emphasis added). The free exercise of religion means, first and foremost, the right to believe and profess whatever religious doctrine one desires. Thus, the First Amendment obviously excludes all "governmental regulation of religious beliefs as such."... The government may not compel affirmation of religious belief, ... punish the expression of religious doctrines it believes to be false, ... impose special disabilities on the basis of religious views or religious status, ... or lend its power to one or the other side in controversies over religious authority or dogma....

But the "exercise of religion" often involves not only belief and profession but the performance of (or abstention from) physical acts: assembling with others for a worship service, participating in sacramental use of bread and wine, proselytizing, abstaining from certain foods or certain modes of transportation. It would be true, we think (though no case of ours has involved the point), that a State would be "prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]" if it sought to ban such acts or abstentions only when they are engaged in for religious reasons, or only because of the religious belief that they display. It would doubtless be unconstitutional, for example, to ban the casting of "statues that are to be used for worship purposes," or to prohibit bowing down before a golden calf.

Respondents in the present case, however, seek to carry the meaning of "prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]" one large step further. They contend that their religious motivation for using peyote places them beyond the reach of a criminal law that is not specifically directed at their religious practice, and that is concededly constitutional as applied to those who use the drug for other reasons. They assert, in other words, that "prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]" includes requiring any individual to observe a generally applicable law that requires (or forbids) the performance of an act that his religious belief forbids (or requires). As a textual matter, we do not think the words must be given that meaning. It is no more necessary to regard the collection of a general tax, for example, as "prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]" by those citizens who believe support of organized government to be sinful, than it is to regard the same tax as "abridging the freedom . . . of the press" of those publishing companies that must pay the tax as a condition of staying in business. It is a permissible reading of the text, in the one case as in the other, to say that if prohibiting the exercise of religion (or burdening the activity of printing) is not the object of the tax but merely the incidental effect of a generally applicable and otherwise valid provision, the First Amendment has not been offended.

That's a long excerpt, so let's pull out two important points: first, the Free Exercise Clause prohibits the government from "lend[ing] its power to one or the other side in controversies over religious authority or dogma", and second it allows for the broad regulation of society in manners that affect individual and group religious liberty, as long as "prohibiting the exercise of religion... is not the object of the tax but merely the incidental effect of a generally applicable and otherwise valid provision".

One more important point, Scalia rejected the Court's precedents that would have required the state to articulate a "compelling state interest" before allowing a law to take precedence over an individual's free exercise of religion. If Douthat believes it is the secularists who were responsible for weakening that protection, he's looking in the wrong direction.

That is to say, Douthat is ignoring every conservative approach to constitutional interpretation, appears disinterested in learning the interpretation provided by even the most conservative, most religious Supreme Court Justices, and advocates a personal interpretation of the Constitution's language consistent with a 20th century understanding of its terminology - and at that, not a broad understanding, but a personal understanding. The theological equivalent would be for him to pick up a bible, read one verse, and announce that he knows exactly what it means - no need to examine history, context, the opinions of past religious leaders, the teachings of his church. In both cases, it's the sort of personalized, shallow interpretation that has long been scorned, respectively, by political and religious conservatives.

Douthat remains upset that the government is regulating birth control in the context of the secular operations of religious organizations. Yet any form of health insurance is going to cover procedures or medicines that violate somebody's religious beliefs. Douthat prefers to misrepresent the facts, purporting that the regulation treats "religious hospitals, schools and charities as purely secular operations", knowing full well that's not the truth. For example, a religious school that hired few, if any, non-practioners of its faith, and catered to a similarly non-diverse student body would not be affected by the regulation. But more than that, although Douthat does not mention private employers, the logic of his intepretation of the Free Exercise Clause would extend his objection to the mandate to purely private contexts.

What would happen if a religious organization, or a religious private individual, acquired Douthat's employer and stripped out of his insurance policy coverage for procedures and medications inconsistent with somebody else's religious beliefs? It's not apparent that Douthat has even considered that possibility. If he has, it would appear either that he does not believe that the rules he favors are likely to affect him - that is, he does not anticipate such an employer acquiring the Times - or would view the new owner's religious views as unduly extreme and thus not worthy of protection. Fortunately for Douthat, even within the context of birth control he suffers no direct impact.

Douthat also complains that a judge in Cologne, Germany - apparently operating under the wacky belief that his court is not regulated by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, held that "circumcision as a violation of a newborn’s human rights". Douthat takes umbrage at the notion that a judge could impose such a rule in relation to a baby boy, but makes no mention of baby girls. Yes, there are serious differences in kind and degree between male circumcision and female "ritual genital mutilation", but those concerns are secular. Douthat complains,

Here again, defenders of the decision insisted that it didn’t trample on any Jew’s or Muslim’s freedom of belief.

Douthat, predictably, does not identify even a single person who claims that the ruling does not impinge on "any Jew’s or Muslim’s freedom of belief" because if he were to approach the supporters' case honestly he would have to acknowledge that they are in fact supporting a balancing test - the rights of the child against the rights of the parent to perform a medical procedure that the parent believes is mandated by religion. Douthat can't keep himself from resorting to hyperbole, that the ruling "would effectively outlaw Judaism itself", as if no Jew has ever had an early or late circumcision, or as if it's impossible for a boy or man to convert to Judaism once he's nine days old. I don't mean at all to belittle the religious issue, but there's no need for that type of sensationalism.

The fact that Douthat has to reach all the way to Germany to find evidence of an encroachment on religious liberty is less evidence of the rarity of this type of conflict, and more of the fact that Douthat's argument is driven by his own ideology. He could instead pick up the cause of parents who, in the name of their religion, would deny an infant or child a potentially life-saving blood transfusion.

Douthat's third and last example is "the great Chick-fil-A imbroglio". Although a handful of politicians to whom Douthat alludes are deserving of cricism for suggesting that they might discriminate against Chick-fil-A based upon the statements of its founder, Douthat is confusing the exercise of speech rights with the free exercise of religion. He also fails to distinguish fair comment - a politician's standing up for the rights and freedoms of his own constituents - for interference with the free exercise of religion.

Does Douthat believe that the president of Chick-fil-A's statement was mandated by his religion? No? Then what we're seeing is his choice to make a public statement about his personal religious beliefs. While that might fall under Douthat's made-up version of what the Free Exercise Clause is supposed to mean, from a constitutional perspective we're actually talking about freedom of speech. The president of Chick-fil-A has the constitutional right to say what he wants about gay marriage based upon his religion, and everybody else in the country has the right to respond with support, condemnation or indifference. Even within the context of grandstanding politicians it's a speech issue - no politician or political entity has actually discriminated against Chick-fil-A based upon its president's statement.

Also, within the context of religion, what are we to make of Douthat's assertion that the president of Chick-fil-A "supports 'the biblical definition of the family unit'"? Because last I checked, the Bible included some family units that, by today's standard, are quite unusual. Even if we limit discussion to the New Testament, Douthat will find no shortage of people who will quote scripture to support their belief in polygamous marriage.

