Notes and fragments on matters personal, political, philosophical, and so forth

 
Back Again

Well, that was a longer break than I intended--and as often seems the case, the break was a mixed blessing: it was wonderful to step away from work and everyday life for a while, but that only makes it much more difficult, disorienting, and disagreeable to return to the daily grind. The jokes people tell about needing a vacation to recover from the vacation have a point. I suppose I'll be lucky if I can get back on top of things and get my act back together by Easter or thereabouts. I wish for a graceful life, and instead it's just a constant pattern of rush and recovery. But I guess that's hardly a unique complaint.

In the meantime, I've got a small backload of things to blog about. And if you were an Invisible Adjunct reader, get over there and wish her a fond farewell before it's too late; her decision to give up blogging has resulted in a torrent of tearful goodbyes, of which mine is just one of many. IA's blog was one of the sanest, funniest, most thoughtful sites around; she will be greatly missed.
posted by Russell Arben Fox at 3/24/2004 10:59:49 PM

 
A Year of Blogging Enviously

My very first blog post appeared on March 18, 2003 (scroll down to read it here; thanks to the maddening complications of Blogger--which I complain about but which also, I admit, aren't quite enough to impel me to do the work necessary to switch over to something better--my permalinks for March don't work, and indeed, most of the first six months can't be accessed through the archives at all, though occasionally specific posts might be recovered if you have the link saved somewhere). So I'm jumping the gun a little in making this an anniversary post. But I'll be out of town all next week: it's ASU's spring break, and my younger sister is getting married on the 17th in Salt Lake City (indeed, she planned the wedding around our availability), so we're going to spend the next several days out West, visiting old friends in Utah and showing off Alison to relatives. Alison has gotten a lot better over the last few weeks--naps still elude us, but she's sleeping at night now, isn't backed up, and thus is a happier baby. I hope she and we survive the plane ride. Anyway, by the time we return it'll officially be spring, and this blog's one-year anniversary will have officially passed. Since I'm a calendar-conscious kind of guy, I decided this was a good time to take care of old business, and have everything ready for a fresh start for when we get back.

I could go into some detail about how my blog posts have evolved over the last twelve months, but I don't think there's much to say there. If this blog's content has had any real theme at all, it's been one of ideological and philosophical clarification: it's been a place for me to argue, with myself and others, about what I really believe, how those beliefs relate to current events and the history of thought, and whether those beliefs stand up to intellectual scrutiny. In short, I've mostly spent the last twelve months trying to figure out where I stand on this, that, or some other issue. In the beginning I mostly wrote about Iraq and imperialism and what kind "liberal" I am (a moderately nationalist, interventionist one); lately I've been writing more about the family and relationships and what kind of "communitarian" I am (a socially conservative yet egalitarian one). But fundamentally, it's all been about self-understanding, I suppose.

The thing is, such arguments, aiming for self-understanding, don't require a blog. For several months prior to beginning to blog, I'd had a pretty active e-mail discussion group going with a lot of old friends; we'd search the web and send links to each other every day, and argue about this and that. I treasure that list, and still do. Unfortunately, it's sometimes been difficult to maintain both those connections and this blog. So why do I do it? Well, there are lots of reasons....but the one which comes most readily to mind is, I'm sorry to say, envy.

By late 2002 and early 2003 I noticed more and more academics--people who are my peers--blogging. Jacob T. Levy, whose old site I got addicted to. Ditto for John Holbo. And many more: Kieran Healy, Chris Bertram...most of the Crooked Timber crowd, now that I think about it. Of course, many of these people started their blogs months before I'd ever even heard of such a thing, but given that I came to the internet quite late (I'm still not entirely clear on what "Usenet" was), I suppose I should be happy I discovered them at all. But I wasn't happy--or at least, not entirely. I'd love to say that I read their blogs wholly because I was stimulated by their ideas, and wanted to engage them in discussion, and it's true that I did. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that a good deal of my motivation for going back again and again was raw, self-interested anxiousness, something along the lines of: "Look at this! I've heard of that guy! I've read her articles! And now, everyone's reading what they say! I could have said that! Wait, I had that idea once! I studied that for years; you need my input! Dammit, I'm getting left behind!" And so forth. I was jealous, in other words. And not only jealous; some rather ugly Nietzschean ressentiment rumbled around in there as well: "Look at them. They're younger than me. They went to better graduate schools than I did. They have jobs at better universities than me. More people know them. They've got book deals. They're better writers, better scholars, better educated, more disciplined, more knowing, less distracted, wiser, hard-working. I hate them." Well, maybe it didn't get that far; at least I hope not. But perhaps I'm in denial.

