UNDER ASSET FORFEITURE LAW, WISCONSIN COPS CONFISCATE FAMILIES' BAIL MONEY.

NOW THIS IS POOR BUT HONEST. "And if the new job doesn't work out after you bet all of your chips, you're triple fucked. And at that point the world will wag its finger at you and tell you how irresponsible it was to move when you were so poor. 'Ha, you poor people are always doing stupid shit like that!'"

Cracked.com, so obviously the language and imagery are quite rough, but I am a huge fan of John Cheese and find his writing almost always worth my time.

WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS: JWB notes that I might want to inform readers that my Weekly Standard review of Red Families vs. Blue Families is now available to nonsubscribers. I did not know that!

So you can read it here. As I said before, I don't think I nailed the problems with the book, but the review might still be worth reading. Please politely ignore the way I completely fuddled the rich man/CAMEL/eye of needle metaphor at the end! Or laugh mercilessly at my incompetence... you know, whatever floats your cup of tea.

HOW IS JONATHAN RAUCH SO AWESOME? I mean, yeah, this isn't the column I would write about Red Families vs. Blue Families, but it is still so much more focused on the most important issues than approximately 99% of the reviews/articles/responses I've read so far, and so completely free from pharisaism . When I went to see him talk about his gay-marriage book he was totally self-overhearing, too, which as you know is one of my absolute most admired traits in any person. It's just so refreshing to see someone actively avoid opportunities to "charge them for it."

CHEAP TRAGEDIES: Noli Irritare Leones has a brief reply to my red/blue families post; here are three quickish points.

1. Right, all of us live in a "contracepting culture," I wasn't clear about that. I made it sound like I thought the basic divide was between people who don't believe in contraception and people who do, which would be a ridiculous claim about contemporary America. I was more referring to the reasons people might be less consistent/diligent about contraception, which includes stuff like mental health and general risk-aversion but also--and this is the real point I was trying to get at, sorry!--how much you feel like your future is in your own hands. People with less of a sense of control or agency are IMO likely to have a more Roman-hands-and-Russian-roulette attitude toward contraception. I may be overly influenced by pregnancy center counseling, but this doesn't seem unlikely, and seems very obviously class-linked rather than e.g. about whether you voted for Obama.

2. A related and perh more interesting point: The more I think about this red/blue families thing the more it seems like the r/b narrative and the "marriage gap" narrative are like those pictures which are a vase, but also two faces; or a duck but also a rabbit. The r/b narrative is the liberal one (not Left, but liberal) and the marriage-gap one is conservative. The r/b narrative promotes one set of solutions and the marriage-gap narrative promotes a very different set. The r/b narrative seems to emphasize politics and religion in its framing, while the marriage-gap narrative emphasizes poverty and race. Both often pay lip service to class (the intersection of economic status and culture, or the culture created by economic status) but really downplay it... which leads me to suspect that class is one of the biggest drivers of this divide. (Here's Jonathan Rauch on the marriage gap as a class gap.)

Anyway I'll probably end up writing a longer thing about these two competing narratives--with any luck, playing them off of each other will illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of both--ideally for money....

3. I am not sure how to flesh out what's essentially an aesthetic argument, but my problem with many of the red/blue commentaries recently is not that they're polemical but that they're pharisaical. "I thank God that my sins are not as the sins of this Republican" and all that. Thus class gets elided, for example, in favor of charging evangelicals with hypocrisy. (I don't think NIL is doing that! Just that it's the attitude which spurred my earlier post.)

...Also, though, a reader sent me this essay (PDF), which is a very early use of the r/b phrase and which I remember thinking was quite good. Still obviously from a liberal perspective but I seem to recall it as a fruitful and provocative one, rather than a self-comforting one. Will re-read shortly.

THANK GOD FOR MISSISSIPPI: There is a fun meme called "red families vs. blue families." This Seussian formula may not be especially based on the book of the same name, which I haven't read and which I therefore don't want to assimilate to the sins of its followers. But the meme itself is not really new.

The idea is that families in "blue states" are relatively adept at transmitting some aspects of a marriage culture to their children. Massachusetts, e.g., is home to families where the children mate for life. Meanwhile "red states" produce children (they produce more children, usually, by the way) who marry in haste and repent in somewhat-delayed-haste, lots of divorces and out-of-wedlock births and similar signs of family-values hypocrisy. When I say "this isn't new," I mean, "I got 10 cents off my Caribou coffee by knowing that Mississippi has an extraordinarily high rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancies more than a year ago."

These are facts, and there are a lot of ways of responding to these facts. You can explore ways in which the contemporary economy and culture, by (for example) prioritizing postsecondary education and stigmatizing living with one's parents, has made it extraordinarily difficult to sustain a culture of more-or-less postponing sex until marriage. You could criticize the notion of marriage as the capper on life's to-do list, to be sought only once all the other boxes are checked and you're "stable," rather than a foundation for a later stable life. You could, in other words, ask why a consumerist culture is so hostile to a communal and marriage-based way of life.

You could maybe talk about Protestantism! Catholic states tend to have very different problems from Protestant ones: They tend to be aging states--whether we're talking about Massachusetts or Italy--where divorce is rare but birthrates are low. What can the competing Christian cultures teach one another?

You could look for institutions and traditions within so-called "red state" cultures which promote lifelong marriage and serve to more-or-less-okay manage the problem of intercourse. You could find heroes and show how "red state" life works, when it works, and which conditions need to be in place for it to work.