Whether intentionally or because he can't help but view the world through a manichean prism, Douthat creates a false dichotomy between the president of Chick-fil-A and the politicians, with the president simply engaging in the free exercise of religion and the politicians are, de facto, neither religious nor concerned about the free exercise of religion. Is Douthat seriously arguing that Mayors like Rahm Emanuel and Michael Bloomberg don't care about religious freedoms? That they're on the side of secularists who would back judicial edicts that "effectively outlaw Judaism itself"? And has Douthat truly failed to notice the considerable criticism of the political grandstanding from the secular community? I recognize that it's easier to caricature your opponents, to roll up every person who takes any position you don't like, to ignore their actual statements, and to pretend they're a monolithic "other" that stands against all that is true and good. But even if he can't reach the point of internal consistency, can't Douthat at least try to be plausible?

Toward the end of his column, Douthat mentions the need to balance the free exercise of religion against the interest of society, but rather than giving that difficult balance the serious consideration it deserves he invokes the absurd,

We do not allow people to exercise beliefs that require, say, forced marriage or honor killing. You can believe in the gods of 15th-century Mesoamerica, but neither Chicago values nor American ones permit the use of Aztec sacrificial altars on the South Side.

Again, it's the easy cases. The ones few to none would find controversial. The implication is, "The judge thinks that circumcising male babies is akin to human sacrifice," rather than examining the court's actual rationale and the actual balancing of interests that the court attempted to achieve. Harder cases, like denying a child antibiotics for an infection, a blood transfusion for surgery, or medical treatment for an easily treatable ailment that, left alone, is life-threatening or terminal? Douthat, it seems, has no interest in the difficult questions.

Even in the context of his examples, though, it's surprising that Douthat can't find a parallel. Why do we forbid honor killing in the name of even the most sincere religious belief? Why do we forbid parents from forcing their children to marry in the name of religion? Because we recognize that the parent's free exercise of religion can affect their child, and that the child is a separate individual with rights that may justify overriding the parent's religious beliefs and, at a certain age, that it should be the child's choice as to whether to follow the religious beliefs of a parent or to choose a different path.

The judge in German was not forbidding circumcision - he was holding that the procedure could wait until the child was old enough to make an informed decision. While you can disagree with that decision on a number of grounds, if you accept that society can forbid parents from completely disregarding a child's autonomy and individual rights in the name of religion, we're talking about a ruling that differs in degree from the circumcision ruling but not in kind.

If you read Douthat, no surprise here, no small part of his argument is predicated upon the fact that he's not comfortable with sex, and is particularly uncomfortable with female sexuality.

To the extent that the H.H.S. mandate, the Cologne ruling and the Chick-fil-A controversy reflect a common logic rather than a shared confusion, then, it’s a logic that regards Western monotheism’s ideas about human sexuality — all that chastity, monogamy, male-female business — as similarly incompatible with basic modern freedoms.

Nobody familiar with Douthat's past writing is going to be surprised that when he thinks of birth control he thinks of slutty coeds trying to get into his pants, not of married women who want to limit the size of their families or women of any age trying to address conditions such as endometriosis and menstrual cramps. But it astonishes me that to Douthat, the sole reason that a judge might be concerned about circumcision would be that it might "deny one’s offspring the kind of sexual gratification that anti-circumcision advocates claim the procedure makes impossible". When he writes,

[Religious ideas] certainly cannot be exercised in ways that might make anyone uncomfortable with his or her own sexual choices or identity.

Douthat gets it exactly backwards. It's not others who want to limit his exercise of his religion lest he "make anyone uncomfortable with his or her own sexual choices or identity" - it's he who wants to impose his religious values on the rest of society so that he never has to feel uncomfortable with his own, awkward sexuality. And believe it or not, from there Douthat's thinking becomes even more convoluted,

It may seem strange that anyone could look around the pornography-saturated, fertility-challenged, family-breakdown-plagued West and see a society menaced by a repressive puritanism. But it’s clear that this perspective is widely and sincerely held.

I'm looking around... funny, I can't see any pornography from here, my marriage seems intact, I have a child so I can't be all that "fertility challenged"... although I suspect that Douthat means the opposite, that the challenge of fertility he perceives is that, believe it or not, some people want to have sexual intercourse while avoiding pregnancy. The only intrusion into my conservative family idyll is a nag of a columnist lecturing me about the decay of society. So I guess from where I'm sitting, at least at the moment his puritanical bent is a bigger issue than our decadent society.

To be more fair to Douthat, yes, it's difficult to conceive of a religion that would not find fault with some aspect of our society - whose practitioners would not find something to be at odds with their sincerely held religious beliefs. That, however, has been the case for all of human history. Yes, like Douthat many religious people will be uncomfortable with our society's treatment of sexuality. But let's be honest, you don't even have to be religious to take issue with our society's approach to sexuality, nor is it only the non-religious who engage in sexual practices that would make Douthat blush.

Douthat believes that the use of birth control is morally wrong? Fine, great, nobody's making him use it. But let's not pretend that there aren't millions of devout Catholic men and women who don't share his dogmatism on the issue. He is free to lecture them that they're not being true to the teachings of their church, and they have every right to ignore him. A constitutional right, at that. It's not those men and women who want "to use the levers of power to bend [Douthat] to [their] will" - again, it's quite the opposite.

When Douthat complains that anybody who disagrees with him necessarily "regards Western monotheism’s ideas about human sexuality — all that chastity, monogamy, male-female business — as... incompatible with basic modern freedoms", he's quite incorrect. But it's perfectly reasonable to point out that much of the "chastity, monogamy, male-female business" emphasis of "Western monotheism" was historically directed not at regulating boys and men, but at regulating girls and women. Not that Douthat would care, but the 20th Amendment - granting women the right to vote - is still less than a century old.

We're similarly not that far removed from an era in which our nation had legal slavery, and even closer to an era in which interracial marriage could result in incarceration - and in both cases, you could find defenders of the practices who advanced sincere, Christian religious arguments in favor of the status quo ante. Now, I expect Douthat would find it obvious that Christianity holds slavery and racial discrimination to be abhorrent. When the government says, "You have to let African Americans rent rooms in your hotel," that offends some hotel owners' free exercise of religion. When society forces changes of that type, is it a bad thing, period, end of story, because it offended some people's religious sensitivities at the time, or can we accept that after a period of adjustment most religious institutions will find themselves agreeing with the change?

Contrary to Douthat's suggestion, our society has a long and proud puritanical streak. While it does not bother Douthat, and perhaps he would even prefer that it were more dominant, there are people in our culture who object to the treatment of women as second-class citizens, and who find it objectionable that people like Douthat use their religious beliefs to advance public policy that makes it more difficult for women to participate in society as equals. It is in fact possible to recognize our society's puritanical streak and recognize that some aspects of our popular culture are, to put it mildly, over-the-top. If you spend time actually looking at our society, both aspects are very hard to miss.