Everyone knows that envy is an essential ingredient in the academy; indeed, on the publish-or-perish level, one might say that envy is built into the system, a feature inculcated into graduate students in order to get them to adhere to the economy of the place. It's something I've struggled with plenty over the years, especially in connection with my (seemingly never-ending) job search. In all honesty, I really don't think it's ever affected me very deeply, certainly not to the point of driving the life choices I make. But in the blogosphere, I must admit that the contrary is true: I have often been driven at least in part by envy. This blog and a great many of the posts I've written over the last year are significantly (if not, thankfully, entirely) the product of seeing some other blog, or some other post, and frustratingly feeling that it ought to have been said or done by me.

So there you go. Judge me accordingly. I'll be back in a week.
posted by Russell Arben Fox at 3/12/2004 07:29:35 AM

 
Update (Huntington's Critics and Me)

My moderate defense of the perspective (if not the point) of Samuel Huntington's recent essay on Hispanic immigration and American culture attracted the attention of Matthew Yglesias, who wrote that I was "all wrong." More accurately, Matt thought I'd been conned by Huntington; that what I described as a "wealth of data" supporting Huntington's claim that "this particular wave of immigrants--both legal and illegal--is larger and different from all previous waves" is in fact nothing of the sort. Could be. As I wrote originally, and in a comment on Matt's blog, I'm in no position to evaluate his evidence. My interest in Huntington has nothing to do with his particular conclusions, which--even if they were supported by his data (and I'm willing to grant they may not be)--I think show a rather simplistic understanding of cultural identity and change. But at least Huntington is talking about such things; and while Matt is correct that "neither [David] Brooks nor I denied that it is important for immigrants and their descendents to learn English," neither of them appeared inclined to attribute much weight to the engagement with (cultural) particularity which language acquisition requires. To repeat: Huntington may be, indeed probably is, all washed up when he equates American identity with a simple "Anglo-Protestant" particularity....but in some ways, I'd rather any discussion of some particularity than no discussion at all. And that's what happens when you treat language--as Brooks, at least, appeared to--as just some neutral, interchangeable tool, just something that you pick up (or your kids pick up, or your grandkids) once what is really important--your "values"--inspire you to cross a border.

And speaking of those values, and that particularity, check out the fisking which Scott Martens has launched against Huntington over at Pedantry. Scott knows the data on language acquisition, and plans to tear to pieces Huntington's argument about the "uniqueness" of the current resistance by Hispanic immigrants to assimilation; but his first post is a broad, indignant attack on Huntington's "value-driven nationalism" and the culture in implicitly praises. Scott cuts right to the quick of Huntington's conception of America, writing with dark humor that he should begin by pointing out that "the American dream--hard work gets you a decent life--is almost completely mythical; that Anglo-Protestant values didn't build America nearly as much as the sweat of cheap immigrant labourers (first from Africa, then from Europe and now from Mexico); and that anglophone Protestants have been happily rejecting Anglo-Protestant values for quite a long time now and have been doing so far more vocally and threateningly than Mexicans ever have." He correctly observes that Huntington's conception is built upon a definitional fiat: he comes up with an Anglo-Protestant majority culture by excluding African-American slaves and Native Americans as from his measure of the American public. (Historically justified, perhaps, but nonetheless a stacking of the deck, allowing him to claim that what was, in truth, actively constructed was simply constituted by virtue of majority preference.) And I couldn't agree more with his dismissal of Huntington's Weberian association of American Protestantism with entrepreneurialism and individualism; as Scott puts it "America's religious dissenters--the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the refugee German churches, the Huguenots--were overwhelmingly organised into tightly-knit interdependent communities...the very opposite of self-reliant or individualistic."

Unfortunately, I do think some of Scott's ire gets in the way of his critique. He gets a little snide, wondering if believing "it's only a crime if you get caught" isn't a central American value as well (no, Scott, I suspect that's more "human" than anything else). He says the idea that Americans have long identified with "a duty to build 'heaven on earth'" is nonsensical, and quotes some selfish conservative pseudo-Christian to that effect--but of course, if that was the case (and if people such as the one he quotes really had defined our history), then the tremendous careers, reputation and influence of such "city on a hill"-type moral leaders as John Winthrop, Abraham Lincoln, or Martin Luther King would be inexplicable. And there are a few other things I disagree with as well. But all in all, a good fisking, and one that will continue. Check it out.
posted by Russell Arben Fox at 3/11/2004 12:35:59 AM

 
Preview of a Pundit

An old friend of mine asked if I'd consider posting a short essay written by his son, which he is supposed to submit for publication somewhere as part of a school assignment. I guess blogs count. Anyway, I'm happy to post it here (frankly, it's better than a lot of stuff I've seen posted over at The Corner). Consider it a preview of a future pundit (he's certainly getting an earlier start than I did).

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"War- What is it Good For?"
by Christian Edwards van Muijen

Let's see; there's the War of Jenkins's Ear, the French-Indian War, the Revolutionary War, The Civil War, The Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the War on Terror, just to name a few. Any kid in 7th grade can (hopefully) tell you that the US has been through our fair share of war and bloodshed. But through all of this you have to ask yourself 'Why? Why must we seek to destroy those who are standing in our way? Why must children cry from the pain of losing a loved one to an American weapon? What is war good for?'