These are all things you could do.

The other really fun thing you could do, though, is blame "red state" families for being Not Our Kind, Dear. It is just so sad that their pathetic religious delusions make them slutty hypocrites. (Yum, by the way; I think hypocrisy makes your breasts bigger.) You could argue that they're really promoting abortion, 'cause it's their fault they haven't adapted to the contracepting, college-educated ways of the elite. It's not about poverty, or the fatalism it breeds, or the terrifying knowledge of how close you really are to falling off the ladder. It's about Baptists suck.

You could wage class war, in other words, on the side of the privileged. You could focus on shaming people who are really different from you, and not on figuring out how marriage and family life can be strengthened across a variety of religious and moral beliefs and a variety of class and cultural backgrounds.

Of course, if the (for example) Catholic view of marriage is simply doomed and pathetic, then I guess it's just ripping off the Band-Aid quickly to say so. But I really think if you spend any time with actual humans actually trying to make decisions about their sexual lives, their unborn children, their religion, and their relationships, you will not sound the way a lot of the "red vs. blue families" commentators sound.

"OFFICER PURCHASES FOOD FOR MAN CAUGHT STEALING."

IT TOOK THE CHURCH THREE CENTURIES TO CELEBRATE THE EPIPHANY: Ch 3: “Mirror Images: Transsexuality and Autobiography.” Again we get careful, sympathetic attention to the metaphors and tropes of transsexual autobiography, especially the way in which the doubling effect of a mirror--the eye looking back at itself--can shift from emotionally devastating to enthralling. Prosser boldly opens the chapter with quotations which seem to reinforce the idea that transsexuals are uniquely narcissistic (sort of like us homos!) and proceeds to perform what I can only call deconstructive surgery on that judgment. The shifting use of “mirror” imagery provides a subtle and sublime rebuke to anti-trans arguments.

My favorite point from this chapter was Prosser's defense of transsexuals against a cisgendered woman who argued that transsexual autobiographies equivocate between “I was always already the other sex” and “I needed a sex change”: If you're already a man even though you've got ladyparts, why do you need hormones and surgery?

Against this charge Prosser not only implicitly incorporates the previous chapter's understanding of sex-reassignment surgery as reconstructive surgery. He also notes that this doubling, this equivocation between past self-understanding and present self's construal of that self-understanding, is an inevitable feature of autobiography: “[T]he genre of autobiography operates precisely on a set of reconcilable and constitutive oppositions.” He argues that transsexual autobiographies play out the way they do in part because conforming to these conventional ways of speaking (“sex change”; “I was always already”) are necessary for someone to gain access to treatment. But he also argues that autobiography itself, because it shapes the story of a life with a telos in mind, always has this tension between past and present. Think of conversion narratives: Their whole drama and drive is the tension between “I recognized the truth about myself and the world, the God Who had always been there” and “I converted, I changed.” I had always been the person the Church says I am; I had to change once I recognized that. Or as Prosser puts it: “In that its work is to organize the life into a narrative form, autobiography is fundamentally conformist. …All life events in the autobiographies seem to lead toward the telos of the sex-changed self. This gendered coherence is inextricable from the narrative coherence of the genre.” The moments and epiphanies we cite to draw out our sense of how we ended up where we ended up did not necessarily seem to convey that meaning to us at the time... and yet that doesn't mean we're wrong when we cite the moment we glimpsed a girl at a window, for example, as one of the key moments in our conversion.

(Note that Prosser is not using “conformist” as a slur, but as a neutral descriptor of one feature of a genre with its own formal properties and characteristic beauties. Conservatism rears its lovely head!)

This chapter is also notable for its crisp argument that because transsexuals must construct an autobiographical narrative in order to even identify themselves as transsexual, and because they must further shape those narratives to fit the rigid conventions of the clinical diagnosis in order to gain access to hormones, surgery etc., “every transsexual, as transsexual, is originally an autobiographer,” and--I'm adding this, but I don't think it's far from what Prosser says--an autobiographer who's likely to have an especially acute sense of the difference between what she says and how she's read. The chapter is equally notable for Prosser's clear, cold focus on how thoroughly transsexual people's own narratives of their lives are treated as suspect. The interrogation metaphor on page 111--used positively by a psychoanalyst/psychotherapist, because interrogator/prisoner is totally a great model for the “healing professions”!--man, I'd make everyone read that page if I could. “And charge them for it,” again, some more.

I couldn't, of course, be the athletic or heterosexual man he wanted. He knew I was homosexual, although we never discussed it. I'd told him in a letter in order to get the money I needed to see the shrink, Dr. O'Reilly.
--The Beautiful Room Is Empty

The guy who created the sublime Daily Mail-o-Matic also made a widget to generate policy proposals from Labour politician David Blunkett. I have no comment on the accuracy of this or any other furrin satire of a furrin pol; but the thing I always remember about the widget is the tag, at the end of each cartoonish abuse of power, "...and charge them for it." Like so: "Pre-emptively convict children, and then lock them up. And charge them for it." "Put Muslims under a curfew order, and then put their children into care. And charge them for it."

And what's so striking to me is how easy it is to convince us to do it: to pay for our own shaming and dismissal, to pay someone else to be the Good Person to our Uniquely Bad. (For example.)