If you want to cloister yourself among people of your religion, living in seclusion, untouched by the corrupting elements of society at large, you have every right to do so. What you cannot reasonably expect to do is to come out of that seclusion into greater society without ever being offended, and you cannot reasonably expect to engage with a larger society that does not share your religious values without ever having those values weighed against the needs and rights of others, and of society as a whole. And sorry, if it feels like society is "bending you to its will" when it tells you that you cannot impose your religious beliefs on others, such is the consequence of living in an open society where others are also permitted to hold and exercise religious beliefs of their own, even if they differ from yours.

Lady Parts!

Please note, I am fully prepared to concede that these people are "immeasurably superior to"... David Brooks.

If There Were a Wage Gap, Women Would Want it to be Larger?

The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial by Carrie Lukas, executive director of the Independent Women's Forum, an organization seemingly devoted to finding women who are willing to advance anti-feminist viewpoints. There's nothing wrong with that, of itself, as women are entitled to hold a range of views and public debate can help clarify the facts and issues. But if this editorial is reflective of the quality of the organization's advocacy, it seems fair to state that they're not really interested in improving the public debate or understanding of the issues.

The article does include the following, valid point:

Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings.

Historically there was a lot of argument about "equal pay for work of equal value," in which two disparate occupations would be declared "equal" and with the women's occupation being noted to offer lower wages. It's classic "apples and oranges", with those on one side of the debate insisting that two jobs had "equal value" and the other arguing that the two jobs are nothing alike. It's not that there isn't a basis for the argument that certain jobs traditionally open to women were undervalued, but you quickly lose your audience when you start making purely subjective parallels between wholly unrelated occupations.

But that's about as charitable as I can be to Ms. Lukas. Her arguments are largely unsupported, illogical, and unrelated to her thesis. "The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women." Well, yes, but the point of discussion is the "Male-Female Wage Gap", and to the extent that the unemployment rate is relevant to the wage gap it's in the opposite direction to what Ms. Lukas would have us infer. If we are to assume that men are drawn to one set of jobs and women are drawn to another, and the reason for men's higher rate of unemployment is that traditional male jobs are comparatively scarce and that they're not qualified for or not interested in applying for "women's work", you would expect that wages for male occupations would drop in the face of an oversupply of workers and that wages for women would rise in the face of relative scarcity. So why isn't that happening?

And about those work choices:

Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries.

Men "tend" to work in vocations that require little to no formal education and involve various forms of physical labor? In May, 2009, 0.70 percent of private sector employment was in the construction industries. 1.4% was in truck driving. 1.91% was for laborers and freight, stock, and material movers, .95% for maintenance and repair workers, .92 percent for team assemblers.... So this tendency among men is reflected in about 6% of private sector employment? And women... cluster? What an interesting choice of words.

When medical schools were overwhelmingly male-dominated, were men "clustering" in the health care industry, or would such a term be used only in relation to female-dominated nursing schools? Now that more than half of medical school students are women, with men who might otherwise have attended presumably ripping off their shirts and going to truck driving school, we can expand the term "cluster" across the entire health care industry? Does the same apply to law firms, with law practice having once been almost exclusively a male profession but with women now comprising more than half of enrolled law students? Again, if women are "clustering" in fields that require more education and that have lower rates of unemployment, some of which are quite well-paid and most of which are far more resistant to economic downturn than the @6% of jobs to which male workers "tend" to apply, why wouldn't we expect women to out-earn men by a substantial margin?

It would seem obvious that if you are going to take the reasonable position that you can't compare apples and oranges, that it is arbitrary to say "nursing home attendants are equal in value to society to hardscape installers, and thus should earn the same rate of pay," you should be able to understand the implication of your position - that to support your argument on this issue you should be looking at wage differentials within occupations, or between very similar occupations. Lukas wants it both ways - she wants to be able to talk about women voluntarily choosing to "cluster" in lower-paying fields while eschewing the "manly man" fields that attract men, so that there should be no surprise that women earn less. Except she constructs an argument that instead suggests that women should be earning more.

Then there's the reality of what men do. Lukas suggests that "Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility." Well, so are men, including those who start out performing manual labor but reach an age when their bodies can't keep up. Lukas suggests,

Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.

As a lawyer, I have had many discussions over the years with other lawyers and law students, often touching on the nature of work and compensation. Within the professional classes you will find no shortage of men who make lots of money but have never held a job that involves demanding physical labor. Sometimes you'll hear a comment from one who has, that "When you say you worked hard today, you have no idea what that means - you barely even got out of your chair." That's not to say that the speaker is inclined to quit legal practice and drive a long-haul truck - contrary to what Lukas suggests, cutting your pay by 2/3 or more in order to work long hours and be away from your family for days or weeks at a time isn't particularly attractive to your average man. Travel may be required, but if you take a look at the higher earning classes you'll discover that their on-the-job travel involves a much different level of comfort than the sleeper cab. It is to say that men and women who have worked physical labor and have found much greater financial reward and stability tend to have moved into the white collar fields and, as much as they appreciate what a hard day's work truly can entail, aren't inclined to go back to the literal trenches.

If you wanted to make a generalization based upon traditional employment, looking at outcome and not opportunity, you might conclude on that partial information "Women tend to work in jobs where they get to be around other women, and where they will have time to take care of their households, husbands and children, even though it means they earn less. Men work with men, and are driven to earn more money and work longer hours." It wouldn't be a particularly meaningful observation, but you can see how an alien visiting our planet might deem it reasonable. But even that alien, I think, would have difficulty with Lukas's willingness to overgeneralize in relation to the types of employment that attract men or women, and to completely ignore how those occupations and the qualifications for those occupations have shifted over time. For example, Lukas argues,

The Department of Labor's Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.

The alien might respond, "But you told us that choice of occupation plays an important role in earnings, and now you're completely ignoring both choice of occupation and wages paid. He works 8.75 hours per day as a long-haul trucker, earning $150, she works 8.01 hours per day in a 'health care cluster' as a nurse anesthesiologist, earning $350 - how does that explain anything about a wage gap?"

Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's.

True, but then why did Lukas spend so much time talking about how men earn more money because they "tend" to work in jobs that don't require educational attainment and are not knowledge-based, or involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions, if the path to a stable, well-paying job is in fact to obtain a college education and to work in a knowledge-based occupation or profession?

And now for the crocodile tears:

Should we celebrate the closing of the wage gap? Certainly it's good news that women are increasingly productive workers, but women whose husbands and sons are out of work or under-employed are likely to have a different perspective. After all, many American women wish they could work less, and that they weren't the primary earners for their families.

