Learning from the "War on Men" — and Stephen Colbert v. Fox News (30 November 2012)

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            In the "The Word" segment of The Colbert Report for Wednesday, 28 November 2012, many of us who do not watch much TV news beyond Colbert and The Daily Show could learn that Fox News is reporting a War on Men, part of which has resulted in American men not wanting to get married.

            I overstate and oversimplify here — and my scholarship is, let's say, casual — but all that’s pretty decorous given Fox reporting, and not just Fox.

            (I gave up on TV news after a drug warrior told Jim Lehrer that the major problem he encountered in the war on drugs was the large number of people who used cocaine without serious problems. Lehrer didn't ask a "WTF??!!" follow-up question. This occurred at the time PBS funding was under attack in Congress, though that may've been a coincidence. But as so often, I digress.)

            Anyway, in the beginning of this males-and-marriage brouhaha, as it came through on the Report, was a survey on attitudes on the importance of marriage wherein was found that among young women — or probably, at most, young American women — 28% thought marriage important in 1997 and 37% thought it important in 2010/2011. My arithmetic has that coming out to an increase of 9 percentage points. Among young men, 35% thought marriage very important in 1997, vs. 29% in 2010/2011, for a decrease of 6 percentage points, and putting young men in 2010-11 finding marriage more or less as important as young women did a dozen or so years earlier. (But don't trust my arithmetic; I tend to screw up "percentage" vs. "percentage points"; the point, though, still holds.)

            On the Fox News website, on 26 November 2012, Suzanne Venker took these data seriously and concluded in Colbert's paraphrase that "Sisters Are Doing It to Themselves" in this declining male interest in marriage in that, in Venker's words, "Women aren't women anymore" but angry and defensive.

            And the cause of decline in femininity was the sexual revolution, which I think means feminism here since the sexual revolution in terms of sex was in the 1970s, and its effects would've been felt long before 1997.

            For a nice evisceration of this analysis, listen to Colbert: the "The Word" segment is about ten minutes into the broadcast. My problems with the Venkerian conclusion start with her taking way too seriously any survey about attitudes. If you want to find out what people really believe, yeah, just ask them — but then check out in detail what they do.

            Still, The Daoist teach that we should listen carefully even to people we know are lying, and they have a point. Sometimes it may seem like picking out the peanuts from the elephant dung, but we should listen to one another and profit from what we hear as best we can.

            So consider this.

            Writing from a thoroughly sexist and patriarchal point of view (though enlightened and progressive ca. 1516), Sir Thomas More has his non-Christian Utopians very strict about sex outside of marriage. Not just adultery — which can get you a sentence of penal servitude for a first offense and death caught twice — but "Any boy or girl convicted of premarital intercourse is severely punished, and permanently disqualified from marrying" unless pardoned on the no-marriage part, and the adult couple in charge of the offending household is "publicly disgraced for not doing their jobs properly. The Utopians are particularly strict about that kind of thing because they think very few people would want to get married — which means spending one's life with the same person, and putting up with all that inconveniences that this involves — if they weren't carefully prevented from having any sexual intercourse otherwise" (Book II, Paul Turner's translation, 1965: 103-04 [punctuation Americanized]).

            Now the stripping down of the family to its nucleus has been fairly recent, and big-family-man More would have been a little shocked by the isolation of contemporary Americans, and his Utopians were downright communal and communistic: More's Utopia is like one huge monastery. More presented a society where one could get companionship and intimacy in the general course of life; if you could also get sex, he asks provocatively, why marry?

            With the sexual revolution, it did become easier in the US to get sex outside of marriage, but alienation elsewhere increased, and perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if women in 2010 — if indeed this is the case — were more interested in marriage than in 1997. Women are increasingly in the workforce, and, as Colbert hints, more non-poor women now perform the alienating shit-work of a lot of jobs, and this may have more hungering for the companionship, intimacy, and relative stability of marriage: that shelter from the outside world for the Victorian father of the family.

            What about those young men, though, whose declining interest — and this may well be the case — needs some explanation?

            The major explanation may be economic, and indirectly educational. Guys haven't been doing all that well of late, and marriage would make most sense to us economically if we were to "marry up": as Colbert hints even more strongly, guys might want to marry a woman who could support them as househusbands.

            Gals, though, may be reluctant to marry down, and most of what's going on here may be that women place greater importance on marriage because it has become more of an issue for them because of a lack of marriageable men — but "No marriageable men around" may often mean no men it would be economically and socially advantageous to marry.

            So guys may find marriage less important because they feel less likely to marry. Aesop's fable on "sour grapes" points to the human tendency to assert, sometimes, we don't really want that which we are unlikely to get.

            More women want equality in marriage, and to a large extent are getting it, and that is all to the good.

            But, arguably, it's all to the good more for women than for men.

            Patriarchal marriage had a lot of advantages for men, especially for men who figured out that one of the most important things a human being has is time.

            Now a cousin of mine just sent me the latest viral video of a Rube-Goldberg device where, with much ado, a humongous chain reaction leads to some guys getting doused with paint. Etc. — check out Facebook and YouTube, to say nothing of XTube! So, obviously, a lot of people have a lot of free time on their hands. Still, one of the most important things we have is time, and traditional patriarchal marriage was very good to men in terms of time and labor: women did most of the work at home.

            An equal marriage nowadays is much less advantageous for men.

            Middle-class standards of housekeeping are very high in today's America, and few people can afford servants. Under strong traditional pressure, often from other women, women's standards for household neatness tend to be higher than men's — tend to be; clearly some men are neat and some women are slobs — and equitable division of labor in a married household probably means the husband spends significantly more time on housework then he did or would as a bachelor. When children come along the time constraints and other pressures on both parents nowadays are tremendous, and women want men to share that load.