What woman, after all, wouldn't happily surrender part of her wages or her job stability in order that her husband could once again out-earn her, or that her (adult?) son could support his family with a manly man's vocational job instead of having to go to college. It may be anecdotal, but look at the compelling arguments to that effect from the many women Lukas quotes... Oh, I guess she didn't have room to support that claim with any evidence whatsoever. A hollow man. On the whole, though, that's in keeping with an editorial that supposedly debunks a wage gap but gets confused coming out of the starting blocks over how you would even define such a gap, and argues both that it doesn't exist and that it results from women's occupational choices. Every which way but loose.

Few Americans see the economy as a battle between the sexes. They want opportunity to abound so that men and women can find satisfying work situations that meet their unique needs.

Why am I thinking at this point, "The few, the proud, the Independent Women's Forum".

(Incidentally, where was the argument that women earn less than men because they take time off for birthin' their babies?)

Masculinity and Temper Tantrums

There's a concept known as sang-froid, the maintenance of composure, level-headedness, and coolness under stressful or difficult circumstances, that is often depicted in movies as the height of masculinity. Think Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now - sure, he may be under live fire in a war zone, but that's not going to stop him from surfing. Think of pretty much any action movie - the hero faces adversity and gets mad, but keeps his cool - there's no point in a tantrum. It doesn't look good on camera and does nothing to even the score. This is anything but a novel or rare interpretation of masculinity.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too; ...

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

When most people are responding emotionally to a situation, a commonly invoked idiom is, "Let cooler heads prevail."

President Obama has sang-froid. In spades. His coolness has resulted in any number of right-wing attacks on him for "not showing enough emotion". As if he would seem more Presidential if he were displaying barely-controlled rage. Me? I got enough of play-acting under G.W. Bush, and I'm perfectly content to have a President who both acts like a grown-up and treats the electorate as if it's comprised of adults.

Parker apparently sees herself less as an analyst, taking facts, creating novel arguments and presenting them to the public in her bi-weekly column, and more as part of an echo chamber:

Many people seemed to have a hankering for one particular emotion: Not the Bill Clinton "I feel your pain" kind but the "Take-BP-Behind-the-Woodshed-and-Make-Them-Pay" kind. They wanted an action figure in the hyper-masculine mode, not George W. Bush but the Terminator.

In fits and starts, Obama had given it to them. He wanted to know "whose ass to kick," he told us. He wanted them to "plug the damn hole." Press secretary Robert Gibbs assured us that in discussions with Obama he, indeed, had "seen rage from him."

Then the president gave his Oval Office speech. And the collective reaction was, "That's it?! Where's the outrage?!?!"

Arnold Schwarzenegger was well-cast as The Terminator because he was big, intimidating, and had not yet learned to convey on-screen emotional range. Earth to Kathleen Sullivan - The Terminator is an android. The Terminator has no emotions. In Terminator II, the android was frozen by liquid nitrogen - you don't get much colder than that - and yet he managed to (dare I say) keep his emotional cool (because he didn't have emotions). You could hardly ask for a better illustration of sang-froid as evidence of masculinity, yet Parker's not sufficiently self-aware to recognize the contradiction. Meanwhile, back in the real world where the real Arnold Schwarzenegger is actually in politics, how often does he engage in public blow-ups or tantrums when things aren't going his way?

With due respect to Kathleen Sullivan's yearning for the "boil" of George W. Bush, it seems that President Obama's ability to keep his cool is more consistent with Presidential tradition. Sure, we have stories of past Presidents who would explode into anger at their aides - behind the scenes - but that wasn't the face they put forth to the public. Which presidents in recent history didn't present a calm public face in response to crisis? Bill Clinton? George H.W. Bush? Ronald Reagan? Gerald Ford? Jimmy Carter? I'm not sure that Parker's either presenting the vindication of G.W. or the condemnation of Obama that she imagines when she, in effect, holds G.W. and Richard Nixon out as paragons of the appropriate display of anger.

If we're honest about perceptions of public displays of anger, as a society we tend to recognize a male form - the inner beast escapes and wants to "break something" - and a female form - "hysteria", "histrionics", the "hissy fit" - etymology, L. hystericus "of the womb". It's sexist, and truth be told the biggest difference often appears to be that men are for the most part more capable of outwardly directed violence. But in the context of Presidential behavior it's all spin.

Had Obama been reacting to things more angrily, you can fully expect that the very same voices that have been demanding "more anger" would be denouncing him as excessively emotional, unbalanced, out-of-control. And you can expect that columnists like Kathleen Parker would pick up on those themes to argue that the conduct she presently contends evidences a "testosterone deficit" would in fact make him more masculine than his "inability to control his anger". Sang-froid would once again be a masculine attribute, while the "boil" of G.W. would be pushed into the background as somehow different or irrelevant to similar behavior by Obama - but I would not be surprised by comparisons to Nixon.

Kathleen Parker: Obama's Not Girlie - Just Lacking Testosterone

The Economist's Language Johnson blog, in which its correspondents discuss the use of language, recently debunked an analysis of President Obama's BP speech, which Paul J.J. Payack of the "Global Language Monitor" claimed to have been at a 9.8 grade level and was thus above the heads of his listeners.

Microsoft Word can calculate the "Flesch-Kincaid" reading level for any bit of text. It tells me that the Gettysburg Address is on a 10.9 reading level, and the first section of Winston Churchill's storied "We shall fight them on the beaches" speech rates a downright incomprehensible 12.6. Yet of course neither speech is called "professorial". It seems that for the gullible reporters at CNN passing along Mr Payack's "analysis", confirmation bias is alive and well.

Language Log on the simplistic analysis used by Payack:

I think we can all agree that those are shockingly long professor-style sentences for a president to be using, especially in addressing the nation after a disaster. Why, they were almost as long as the ones that President George W. Bush, that notorious pointy-headed intellectual, used in his 9/15/2005 speech to the nation about Hurricane Katrina, where I count 3283 words in 140 sentences, for an average of 23.45 words per sentence! And we all remember how upset the press corps got about the professorial character of that speech!

Unfortunately for Kathleen Parker, while she obviously got the memo that she's supposed to attack President Obama as a girly-man, she apparently doesn't follow The Economist closely enough to avoid being, in its words, gullible. (She actually writes, "No, I'm not calling Obama a girlie president", before proceeding to attempt exactly that - again.)

After telling us that "Obama is a chatterbox who makes Alan Alda look like Genghis Khan," Parker writes,

When he finally addressed the nation on day 56 (!) of the crisis, Obama's speech featured 13 percent passive-voice constructions, the highest level measured in any major presidential address this century, according to the Global Language Monitor, which tracks and analyzes language.

Yes... he's so chatty, and so unable to shut up that it took him eight weeks to address the subject that Kathleen Parker thinks he should have been sounding off about from day one. Obviously she could argue that he's being aloof, unconcerned about the feelings of a region and nation that wants nothing more at a time of crisis than a strong presidential shoulder to cry on and some sort of many combination of "There, there, it's alright" and "I'm gonna beat the tarballs out of BP" - yet just like a man he didn't even notice the nation's emotional needs. Somebody who took that opposite view of the same behavior might even see Obama as demonstrating "cool detachment"... oh, wait.

But no, she complains that he used the passive voice. A manly President would never say something in the passive voice, like "Mistakes were made". (Ahem.) Of course, by limiting the "analysis" to "this century", we're effectively talking about only two Presidents and two sets of speechwriters - about as deliberately non-scientific an example as you can obtain.

Further, Sullivan offers nothing to suggest that use of the passive voice is more common for women than for men. She appears to grasp the word "passive" and conclude, "That references a personality trait" instead of "That means the subject in a sentence receives the action with the use of a passive verb." ("Mistakes were made," as opposed to "We made mistakes.")

With a bit more digging, Parker would have discovered that Payack's analysis of the use of the "passive voice" is anything but reliable. Payack "analyzed" the Vice-Presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, stating that the passive voice can be used to deflect responsibility and that it was heavily used by Palin, implying that her use was to distance herself from Bush and Cheney. However,

There are (by my count) eight passive clauses in this dataset, occurring in seven sentences, so 9% percent of her sentences have at least one passive clause. But let’s look at representative examples of these passives:

(3a) “And our commanders on the ground will tell us when those conditions have been met.”

(3b) “[...] those dangerous regimes, again, cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, period.”

(3c) “No Child Left Behind was implemented.”

None of these use the passive to deflect responsibility. In fact, in all of these sentences, the agents would probably be proud to be explicitly named. “Me! It’s me who is not allowing a dangerous regime to obtain nuclear weapons!”, they’d scream.

Payack also reported that Palin spoke at the tenth grade level, and Biden at the eighth - after all, under Flesch-Kincaid, long, convoluted sentences test at a higher "grade level" than short, clear sentences, even when the thought being expressed is simple, incomplete, inarticulate, or platitudinous. Also, when you're analyzing a speech, the manner of transcription can change the result - if thoughts are transcribed as separated by commas instead of periods, the "grade level" goes up. (The post uses an example "I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant." - that's supposedly a ninth grade level sentence, but if you change the comma to a period the two sentences score at third grade level.) The grade will also be inflated by speech errors.

Readability tests like Flesch-Kincaid are inherently imprecise, even for written text. When you try applying them to speech, the resulting number is pretty much meaningless. A precise estimate of the difficulty of a sentence requires psycholinguistic testing, not just pressing F7 in Word.

This isn't the first time Payack has excited the armchair psychologists of the right wing. A couple of years ago he wrote that Obama said "I" more than McCain during a presidential debate, kicking off a series of attacks on Obama as self-absorbed, even narcissistic. (That that type of analysis seems to tell us more about the speaker and their views of the subject than about the subject of their comments. The same people who hated Obama in 1998 and saw him as a narcissist are likely also happy to dismiss him as feminized, without regard to whether the two lines of attack are consistent.)

Parker also relies upon an article by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, written in 1998, that describes how Hillary Clinton was attacked "for the sin of talking like a lawyer and, by extension, 'like a man.'" Parker asks,

Could it be that Obama is suffering from the inverse?

You mean, could somebody who knows next to nothing about linguistics accuse President Obama of speaking like a woman, as part of a larger effort to diminish and marginalize him? Think really hard, Ms. Parker - where could you find the answer to that question.

Campbell's research, in which she affirms that men can assume feminine communication styles successfully (Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton), suggests holes in my own theory. She insists that men are safe assuming female styles as long as they meet rhetorical norms for effective advocacy - clarity and cogency of argument, appropriate and compelling evidence, and preempting opposing positions.

I'm not so sure. The masculine-coded context of the Oval Office poses special challenges, further exacerbated by a crisis that demands decisive action.

I somehow missed Parker's years of criticism, whether of President Reagan or President Obama, that they lacked testosterone. I have somehow missed Parker's analysis of Reagan's eight years, with her wringing her hands about how indecisive he was.

Parker also abuses Toni Morrison's comment about Bill Clinton:

When Morrison wrote in the New Yorker about Bill Clinton's "blackness," she cited the characteristics he shared with the African American community:

"Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."

If we accept that premise, even if unseriously proffered, then we could say that Obama displays many tropes of femaleness. I say this in the nicest possible way. I don't think that doing things a woman's way is evidence of deficiency but, rather, suggests an evolutionary achievement.

(Evolution? Just like with Hillary Clinton, we should take it as a compliment, right?) Parker's is the popular conception of the phrase, but that doesn't mean it's correct:

[Morrison's] words have been used frequently and almost always out of their original context, as a way of signaling Bill Clinton's supposed comfort with and advocacy for black people, to the extent that Hillary Clinton even attempted to joke that she was "in this interracial marriage."

A look at the context of the words at the source is illuminating.... Morrison was not saying that Bill Clinton is America's first black president in a cute or celebratory way, nor was she calling Clinton an "honorary Negro." Rather, she was comparing Clinton's treatment at the hands of Starr and others with that of black men, so often seen as "the always and already guilty 'perp.'"

So, Ms. Parker, when you reflect on your work are you going to tell us, "Mistakes were made," or, "I made mistakes"?

Update: My analysis focuses principally on how Parker's argument is not logically supported. It's very much deserving of analysis based upon Parker's assumptions about the role of women and what it means to be a woman. See, for example, Feministe and Politics Daily. Nisha Chittal at Feministe reminds me of Parker's impression of Alan Alda, something that has always had me scratching my head,

Obama is a chatterbox who makes Alan Alda look like Genghis Khan.

For some reason, Alan Alda earned a public image as a new age, sensitive guy for his depiction of Hawkeye Pierce on MASH. Except Hawkeye's interactions with women were almost exclusively either focused on putting his superior officer, Major Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan, in her place, or bedding a woman from the nursing staff. Sure, he used charm whereas a caricature of Genghis Khan might be expected to take the "rape, loot and pillage" approach to the fairer sex, but his chatter was literally intended to charm the pants off of his female co-workers.

To Parker, that means Hawkeye was somehow feminized? Or does Parker see Hawkeye as weak because he was opposed to war, and directed angry rhetoric at the heads of state responsible for sending him into what he perceived to be a futile war? If it's the latter, does she truly believe Hawkeye would view Obama as a kindred spirit, or as personifying the magnification of his beliefs? One way or another, Hawkeye seems like a terrible example of the new age, sensitive, "feminized" man.