            A "night club" when I was growing up meant a place my parents went. I had good, conscientious parents — who didn't think they had to come out to watch me swim or play football, much less coach a team. (By high school, we had "SACs," social-athletic clubs and fraternities, and we ran our own athletics.) And, of course, even middle-class and well-to-do kids until recently could be sent out to play on their own and were expected to walk most places or take public transportation.

            When kids come along, contemporary US parents are under tremendous strain — poor people probably more than the middle class and rich (though in different ways) — and significant numbers of women will work very hard to get men to share the burden.

            Much of that "burden" is self-imposed and a good deal enjoyable, but much is not.

            If a guy finds love and a "soul mate" — and that's an additional issue: the newish idea that every couple seeking marriage has to be Romeo and Juliet and powerfully in love, and working on the relationship — if a guy finds love and a soul mate and he can bring some wealth and skills to the marriage … well, yeah, he'll want to marry and probably will marry. But that may not happen.

            So, if young guys nowadays say marriage is less important to them than guys said in 1997, it could be sensible on their part: sensible if they're less likely to get married and if they are lucky enough to get companionship, some sex, and maybe even intimacy outside of marriage.

            There's no war on men, but there has been reduction in male privilege, and guys may be responding to that reduction in socially and economically rational ways.

            The nuclear family is a relatively new invention, and it's a bad idea. We're in an awkward period moving on to other possibilities. Get over it, conservatives, and start acting like real conservatives: working to increase community, and social supports.

What If You Did Everything Expected …? (7 Dec. 2012)

            If you're reading this, you're a modern person, free from the anxiety of primitive life and its taboos, probably free even from the complexities of following the 613 mitzvot ("commandments" — sort of) of the Mosaic law or the straight, strait, and narrow path for Christian salvation. Okay fellow free, modern folk, I have a question for you: What would happened if your tried to do everything expected of you — if you'd try even in our state of liberation to get everything right?

            Let me get into this question with a couple of stories. (I'm an old fart; I get to tell stories.)

            First one is from about the mid-1970s, when I found myself on Miami University's Student Affairs Council looking at proposed rules and came upon the locution, "Students are expected to …." I asked, "By whom, and so what?" Who expects them to do what this rule says, and why should they care: "what happens if they don't?"

            I was told, "Oh, then we can throw them out of school."

            I pulled what rank I had as an English teacher and former parliamentarian and — let's say liaison (and not "lobbyist") — and as someone who had dealt with student-targeted laws in the Illinois General Assembly.

            "'Shall'," I said; "You need to say, 'Students shall.'"

            Part of my sensitivity to this usage came from near the end of my first academic year at Miami when I received a very nice letter — fancy letterhead, really good paper — from the President of the University telling me that full-time, tenure-track faculty members "are expected to attend commencement."

            I asked myself, "By whom and so what" and concluded that I could skip those questions and read the sentence, «Untenured assistant professors had better get their asses to commencement», which turns out to have been much of what it meant.

            Behind that was my experience as a sophomore undergraduate moving out of a biochemistry program and into the Microbiology Department with a growing knowledge that what I really liked was English and history. I got a note telling me to report to the office of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and declare a major; "You must declare a major." That was back when one talked to humans about such things, and I asked the woman at the desk, "Uh, what if I don't? Don't declare a major." And I was told, "You must" and asked again "But what if I don't" — and was answered, "I don't know; no one hasn't before." After a moment of secretarial consultation, they told me to just be sure to declare a major before too long into the semester I graduated — "But don't come in during the first week or so; we've got too much work then."

            So my last semester I declared an English major, and a sweet little old Credentials Analyst told me I could have a split minor of Microbiology/History, which she recommended because, "We've never had one of those before." Which is what I did, and I graduated as an English major with a split minor in Microbiology and History; and the whole process was very good for me. And it was good for rule-writing by Student Affairs Council (for a while, and uniquely in the school's governance) because they adopted a policy of trying to be clear when we were making suggestions or requests and when we were bloody well giving an order backed up with, say, expulsion.

            The experience was good for me because I had grown up doing what I was told, asked, and/or (often just) expected to do.

            In my family, I was The Good One.

            It was fair. My sister was clearly my father's favorite child, and I was my mother's — talk about living a cliché! — and she was The Smart One, and I was The Good One.

            My father took this judgment with him to the grave in spite of occasional evidence to the contrary.

            After my father had a stroke and my mother came down with Alzheimer's disease, my sister was more loyal and helpful than I was; but I was still The Good One. With my father's encouragement, I ran a charity at age 18, and I pretty much ran a fraternity chapter at 21; I made Phi Beta Kappa and got Wilson and Danforth Fellowships for graduate school, took an MA at Cornell and a PhD at Illinois; helped manage the student strike at the U of I at Urbana during the Troubles in May of 1970, and managed to get work in my field and eventually get promotion and tenure at a pretty good university.

            My sister was still The Smart One, and I was not. (Indeed, when my sister called our father to tell him her son had made Phi Beta Kappa, our father congratulated her, paused, and then said, "But Phi Beta Kappa can't be that big a deal; Rich made Phi Beta Kappa.")

            Returning to topic — responsible students stay "on task" — returning to the topic, we can allow that I had some experience questioning authority and resisting social pressure. "And yet the old schooling sticks," and I still get anxious whenever I stray from the Good-One role and try to ignore (or reject) social demands.

            And this means a lot of low-grade anxiety for me, and probably for you. One of the easily-resolved paradoxes of the 1960s was that most of the radicals and counter-cultural people in The Movement were the good kids from high school, so even at a time of a lot of apparent rebellion most of us, most of the time, conformed and complied; and nowadays it's possible that more of us, more of the time, conform and comply.