Update 2: Language Log takes on Payack's claims and finds them wanting:

The real point emerges if you look at the passive examples themselves. I will list all of them, with the passive clause (the passive participle together with its complements including the agent by-phrase if there is one) underlined in each phrase quoted. Judge for yourself the extent to which these phrases look as if they were "used to either deflect responsibility, or to have no particular 'doer' of an action" — Payack's version of a familiar but thoroughly ignorant claim about the function of passives:

Passive clauses (underlined) in Obama's post-oil-leak speech

1. Seventeen others were injured


2. a team led by Dr. Steven Chu


3. a relief well … that's expected to stop the leak


4. an effort led by Admiral Thad Allen


5. millions of gallons of oil have already been removed from the water


6. five and a half million feet of boom has been laid


7. the second thing we're focused on


8. areas where the beaches are not yet affected


9. their way of life may be lost


10. whatever resources are required


11. the workers and business owners who have been harmed


12. this fund will not be controlled by BP


13. to ensure that all legitimate claims are paid


14. the account must and will be administered by an independent third party


15. The plan will be designed by states, local communities, tribes, fishermen, businesses, conservationists and other Gulf residents


16. the necessary precautions would be taken


17. known as the Minerals Management Service


18. a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves
    industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight


19. Oil companies … were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections


20. the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered


21. the path forward has been blocked — not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor


22. an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude


23. there are costs associated with this transition


24. the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II


25. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon


26. a tradition that was brought to America long ago by fishing immigrants from Europe


27. It's called "The Blessing of the Fleet"


28. a blessing that's granted

Tell me the truth: can you truly say that you think phrases like seventeen were injured, or a team led by Dr. Chu, or expected to stop the leak, or a way of life may be lost, or the resources that are required, or his days are numbered, or threatened by a menacing cloud, or costs associated with it, or brought from Europe, sound girly?

The author points out that Obama even used a passive phrase ("At this agency [the Minerals Management Service], industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight") to direct responsibility.

Interpreting a raw frequency count of passive clauses as a measure of shiftiness or evasion is outright and obvious stupidity. But that's what Payack does. Parker merely stretches things to draw an even sillier conclusion (one that Payack cannot be blamed for) by confusing use of passive clauses with speaking like a woman.

Update 3: Parker offers some peculiar defenses of her column. She deflects, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say she ignores, all substantive criticism with,

Do I think people are too sensitive? Yes. Do I think I may have overstepped the line? No. It's a column, not a dissertation.

Let's be honest here - Parker was simply picking up a theme she has run with before, and which is being actively advanced by other, similarly situated Republican party hacks. She was in all likelihood coming up on a deadline, found herself with nothing new to say, stumbled across the Payack "analysis" and, without bothering to lift a finger to verify its accuracy or relevance, latched onto it as her opportunity to "phone in" her column. She either doesn't understand the difference between "passive voice" and passivity, or knows the difference but thought it was nonetheless a cute way to attack the President's masculinity, and has no real defense for writing a truly crappy column. But it's all about controversy, right? People talk about her column, she gets to write a second column defending the first, and her editors are happy because she's generating page views, facts and accuracy be damned.

So beyond, "It's just a column, so why would you expect it to be something better than half-baked nonsense," Parker also defends herself,

I don't view Obama exclusively as a black man -- no matter what he said on his census form. Not only is he half-white, but also he has managed to transcend skin color, at least from where I sit.

Strange.... It was not so long ago that Parker, while using the same line about Bill Clinton didn't seem to have difficulty identifying Barack Obama as a black man:

The contest between a black man and white woman for the Democratic nomination is both historic and fascinating to watch.

Did something change?

As a sidebar, there's another reason I don't see him as only black. He is my cousin. I had intended to save this nugget for a future column, but now seems as good a time as any to brag.... According to the family grid, Obama and I seem to be eighth cousins once removed.

Okay, so if you're related to Kathleen Parker she can't perceive you as black... but what does that mean for her argument that he's not a full-blooded American?

But that bond doesn't blind me to his -- and our -- flaws.

Meaning... Parker thinks she and Obama are both lacking in testosterone?

Meanwhile, let me just say that I'm proud that I'm related to every person on this planet in one attenuated way or another. It took a lot of effort, and... yeah.

Obama elected to employ a certain type of rhetoric in the Oval Office that put him in line with feminine rhetorical traditions and at odds with historical precedent and the expectations for his gender. Such a choice ultimately may prove to be a crucial step forward toward a better world. But the backlash against his rhetoric suggests we're not there yet.

Okay, so we're back to the premise - that there's something feminine about Barack Obama and his manner of speech. The basis of the argument is that he doesn't display enough public anger, and the nonsensical notion that it's automatically feminine to use the passive voice in a speech, facts (again) be damned.

Accusing Obama of "suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit"? I guess the take-away is supposed to be that Parker meant that as a... compliment.

Brooks on Dating

Poor David Brooks seems to think his children's romantic lives will be ruined by 'texting'. For the most part he's unintentionally funny, but then there's this:

Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.

You know why we think of that as a "Happy Days" era? Because it's a history of dating that can best be gleaned from "Happy Days" reruns. Seriously. Most charitably, the "Happy Days" version of dating represents a brief moment, not particularly representative of what came before or what has come since.

The "decline" of "Happy Days" dating has more traditionally been blamed on birth control. Except in the televised world of Richie Cunningham, it was largely accepted that "boys will be boys" - that "delaying sex" was the role of a "good girl". In reality, sex wasn't always delayed - a lot of young women took unexpected, extended "vacations" that coincidentally were just long enough to cover up a pregnancy and childbirth. A lot of others got married. Does Brooks truly not know the prevalence of teen pregnancy in the 1950's?

The rate of teen childbearing in the United States has fallen steeply since the late 1950s, from an all time high of 96 births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 in 1957 to an all time low of 49 in 2000....

Further, other than that "fairy tale" moment found principally on TV sitcoms, the "script" for dating has looked more like this: The parents arrange the marriage of a young girl to and older male. She's expected to be a virgin, but he's not. The couple was "guided" to long-term commitment by fault-based divorce laws (or the unavailability of divorce) and, for much of history, the fact that the children were the husband's property so the price of divorce to the mother would be that she would have to leave her children. How... idyllic. It's a darn shame that texting has come along.

The Joy of Housework?

While others (such as mythago) are lambasting Michael Pollan for his various assertions about the decline of cooking, this one caught my eye:

Curiously, the year Julia Child went on the air — 1963 — was the same year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.

Ah, yes.... 1962, the last year of the joyous scullery maid.

From the first day a rich, powerful person said, "Wow - I can hire (or force) somebody else to do this for me," few truly wealthy people have taken time out of their day to empty bedpans, beat rugs, or hover over a hot stove. The scullery maid, pretty much at the bottom of the hierarchy of household staff, would spend her entire days cleaning and scrubbing... 14, 16, 18 hour days. But until Friedan came along, how was she to know that hers was an unhappy lot, as opposed to a life of endless joy? I mean, c'mon.

I don't so much mind people being wistful for "the good old days", and Pollan's hardly the first to imagine a version of "the good old days" that never actually existed. But seriously - has he ever picked up a broom, changed a diaper, cleaned a toilet, mopped a floor? Did somebody have to teach him that housework can be drudgery, and that as you approach scullery maid level it's unquestionably oppressive? If so much joy is to be found, why didn't men step in the moment women gave them the opportunity?

Pollan describes glorious memories of watching his mother cook, something he sees as more elevated than watching a cooking show on television, but something that apparently didn't inspire him to pick up a spatula or a mixing spoon. Watching my mother cook (I joke cruelly) was a bit like watching one of Snape's potions classes in a Harry Potter movie. Okay, I exaggerate, but I did pick up that mixing spoon, and made my first scratch cake from a Betty Crocker recipe when I was seven. (And yes, it was good.) Pollan suggests that cooking is like an alchemic science that can be lost in a generation. But recipes are plentiful, and honestly, following one isn't particularly hard. What we truly lack, as Pollan concedes, is time.

I don't watch cooking shows as a general rule, but I have occasionally been drawn in, and have at times picked up ideas or techniques that have improved my own cooking. I enjoy cooking. But that's not to say I easily confuse the type of cooking I enjoy with the type of cooking Pollan describes - planning a dinner party, picking recipes, doing something creative or difficult, and having everything come out beautifully can be incredibly rewarding. I don't claim to be a chef - I'll stick with "cook" - but as mythago (who makes my kitchen skills look downright pedestrian) points out, real people don't have the time, money or energy to cook like that every day, let alone three times per day.

Pollan does know that - he lovingly describes his mother's Chicken Kiev, but implicitly acknowledges that it's a "special occasion food" that can be eaten every day only when you outsource the labor - and even then, shouldn't be eaten every day ("When we let corporations do the cooking, they’re bound to go heavy on sugar, fat and salt".) But that means, outside of those special occasions, we're not really following Julia Child's lead. We're talking about cooking that's much more ordinary.

When you map out the week by "spaghetti night, meat loaf night, chicken night," etc., week after week, the joy of cooking quickly dissipates. (In Pollan's view, where making sandwiches isn't "cooking", should "spaghetti night" count as cooking? When Pollan's mother made spaghetti, did she make her own sauce? Her own pasta?) It's difficult to come up with a creative, flavorful succession of recipes that you can prepare in the thirty or forty minutes between when you get home from work and when you need to get a plate of food in front of your kids. When you work as much as we do in this culture, sometimes it's hard to scrounge the time and energy to boil water for the spaghetti and warm up a jar of sauce. It's no wonder, and no fault of women, that we turn to convenience foods.

The question is, Can we ever put the genie back into the bottle? Once it has been destroyed, can a culture of everyday cooking be rebuilt? One in which men share equally in the work?

Why am I asking if spaghetti night counts as cooking? Powell alludes to something he calls "real scratch cooking", a concept he doesn't define but that he clearly sees as excluding certain cooking short-cuts - perhaps not Minute Rice, as he excused his mother for using that product, but including unspecified prepared ingredients that make cooking faster and easier. I made chicken, broccoli and quinoa for tonight's dinner. Was it "real scratch cooking" even though I used a commercial marinade? If not, would it have been "real scratch cooking" had I made my own marinade, but included a commercial soy, teriyaki or Worcestershire sauce in the marinade? I added some garlic powder and chicken bouillon to the quinoa; should I have used fresh garlic or made my own chicken stock to make it "real scratch cooking"? Should I be embarrassed that I know what quinoa is, even though I learned about it from a nutritionist and not a TV show? I put some butter on my daughter's broccoli, but to my shame I didn't churn it myself.... (I'll leave to mythago the discussion of whether I should have slaughtered and plucked my own chicken.) Seriously, at some point everybody tries to save time and labor. Even grandma had somebody else grind her flour.

With a definition of "cooking" that includes making sandwiches and grilling burgers, Pollan tells us that men "are cooking more today than ever before: about 13 percent of all meals". If he can get that number up to 50%, while women hold steady, won't his goal pretty much be achieved? If only Betty Friedan hadn't convinced, um, men that cooking (and housework) are drudgery. I'm personally of the opinion that the dominance of men in the kitchens of fine restaurants has nothing to do with innate skill, and is primarily the result of a culture that expects women to cook food to feed a family while allowing men to approach the kitchen as experimenters and hobbyists. If you want more Americans to return to the kitchen, you need to be honest about what you're asking them to do, and that includes being honest with yourself that there's drudgery involved (even if you can convince your spouse or kids to wash the dishes).

Powell is correct that today's food culture is aimed at mass market consumerism and instant gratification - which means it's not really different from anything else in our consumer culture. If you think about cooking, there's a huge component of chemistry. (Switch alkalized cocoa for natural cocoa in a typical recipe without adjusting the rising agent, and you'll see what I mean.) Modern corporations have turned food production into something that doesn't really resemble cooking, but produces (artificially) flavorful, (artificially) aromatic food items that are incredibly calorie dense. (Absent artificial odors and flavors, I suspect the typical fast food burger would smell and taste like cardboard, if that good.) No, our nation's diet is not on a healthy course, but the solution is not to besmirch sandwich-making as "not really cooking", to guilt-trip women or to pretend that we can recapture either the hours in a day we spend at work or a bygone era that exists primarily in rebroadcasts of 1950's-era TV sitcoms and our imaginations.

I don't feel guilty that for lunch, yesterday, I bought a salad composed of locally grown, flavorful vegetables (that I did not grow myself) with fresh feta (that I did not make myself), nor that the day before, when a visitor and her children unexpectedly desired a meal, I made sandwiches - good ones - from what I had on hand. (Pollan's correct that the "make a meal in thirty minutes out of the ingredients at hand, whatever they happen to be, perhaps including string cheese" situation doesn't arise in a professional kitchen, but it sometimes does arise in mine - and I wouldn't be surprised if it arose at times in his mother's.)

Let me offer Pollan an idea for his next column. It used to be common for men to build their own homes, often with the help of neighbors. There are a ton of shows on home improvement all over the networks, and between the Internet and television you can easily collect the information you need to build your own home from the ground up. Yet somewhere along the line, men apparently decided it was drudgery, or even oppressively difficult and time-consuming, to build their own homes, and now pretty much everybody busy homes built by others. Was this due to the release of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House - shame on Cary Grant? Did "This Old House" transform home building "from something you do into something you watch" - shame on Bob Villa?

Or perhaps it's that with increased specialization of labor, diminished spare time, a desire to have a home that's nicer than you could build yourself, and the ready availability of builders to whom you can outsource your construction and home renovation needs, people have chosen an easier, less time-consuming, more gratifying path. If you don't like to cook, or simply don't have the time, you shouldn't be expected to feel guilty about it.

Of All The Things To Obsess About....

Sarah's song?

Seriously, it seems silly, but can you actually imagine a candidate, male or female, running for national office in a wardrobe by JCPenney? With a Borics haircut? And wearing the same "nice clothes" for multiple pubic appearances, perhaps even within the same two week period? The horror....