            Or we try to.

            Think about your life if you did all you were supposed to do — just socially "supposed to do," ignoring serious stuff like moral dilemmas when social pressures conflict with internal ideals; ignoring big issues and major life-choices. What would life be like if we complied in all things in just the small stuff of daily life?

            What if you kept all your receipts, performed routine maintenance on your car and appliances, ran your virus scans, read the labels when you shopped, read the manuals with your cell phone and computer and the GPS on your car; if you spent all the time with your spouse and kids that you're supposed to nowadays; if you "gave 110%" on the job or to a sports team or volunteer work?

            If you got your holiday shopping done early — don't forget Halloween! — and studied up before you made big purchases; if you carefully reviewed the releases and contracts and terms of use that you sign; if you seriously skimmed a significant portion of your electronic and hard-copy mail and carefully considered all the requests for your support of worthy causes.

            If you followed the campaigns of all the candidates you're entitled to vote for, and read the full texts of the propositions and initiatives.

            If you replaced those batteries, checked the wiring, checked the furnace and the vents and the ducts and got the right amount of the correct exercises and kept up with the latest research on proper nutrition and got checkups and early treatment when you were supposed to (which can get tricky: check the health websites for current views on checkups, and learn the symptoms you should just keep an eye on for a few days before seeing a physician).

            What if you kept careful track of your spending and the packages you send and put in the necessary time to get the best deals on insurance and shopping: if you were a totally responsible investor, consumer and producer, worker and parent?

            Etc., etc., etc.

            What would life be like if, in all your roles, you gave that "110%" — or up to 20% in each role — to respond just to all of the legitimate demands on your time and effort?

            And remember that anyone who asks for "a 110% commitment" is demanding a blank check, and that someone who seriously wants more than, say, a quarter of you is making an illegitimate demand.

            As Curtis Armstrong's character Miles says to Tom Cruise's significantly named Joel Goodsen — "good son" Get it? — in RISKY BUSINESS: "[…] you wanna know something? Every now and then say, 'What the f*ck.' 'What the f*ck' gives you freedom."

            Maybe more exactly "What the f*ck" or its equivalent is necessary for survival.

            "Students are expected to …"; "Good citizens will always …" "Warrantee is voided if …" — Yeah, most of this stuff we should do, and in some cases it's a real risk if we don't. But part of the low-key horror of modern life is that we just can't do it all or even most of it. Fairly often we must say, "What the f*ck," which guarantees that now and then we will fuck up.

            Every bit as much as "primitives," surrounded by innumerable taboos, every bit as much as more recent folk with 613-and-counting divine demands or the infinite obedience a devout Christian owes a God who became human and died for your sins — as much as most people, most of the time, we will fail to live up.

            Freedom and responsibility means trying to do what is right as much and as often as we can, but now and then saying "What the f*ck" to things in general — and to some people making demands on us and placing their expectations, to everyone who wants more than their legitimate 25% or less —just saying (now and then, with an asterisk), "F*ck off."

Relationships, Political Debate ... and Basic Skills (12 Jan. 2013)

           During the era of the audiocassette, at the time of the great flourishing of the American 12-Step movement — probably some time in the 1980s — a bootleg tape circulated of an address to a 12-Step conference by a psychologist who'd been asked to talk about relationships.

            Relationships were a hot topic in the last third or so of the 20^th century, with a lot of people complaining of having problems forming and maintaining serious relationships.

            So the psychologist had been asked to give a talk for a lay audience, but a knowledgeable one, on relationships.

            As I recall the tape, the psychologist wasn't going to deal with whether or not there'd been an increase in problems of relationship, nor with sophisticated analyses of what might cause those problems and how to cure them. He asked instead what abilities might be required to maintain a relationship and decided that one obvious one was the ability to carry on a serious, intimate conversation.

            Then he asked what basic skills might be required to have an intimate conversation.

            Most basically, a person would need to figure out what he was feeling — the speaker was male, and I'm male, so let's gender the pronouns male here — and put that perception into words for himself. Then he'd have to express those feelings to the other person, and then shut up and listen, really listen, to the other's response, and then recycle, starting with feelings elicited by the other's words.

            And so on for a number of exchanges.

            The research the speaker had seen indicated that these skills were somewhat like language: not that they were hard-wired in the way language acquisition is — unless your early years are in a totally pathological situation you will learn a human language — but that they were something one "picked up" from one's family and early peer group, and it was just possible that if one didn't "pick them up" at an early age, learning them later could be difficult. (Few adults can "pick up" a foreign language; we have to work to learn it.)

            And how many Americans were picking up those skills effectively, how many families were, so to speak, teaching them well? He said the best guesses were about 20%. By the time we reach adolescence or adulthood, about 20% of Americans have strong competence in the skills necessary to carry on an intimate conversation, to do a good job talking about their feelings.

            Which means that some 80% of Americans have less-than-stellar down to downright poor command of the basic skills needed for a serious conversation about feelings, maybe serious conversations, period: at least serious conversations on topics about which, as we say, people feel strongly.

            For a couple or three years after hearing that bootleg tape, I asked every clinical psychologist I talked to what they thought about the analysis. To the last shrink, they agreed that, if anything, the statistics were optimistic; they felt that far fewer than 20% of Americans were skilled at having an intimate conversation and that large numbers weren't good at all.

            Okay, this would be an unreliable sample: shrinks tend to see people not doing well with relationships. Still, even allowing for pessimistic shrinks overgeneralizing from their experiences — even allowing here a hefty "plus or minus __ per cent" — even so, there's a fair possibility that a lot of Americans have trouble with relationships for the very simple reason that we have trouble talking about them.
            And the situation may be more serious than that observation indicates.