I will grant, it's easier for a man to get away with wearing the same suit more than once in two weeks. As long as it's sufficiently generic that nobody will notice. (Even then it's probably at least $1,500 - $5,000 worth of "generic", before we start adding in the cost of the shirt, shoes, tie and accessories.) There's a different standard for women, in no small part resulting from the fact that women's clothes are (and are expected to be) less generic.

Had Palin not been professionally dressed, coiffed and polished, that would have been the focus of news stories, rumors, and jokes. Now, having been found to have expended quite a lot of RNC money on her appearance, she risks the "John Edwards" treatment. And while the McCain campaign's defense of her,

With all the important issues facing the country right now, it's remarkable that we're spending time talking about pantsuits and blouses. It was always the intent that the clothing go to a charitable purpose after the campaign.

is weakened by its silence in relation to similar non-scandals directed at candidates from the other side of the aisle and its celebrity ads aimed at Obama, they're right.

Now let's get back to the real issues. Like falsely accusing our political opponents of being "socialists" and of "palling around with terrorists", or of having a secret plan to eviscerate Medicare.

Feminism and Child Care

I had mostly forgotten the reaction to Linda Hirshman's American Prospect article, Homeward Bound, in which she suggests that feminism is largely a failure, and that intelligent, educated women who stay home to raise children are wasting their potential, if not their lives. Hirshman's thesis to me seems a bit attenuated. Her admittedly judgmental position on the value of caring for a child seems to drive her conclusion - if you were to start by assuming that highly-paid positions in business and industry were beneath human dignity, it would just as naturally follow that women (and men) were wasting their lives by taking positions of power and influence. (She could even support this thesis by referencing the significant number of people who have publicly professed to be leaving their positions of power and influence "to spend more time with" their families.)

I also disagree with any suggestion that it is somehow a failure of feminism, or the fault of feminism, that where a professional takes time away from a traditional career, that person will often have difficulty later getting back on track in that career. The fact that men don't face the same pressure to take time off of work to raise families? Granted, that's true - so if we presuppose that feminism was supposed to erase that inequality, its perpetuation becomes a failure of feminism. But that seems like something of an overstatement of the case. Further, it is my impression that a father who takes time off for the "daddy track" would likely face greater obstacles returning to the workforce than a mother, so perhaps the problem is not so much one of "feminism" but of the fact that attitudes like Hirshman's - that child-rearing tasks are unworthy - are pervasive. Beyond that, it only makes sense that somebody who takes a few years away from a career will not get credit for the time they would otherwise have spent, the connections they would otherwise have made, and the experience they would otherwise have gained, in their jobs.

Where I do agree with Hirshman is that women who believe they would be wasting their lives if they stayed home with their kids should not be expected to feel guilty about either not having children or returning to work after their children are born. It similarly follows that women who attempt to stay home with their kids, but find that they would feel more fulfilled in returning to work (or are left with the impression that they are wasting their lives) should not be expected to feel guilty about returning to work. But by the same token, if a highly intelligent, highly educated, and highly capable professional discovers upon having a child that she loves staying home and caring for her child, people like Hirshman have no business trying to make her feel guilty or to suggest that she is somehow wasting her life. Get that? It's her life.

I also question Hirshman's attitude toward child care tasks as beneath professional women. There's a woman in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Gretchen Preston, who had a different attitude toward child care, and since the mid-1980's has built a small empire in the high-end child care business. I would venture that she earns more than most of the professionals Hirshman views as working in "worthy" careers - while providing them with the child care they need to continue in those careers. Would Hirshman nonetheless view Preston as having failed to meet her potential?

"She's Interested in Literacy"

According to GW, his wife isn't interested in running for office:

"She's not interested in running for office. She's interested in literacy," Bush said during an appearance at RK Moving & Storage here.

Perhaps Bush isn't sufficiently familiar with his own programs to know that it is possible to both run for office and be interested in literacy.

I don't mean to imply that Bush is sexist, although his comments may well convey that impression. He may be silently considering this little incident, which in a Senate campaign might inspire comparisons to Chappaquiddick.

Escaping

Today, Eugene Robinson takes us (for some reason) through the divorce proceedings of Terry McMillan. Perhaps I should spend more time reading the Post's gossip columns, or Us Weekly - I wasn't even aware that Ms. McMillan was getting divorced.

The gist of the column seems to be that somebody as savvy, intelligent, and well-educated as Ms. McMillan should have been able to see right through the deceptions of her much-younger husband, and recognized him as one of the "slick, predatory, no-good players" that appear in her novels. (Perhaps it is that depiction that inspires the column - the woman who was too good for the players got played, and this is her comeuppance.)

First of all, I'm thinking that an educated, accomplished, professional woman in her forties, even while joyfully regaining her groove with a Jamaican cabana boy less than half her age, would have to be thinking in the back of her mind that this probably wouldn't turn into forever.

Maybe McMillan made that calculation and decided to bring him home anyway. I hear that men have been known to bring home hot, young, empty-headed things, and she did have the foresight to make him sign that prenup. But if it were all calculated, she wouldn't be so angry. The betrayal isn't just that he's lost interest in her; it's that his new interest is in men.

Here's where I get myself in trouble (if I haven't already): In 10 years with this guy she didn't have a clue? In the bathroom cabinet, no stock of overly metrosexual hair products? No hint when the business he got her to finance turned out to be a dog-grooming salon? Terry McMillan, such a keen observer of love and war between the sexes, and nothing ever showed up on her "gaydar"?

I have a somewhat different reaction.

Terry McMillan spent her childhood in Port Huron, Michigan. I recall reading in Time Magazine, many years ago, about how she spent her years as an early teenager, spending her time volunteering in the public library. How when she got the opportunity to escape her childhood home, she took it - ultimately becoming an author, and becoming a success not because of her family and community, but in spite of it. Her success, or some shadow of it (if nothing else, escaping the family and environment, going to college, and becoming a success) is the type of vision most people reading this blog might have for themselves, had they been born into similar circumstances - the notion that, with their inherent intelligence and academic interests, they too could have escaped.

But some families are reminiscent of the trash monster from Star Wars IV - the moment they sense you might escape their misery, they wrap themselves around your ankles, pull you down as hard as they can, and try to drown you. I am not one to try to psychoanalyze Ms. McMillan, but if I were in her shoes I would be angry at her husband not, as Robinson suggests, because "he lost interest" - or even that his interest was in men. I would imagine finding somebody much younger than me, certainly, but probably also much different from anybody I ever knew before and, after ten years, being angry when he turned out to be yet another anchor - somebody whose attentions and affections now appear to be all about getting money.

In any event, I think Ms. McMillan's achievements are remarkable, and I would rather read an article that applauded her achievements rather than one which... well, I hope wasn't gloating over disappointment in what really should be her personal life.