            First, if this analysis holds, it's quite possible that things have gotten better the last generation or so but unlikely that improvements will come quickly. If your parents weren't good at intimate conversation, it's a skill you'll probably have to learn later in life — learn with difficulty — and if you don't, it's likely to be a skill you'll won't hand down to your children. Etc. over the generations.

            Second, more may be involved here than touchy-feely couples relationship and family dynamics.

            During the same era as the speech to the 12-Step conference, Professor Michael Moffatt was occasionally living among and studying Rutgers University undergraduates and eventually reporting his findings in Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture (1989).

            Moffatt found "some classic, old-fashioned America anti-intellectuals among the undergraduates at Rutgers" and noted that the term "bull session" for a rambling talk about deep things was unknown to his informants; but the students Moffatt studied claimed "that the now-unlabeled college 'bull session' was still alive and well at Rutgers in the late twentieth century." That Moffatt hadn't observed one would likely be because his dorm-mates "had probably not wanted a known professor listening in on their private intellectual forays." In self-reports from 1986, however, the students said they had serious conversations "all the time among themselves" (298-99).

            Significantly, however, they also said that "they usually did this talk quietly and intimately, with one or two friends." Moffatt notes, " in fact, a certain an analogy between sex and mind in the assumptions of the students. The expression of your real, honest mentality, like that of your real sexuality, could make you vulnerable among your peers. [* * *] As with sex talk, so, too, with mind talk: the safest place to do it was outside the hearing of the dorm peer-group — very late at night in the lounge with just a few friends, or in your room or a friend's room, or elsewhere" off the dorm floor (299).

            Two related points here.

            First, as a teacher in the 1980s intio the 2000s, I probably erred in casually asking students in a classroom, "Well, OK, but what do you think about that — what are your feelings on the subject?" For my students, divulging one's real thoughts and feelings might have been a highly personal matter.

            More relevant here, what if discussing emotionally-charged political issues is close to intimate discussion, and if many Americans lack not only background knowledge, basic information, and training in logical argument, but also lack basic skills in discussing just how they feel about a public topic?

            What if, especially, many Americans lack skill and practice in that move of shutting up and really listening to what the other person is saying — and the following move of pausing to determine just how we feel about the other person's comments: that thoughtful, "in-feeling" pause before mouthing off ourselves?

            It's possible that since the 1980s "The Politics of Feeling" have become more respectable, simultaneous with increasing acceptance of "letting it all hang out" in public, perhaps even an expectation of public emoting. It is possible that since the 1980s politics in America have become a paradoxically public "intimate discussion," often carried about by people who lack the skills for such discussions.

            The issue will be in and out of the news, but I wouldn't expect rapid improvement in Americans' handling of our personal relationships. And I see with the now-anonymous 12-Step spearer's analysis yet another reason to be pessimistic on improvements in American public debate.


            Many of us not only lack the skills for important conversations but don't even know we need them. 

Limiting Gun Deaths: A Direct and Humane Approach (23 Jan. 2013)

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            In a column in The Washington Post in January of 2013, Eugene Robinson cited an important statistic: "Roughly 30,000 Americans will die by gunshot this year. About two-thirds will be suicides […]." Of those gun-death suicides, 80% will be White males, and a high proportion will be people over 65. So if a crucial public goal is bringing down gun deaths — and if "Nothing is off the table" — a major strategy should be reducing suicide by gun among the elderly, especially among my people, White males over age 65.

            One obvious thing that can be done is to make life a bit less despair-inducing for old people. Many of us get ourselves isolated and not only feel useless, condescended to, and occasionally invisible but are, socially speaking, pretty useless, condescended to, and literally overlooked. (On one occasion I was, so to speak, walked through by a well-to-do family in an upscale mall; on another, I stood at the "Consultation" window at a pharmacy for a significant time being ignored. In each case I finally said, rather loudly, "Hey! I exist!")

            Society generally could do a better job finding some uses for us old farts, functions someplace short of Soylent Green. And better public transportation would help us, and probably others: US roads would be safer with fewer old folk driving.

            Still, there are horrors flesh is heir to that neither societies nor loved ones can do much to ameliorate; so we would do well to consider the custom of Thomas More's rational and moral, but nonChristian, Utopians. The Utopians take excellent care of their sick, but if any Utopian

is taken with a torturing and lingering pain, so that there is no hope, either of recovery or ease, the priests and magistrates come and exhort them, that since they are now unable to go on with the business of life, are become a burden to themselves and to all about them, and they have really outlived themselves, they should […] choose […] to die, since they cannot live but in much misery: being assured, that if they thus deliver themselves from torture, or are willing that others should do it, they shall be happy after death.

The Utopians believe that terminal patients who follow the advice of the Utopian religious and civil authorities and end their suffering "behave not only reasonably, but in a manner consistent with religion and piety."


            Moreover, some of us might reasonably choose skipping the drawn-out-torture phase of dying and off ourselves earlier; and most Americans would prefer to avoid the more totalitarian aspects of Saint Thomas's Utopia, including death panels of "priests and magistrates" delivering exhortations. Guns are efficient for moving on with finality, but messy and dangerous to have around: youngsters of 40 or 50 can get hold of them, for one thing, plus handguns are currently a bit too handy for oldsters who might be just in a funk.

             If reducing gun deaths is a priority and we're serious about considering all possibilities, then well short of spending billions to make schools totally like prisons we should consider offering old people suicide options more elegant than blowing out our brains: suicide options that may come with objective counseling, by counselors willing to give an honest opinion: "Yeah, given your options, the next week or so would be a good time for you to die. Here's contact information for a large-animal veterinarian who makes house calls and helps with funeral arrangements. Have your family over; have a farewell party." Additionally, and better, suicide counsellors should be able to recommend places where people can actually get aid: affordable health care, transportation, a decent job, which means an America that offers affordable health care, social support, and jobs.

             So you, dear reader, think about it: not killing yourself or encouraging grandpa to kill himself (already!), but about gun deaths generally.

             School shootings and mass murders make the headlines, but what drives up the bodycounts is suicide combined with banal homicides. We cannot eliminate murder, but we can reduce the scale of murders. And we can make suicide less traumatic for survivors and for those near death anyway, for old people who rationally and with compassion for their loved ones, choose to die. 

Ayn Rand Will Enslave You! (2 Feb. 2013)

            Okay, "Ayn Rand Will Enslave You!" is a little over-stated, but I think I can pull off a snarky variation on a theme by F. A. Hayek and argue that fully-achieved, radical Libertarian capitalism would put us on a road that ironically returns to the essence of serfdom.

            Let me start with that "most of us."

            We humans have the bad habit of hearing stories or reading histories and identifying with the winners. (Americans nostalgic for the Confederacy are an exception: The rebel-traitors lost, pendejos! Get over it.).

            We humans have a bad habit of identifying with the winners and the privileged, and this is odd in Americans 'cause if our ancestors were doing all that well Over There, most of us wouldn't now be Over Here.

            I'm Over Here, in the US of A, in part because in 1903 my father's father fled Russia ahead of the Czar's police after him on a murder charge. He'd killed a Cossack; in the family version of the story — which we're sticking to — my grandfather killed the Cossack while the Cossack was raping his (my grandfather's) sister during a pogrom. Still, if my grandfather had murdered a Cossack in a fit of unfortunately premature revolutionary zeal, that would be all right with me.

            A lot of us are here in the USA because our ancestors mistimed their revolutionary zeal or lack of zeal or found themselves POWs at a time and place where POWs were sold to the local slave traders — or preferred not to starve to death in a potato famine or fled press gangs and conscription or a bad marriage and debt collectors; in short, for whatever reasons, they found it best to get the hell out.

            Granted, some were aristocrats who had to get the hell out: a few revolutions succeed, or nobly-bred conspirators took the wrong side in a coup that failed; but there never were that many aristocrats, not relatively speaking, not relative to the masses of peasants and lower.

            I had a friend who bragged that his family was on the losing side of wars and rebellions going back at least six generations; you probably lack bragging rights that impressive, but there's a really good chance your ancestors like mine were among that teeming "wretched refuse," the mongrels of the Earth.

            So none of this identifying with the aristocrats, already! It's not just un-American but unhistorical and disloyal. The odds are your people were peasants or lower on the food chain, and you'd damn well better be capable of thinking like a peasant or, in this case, a serf.

            So: What's the essence of being a serf?

            It's going to piss you serfs off that you're trapped in the precursor of a company town and have to get your grain ground at His Lordship's mill and get ripped off on assessments when His Lordship gets captured in battle and you have to help ransom his ass — or pay for his son's getting knighted or his daughter getting married. It will piss you off if His Lordship and Ladyship can't be hauled into court by a peasant like you when their thugs mug and rob you: "a jury of his peers" meant exactly that, his peers, not necessarily yours. And your heirs will be pissed off when the Lord gets the best of whatever you have to leave when you die.

            Sure, but the essence of your lowly estate is the demands on your time.

            That's the essence of serfdom and more so of slavery: the day-to-day, routine expropriation of time and labor.

            "But," you say, or should say, "but," you say, "freedom from oppression is exactly what capitalist Libertarianism is all about. Freedom from oppression by the State!"

            There wasn't much "State" back in the bad old days of feudalism, so let's all accept the idea that "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" primarily from the State but also from other possible oppressors and exploiters. And let's accept the idea that exploitation nowadays can get subtle. A "wage slave" isn't a slave and "working as a serf in a cube farm" isn't being a serf in Imperial Russia. But …

            But consider day-to-day life in a necessarily imaginary actually-existing capitalist Libertarian utopia: that's life as lived by you, a probable descendent of a slave, serf, peasant — or even an aristocrat not too good (or lucky) choosing sides in power struggles.

            So you're probably not an Ayn Randian general of industry leading the Makers of the world. You're probably a wage-earner pushing virtual buttons at home or in a cube farm and wondering if a capitalist Libertarian utopia offers a union you can join.

            What interests me more, though, is everyday life outside of work for a grunt like you or me in a rigorous market economy, life spent mainly as a consumer, and a consumer who is highly unlikely to have a staff.

            What's life like in a hyper-capitalist, high-tech world, where you're surrounded by choices in a grand array of overlapping free markets — mostly unregulated markets — caught up in the swirl of dynamic, rapid, capitalist change?

            With the money to hire a staff, life could be very good.

            Without a staff, though, I think you'd be trapped in a system that expropriates your time as much as — if far more gently than — in feudalism.

            Consider what happens when you have to negotiate and contract for health-care, paying for health-care, arranging public health services — good luck with that! — contracting for school, water, power, police and fire protection? And what happens when you have to negotiate those contracts more and more frequently as corporate persons fine-tune ways of maximizing profit by tweaking contracts as often as Travelocity changes rates for plane flights?

            There isn't much of a State in a capitalist Libertarian utopia, but what there is will spend most of its energy enforcing contracts. What happens when you really have to read all those agreements for Terms of Use?

            Choice is good. Change is often good. Choices forced upon you, however, continual and rapid change: those are not so good.

            If you have no choice but to spend large hunks of your time shopping around and operating as a "Midas-Plagued," product-consuming, free-market economic animal; if you have to negotiate your way through the day knowing that tomorrow you may have to renegotiate — what then?

            The bitter joke in recent, economically modernized and liberalized Eastern Europe has it that Karl "Marx was wrong about everything about Communism; unfortunately, he was right about capitalism." As Marx and Frederick Engels said about the slow-speed capitalism of their time: "Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air […]."

            The turbo-charged capitalism of our time has placed even more strain on people. A capitalist-Libertarian "utopia" of rampant markets would be worse. The markets might be free, but those systemically coerced into using them are far less free. The working conditions will be a whole lot better, but like our "huddled masses"/"wretched refuse" ancestors, much our time and labor will have been appropriated: appropriated by the aristocrats of the new world, with money to hire us peasants as staff to do the grunt work of consumption.

Doctor-Assisted Suicide: Some Useful Clarifications (6 March 2013)

            On her National Public Radio show on 5 March 2013, Diane Rehm got into an exchange that helps clarify the issues with doctor-assisted suicide.

            Early in the show, Ms. Rehm talked with Krayton Kerns, who, uses his doctorate with his name and stresses it on his website, and thereby made himself fair game for a line of questioning that started with his being a practicing veterinarian, and a vet definitely willing to euthanize animals: "Oh yeah, without a doubt. We do it all the time."

            Krayton Kerns, DVM, is relevant to discussing doctor-assisted suicide with humans because he is also the Honorable Krayton Kerns, Representative in the Montana Legislature for House District 58, and Rep. Kerns recently pushed through the Montana House of Representatives a bill that could — if approved by the Montana Senate and signed by the Governor — impose on any Montana physician assisting in a suicide (1) a fine of up to fifty thousand dollars and/or (2) ten years in jail.

            In response to Dr. Kerns's robust reply on his professional willingness to put down animals, Rehm asked, "And how do you see the treatment, the care and treatment of those animals as being different from the treatment of humans who wish to die?" Kerns responded that the situation with animals is "entirely different." He explained, "Number one, they can't give their consent […]." Since the non-human animals' lack of choice here seemed to work against Kerns's position, Rehm pushed the point, and Kerns replied that "The animal has no choice. That would be correct. And the human being does have the choice. Yeah, I think that would be a correct assessment."

            Rehm pushed on: humans have choice and what "if the human being says, I choose to die" and adds, "I really am asking you, my doctor, to assist me in dying" — how would Kerns "regard that as different"?

            Kerns's immediate answer was rambling but instructive: "Well, you're also asking the doctor to go against their oath above all, do no harm, and […] they're no longer an agent of healing. You know, it's a different circumstance then. And this also gets discombobulated as this nation degrades into a single-party payer health care system where everything is controlled by the government. And then we have a very frightening situation where the government controls the diagnostic end of your disorder, the treatment end of your disorder. And due to the power of the inheritance tax, it is to their advantage for you to select suicide as early as possible before you exhaust your resources."

            To help clarity — clarification is my goal here — Kerns raises the important points of (1) the possibility of harming someone by failing to act, (2) money, and, crucially, (3) of control: who gets to decide what.

            Like a good teacher or most excellent interviewer, Rehm prompts Kerns with "But suppose I am really suffering from something as debilitating as, say, Parkinson's disease or ALS or an invasive cancer that is bringing me so much pain and suffering that I no longer wish to live and wish to die in as humane a fashion as I would treat my dog." And then we get to the heart of the matter.

            "Well, of course, Kerns responds, "I view it as you're interfering with a decision that is not yours to make, it's God's. He'll take your life when it is time. And until that time, it's your obligation to press on and make the best that you can with what you have available."

            Rehm moves from a prompt to a bit of a goad, though pronounced without sarcasm: "So as a veterinarian, you bring in the religious element." Kerns says, "Well, I don't because I don't think it plays in in the veterinarian end because we're dealing with the animal and not a human life."

            On his website (www.KraytonKerns.org), Kerns handles the abortion issue succinctly: "*Abortion:  I am a Christian.  I am Pro-Life." And we can use this assertion to make clear that Kerns has a coherent position, an important position, and a position pretty radically opposed to those held by people likely to read anything by a commie-liberal-pinko-pretty-secular-humanist-registered-Democrat like me.

            I've got $50 to bet that by "Christian" Kerns means something like the student of mine meant when he said, "I used to be Catholic, but now I'm Christian" — but I'll just put it that what Kerns says makes sense in terms of a "Bible Christian" for whom Adam — Man — became a living being when he received the breath of life from God (Genesis 2.7), someone who believes that when we say "choose life" it means choose a life following God. Or, as God puts it, "[…] I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice, and cleaving to him; for that means life to you and length of days […]" (Deuteronomy 30.19-20).

            Human beings live and have choice and free will because we have within us a special life-breath, one different from non-human animals: a direct-from-God kind of ruach, anima, spiritus: words that (roughly speaking) evolved from "wind, breath" to more or less "spirit," and then to soul.

         Kerns can kill dogs and cats and all without qualm if not literally "all the time" but objects to even suicide by humans because with a dog "we're dealing with the animal and not a human life," not a real life, not the life of a creature ensouled.

            One of the reasons he can so readily kill non-human animals is precisely because they have no choice in the matter and are innocent in their deaths and in all else. Humans should be prohibited from killing ourselves precisely because we have free will as a gift from God and have souls from God and damn well better be willing to put up with any shit God sends us. Or else.

            And that's "or else" you will be damned to eternal Hell, you and, in this case, the physician you rode in on: indeed all those risk damnation who aided you in succumbing to the unforgiveable sin of despair.
            God has set before us life and death, but we don't — in the traditional Christian view — we don't get to choose death in the sense of suicide because that is "a decision that is not yours to make, it's God's. He'll take your life when it is time. And until that time, it's your obligation to press on […]," even if doing so subjects you to misery we would not inflict on a gerbil.

            Indeed, you're to "press on" even if it bankrupts your family, and definitely without getting advice that you'd do better to shuffle off this mortal coil before you and the other codgers bankrupt a single-payer health system.

            I'm serious about the family bit, and about money. However much Christianity — definitely here including Catholics and Orthodox and all the traditional Church — however much the churches have long been big on the family, you do have the musical injunction from Martin Luther, "Let goods and kindred go"; and Jesus was emphatic that "[…] he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me" and enjoined his followers, "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth" (Matthew 10.37, 7.19). Nor for the kids.

            God gave you the breath of life and freedom and the promise of eternal life. Immortal God put on flesh and became human — Yuck! — and was tortured to death willingly for your sins, so you, you ingrate, can bloody well die miserably and bankrupt your kids and help bring down the economy rather than disobey a jot or a tittle of God's word which, traditionally (uh, actually, without a whole lot of scriptural warrant) says man up, press on, and die a lingering death if that's what God wants for you and from you.

            That may not be what mere mortal reason and compassion says — see Saint Thomas More's rational but non-Christian Utopians on the matter — but that's why we have Revelation to supplement, and sometimes over-rule, mere mortal reason (and occasionally compassion).

            Personally, when "It's time," as the vets say, I want to be put down like a dog. Or, since my dog was killed by a train and that would be hard to arrange — more exactly, I'd like to be put down like my cat Lilith, who died in my arms Christmas Eve a while back, from lethal injection.

            Still, there are reasons to carefully hedge assisted suicide. We do want to ensure that the family doesn't send grandpa off to the needle the first time he breaks a hip or that a fascist State doesn't start a program in racial hygiene by slaughtering the infirm. More immediately relevant here, secular sorts must understand that Representative Krayton Kerns has a coherent code behind him and one agreed to more quietly by a lot of people.

            The question is control. Mr. Kerns doesn't want the US Federal Government to be the single-payer for health care; a lot of us don't want Mr. Kerns and Church or State in any of their forms getting too coercively involved with what we do with our bodies.

"Oh, Right; I'm the Mommy now": Mini-Epiphanies (24 March 2013)

         I'm not writing here about those "Eureka!" moments, grand epiphanies or satoris. I've never had grand anything, but I have had the little epiphanies: "ah-hah" moments or "Oh, yeah" moments — or "Oh, shit!" moments on something not just immediate and personal.

         A colleague of mine — call her Katarina for future reference — described hers at a shopping mall one day watching some unattended kids misbehaving. "Harrumph!" she thought, or maybe something stronger. "One of the mothers should do something about that." And then it hit her, "Oh, right; I'm the mommy now" — and she strode over and, figuratively, kicked some tween and teen ass.

         That's an important moment: when we realize we're "the mommy now" or, in unisex formulation, "the adult in the room," or at least the closest responsible person in the mall.

         My experience was somewhat different; it was having confirmed how difficult it could be for me to to be accepted as an adult, and as an authority.

         I started teaching with one course in Rhetoric 101 (College Comp/"Freshman English") at the University of Illinois at Urbana. I was twenty-three- or twenty-four-years old and 5'2" tall (say 157 cm.) and still had my hair, a fair amount of it and still dark. Since I got my course the Friday before classes started, I was definitely "low man in seniority" and ended up teaching in the Armory in a classroom that lacked not only air-conditioning but also ventilation. I arrived early and wore my three-piece weddings, funerals, and interviews suit. I got talking with a nice young woman waiting with me outside the classroom. Eventually:

         "Well," I finally said; "I guess we'd better go in."

         "Nah," she said; "we've got time."

         "I have a lot to write on the blackboard," I said.

         At which point she stepped back, looked me over, kind of pointed, and said with mild amused/bemused disbelief, "You're the teacher?!"

         "Why the hell else would I be in a three-piece suit in this heat?!" I responded. And I walked in.
         That student and I got along, and the class went fine, all things considered. For one thing, they were very tolerant of my ignorance and inexperience, and, well, just good people. Last day of class I took them out for a kind of class party at a local dive. You have one guess who alone of the group got stopped at the bar and had to show two pieces of ID and still got hassled to buy a beer.

         It could have been worse. My ID were legitimate, and I was an adult.

         Part of my entry into adulthood came at age seventeen or eighteen when I took over as president of a charity group and had to deal with a group of guys who'd embezzled the profits of a dance their high school fraternity had run and took off to Florida for a very long weekend. My previous job with the charity was what would later be called "Media Relations," and I was well aware that we couldn't afford the bad publicity of having the guys arrested. So we covered it up; most centrally, I covered up a really reprehensible theft. However, this was not exactly a loss of innocence for me.

         Much later in life, when I was one of "the older guys" on Miami University's Student Affairs Council, another faculty member and I were talking with one of "the younger guys": an Ayn-Rand Libertarian mostly, but a young person who'd just compromised and cut his first political deal. My colleague kidded the guy with an allusion to loss of virginity, and I started to throw in, "Yeah, I remember—" when my colleague cut me off with, "Rich, I don't know anything about your sex life, and God knows I don't want to know anything about your sex life, but politically, you were never a virgin."

         That's an overstatement, but OK; politically, by seventeen or eighteen, by the time I took over as president of that charity — I was no innocent.

         What the theft taught me, what dealing indirectly with the thieves taught me, was the important insight, "Everybody feels justified."

         That was a kind of "Oh, shit" moment.

         As Steven Pinker notes somewhere in his monumental The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), it's a real problem that murderers and others who commit violent acts typically feel justified; indeed they are in their own minds moral people, doing justice upon their victims.

         Not everybody feels justified; some people feel guilt and remorse. But most of us, most of the time, do feel justified, even when we do bad things, even when, indirectly, we steal from crippled children.

         My second confirmation into adulthood came on 23 November 1963. I typed that correctly: 23 November, the day after President John F. Kennedy was murdered.

         I was saddened, and appalled by the murder of President Kennedy, but it didn't shake my vision in the universe or anything like that. Three American presidents had been assassinated before, President Lincoln quite famously; and I knew of the attempts to kill Franklin Roosevelt — and had been alive during the known attempt to kill President Truman. (I only learned of the attempt on his life by the Stern Gang in researching this paragraph.) Anyway, however much some of my fellow citizens believed "It can't happen here," in my universe, such shit happened, and "It" — any "it" that happened elsewhere or in earlier times — could indeed "happen here" in the United States.

         Nah, what shook me up a bit was a petty thing, and personal with me.

         When Kennedy died, I put a black ribbon across the seal of our fraternity at the entrance of the house. I was a house officer and had the permission of the chapter president to do so, and it was the custom if we mourned the death of someone in the chapter. I thought we should make some gesture, and the single black ribbon was decorously restrained (the seal was inside).

         One of my fraternity brothers tore off the ribbon, primarily, it got back to me, to get back at me for a gesture he thought stupid — and in part just to hurt me.

         He later apologized, after other Greek houses on campus lowered their flags to half-staff and such, but he threw in that, yeah, he did what he had done mostly just to hurt me.

         This was my introduction to malice: doing harm to another without profit to oneself.
         I ended up writing my master's essay on malice among some of Shakespeare's major villains, and the idea of malice is pretty central to my dissertation. "Everyone feels justified" — or many of us do, much of the time, even when we shouldn't — and "Some people are just no damn good," or, more exactly, many of us will act maliciously, hurting others while not helping ourselves. Or not helping ourselves except insofar as we feed our pride.

         And just how dangerous that occasional maliciousness can be was taught to me by a former student, after he'd graduated and had gone to law school and — before moving to the really big show of international law — served as a small-town Ohio attorney. A young man himself at the time, the attorney told me that his father had never hit him but that as a child and teenager he had feared his father. He had clients, though, who really lived the dumb-ass slogan "No Fear." When I wrote him and checked my memory of what he had said, he wrote back that some of his clients "had no fears or boundaries … they feared no person or adult figure … (one guy, Robert "Rip-Off" Jones was heard to say (moments before his death by gun), 'I'm not afraid of you or your gun.'" These guys "were largely socialized by the streets" and "having no fear was part of their problem, and definitely a problem for others."

         It's definitely a problem for others when "No Fear" and no limits are combined in a large human being with desires to lash out suddenly or (and ethically worse) act with a cold-blooded malice.
         It's probably a good thing none of these guys — or their little sisters — were in the group my colleague Katarina confronted at the mall. I'm not sure many guys with no limits would find themselves saying, "Oh, right; I'm the Daddy now" and start setting limits for others.

         That's a depressing thought, and I won't end on it.

         For another thing I've learned, in an "oh, yeah" moment while reading depressing books on human nastiness — another insight that comes through is, "Well, yeah, but most of us most of the time feel justified because we're doing OK." All of us, at one time or another, can do some really bad shit; but, again, most of us, most of the time, don't.

         I'm sure the first class I taught sensed my fear and noted that I looked sixteen — but they cut me some slack. Sometimes, most of us, can be downright kind.

Porn in the Public Interest (3 May 2013)

{Bloggers Note: For whatever reasons, this post on OpenSalon got more hits — a whole lot more — than other individual item I've ever posted to the web.}

Headlines in the News:

"Gates Foundation Funds Development of High Tech Condoms"; 

"California’s landmark condoms in porn bill (AB 332) 

clears first Assembly committee, 5 to 1" (References: Gates, AB 332) 

       
            If fashion can get people, especially young people, to tattoo and pierce their bodies, shave their genitals, wear stiletto heals and low-rider pants, and — in the developed world — buy water in small bottles; then fashion can also be a force for good, encouraging condom use.

            So there should be strong support for California Assembly Bill 332 and similar legislation in other states requiring condoms on male actors in pornographic movies. The argument for condom use for sex-workplace safety is legitimate, but there's a more pressing argument for such legislation as a truly public, public health issue. In their way, porn stars are role models, and if their example can be a major influence getting young people to shave like semi-pro swimmers or body builders, porn-actor behavior can be important in making condom-use fashionable, normal, and normative: perhaps even, in the old expression, cool. Condom use as normal behavior for young people has obvious benefits limiting sexually-transmitted diseases, reducing unwanted pregnancies and, hence, the numbers of abortions, and more generally encouraging responsibility among older boys and young men, who should take responsibility for their reproduction and health.

            As part of a larger public information program — i.e., "Wrap That Willy!" propaganda — porn stars can inculcate the doctrines that "Real Men Control Their Reproduction" and "Real Men Can Hold an Erection Well Enough to Be Cool in Condoms." Well, and that Real Women limit their heterosex lives to such Real Men, and have the sexiness and know-how to help their men, let's say, achieve and maintain their "reality."

            Parents and other older adults could also get involved.

            "Late adolescence" was invented during my lifetime, and it isn't a good idea. "The pill" was an excellent idea, except insofar as its existence got people to think contraception an issue for just women and girls. At 18-years old, I was expected to be a young adult, and a good while before I turned 18 my father gave me an optimistically large box of condoms and told me, "Until you know what to do with it; keep it in your pants." I suspect that bit of SexEd was more useful than most of what gets taught in US schools.

            Parents, however, are radically limited in their influence over fashion; stardom, including porn-star stardom, is powerful.