The line from my Dad's song says that the answer to that question is 'absolutely nothing', but we of course know that that is not true. Without a war, there would be no United States of America. Without war, Hitler would control most of Europe, if not the whole world. The real question is 'Which war is a good war?'

The main way to discover whether a war is 'good' or 'bad' is to set up criteria for a 'just' war. The ones that I feel are most important are: 1. We must be defending our rights, 2. We must be defending the helpless from a known threat, and 3. There must be a force pressing almost equally, that is, the threat must be a real threat. If we are attacked by some new nation who are killing our people, that is a just time to go to war. If some nation is slaughtering people because of their ethnicity, that is a just war.

Even so, us 7th graders can feel the blow from any war, good or bad. Wars have their costs in an average area, like a school. Some students think that they shouldn't think by shutting off their minds and believe whatever ideas are thrown at them. Others are really just trying to hide from the fact that we are at war. Sadly, some students are segregated for their ethnicity when we go to war with their homelands. In fact, one of my good friends thought that it was World War III and we were going to war with India. Because of this, he was unkind to an Indian student in our school until we convinced him that WWIII hadn't occurred yet.

Going to war is not an easy thing to understand for my generation. With the Iraq war drawn to a close, most of us feel a quiet relief: No more violence, no more death, no more pain. The President says that the war was good and just, and we can just trust them. But the President's explanations don't really match up with our criteria. What was the point of going to Iraq? We went in there, looking for Weapons
of Mass Destruction, blew up some Iraqi citizens, and found... nothing. All the war proved was that George W. Bush wants to milk his title of "Commander-in-Chief" for all it's worth. If any of us folks in 7th grade have a problem, most of us can talk it out and find a better solution than going in and nuking anything that moves.

In conclusion, war is a complex and delicate matter. With many different perspectives to look at war through, there is no right way of describing a war. However, there are 'good' and 'bad' wars. I hope that we will have the wisdom to only fight 'good' wars in the future.

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I'd never even heard of the War of Jenkins's Ear before I read this essay, and I'm a college professor. So much for my junior high school education.
posted by Russell Arben Fox at 3/10/2004 10:57:59 PM

 
Update (The Nanny Debate Continues)

The long, often contentious, but always interesting interblog debate on motherhood, nannies, domestic service, and exploitation--which I weighed in on here, here, and over at Times & Seasons here--has reared its head again, this time with a few interesting twists. Timothy Burke and Belle Waring both post some wonderful, revealing, reflections on domestic service and the exploitation question in non-U.S. contexts. Laura takes Tim's comments and uses them as a springboard to wonder about the relationship between a desire for "privacy" (the main reason Tim is uncomfortable with domestic service) and our discomforting unwillingness to get our own hands dirty. She asks: "Are we losing the ability to take care of ourselves? Are we losing some of the rugged individualism and self-sufficiency that de Tocqueville observed in our country 200 years ago?" Chun the Unavoidable has a pretty emphatic response: "If you're healthy, and someone else is cleaning your house, you need to check yourself." Oh, and Nate Oman gets all lawyerly, as is his right, about the meaning of "exploitation." Anyway, read and comment away.
posted by Russell Arben Fox at 3/5/2004 09:38:34 AM

 
Great Acting

I'm hardly an expert when it comes to film, but I watch my share of movies, and like most people, I love talking about them. (No, I haven't seen The Passion of the Christ yet; for a variety of reasons, I rarely go out to see films without Melissa, and since she has no interest in seeing the movie--she knows she wouldn't handle the level of violence very well--I don't know when I'll get around to it. Perhaps soon, but perhaps not until it's out on dvd.) I especially like thinking about, and talking about, what makes movies (some of them, at least) work as art--the cinematography, the editing, the dialogue, the staging, and certainly not least the acting. Thus I was delighted to discover this informative little essay by Lee Siegel, in which he takes up the opportunity which the Oscar season provides us to reflect on the art of film acting, and runs with it. Siegel could no doubt say a lot more on this subject, but what he does say was insightful and provocative. He gives us a little bit of history:

"It's time to talk about acting because acting as an art with a history of evolving styles--acting as a highly developed discipline that demands specialized training--almost never gets discussed. When it does you'll find vague references to the Method, the naturalistic style of acting imported from Russia into this country by Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio in the 1940s...But rarely is there mention of the fact that there were two antagonistic versions of the Method: Strasberg's emphasis on how actors should draw from their own experience to inhabit a character; and Stella Adler's insistence that actors must pay closer attention to the play's circumstances than to their own memories and emotions. Nor does anyone bother to observe that David Mamet has devised the only successful alternative to the Method...a style that consists of a high, though subtle, degree of deliberate artifice."

"Deliberate artifice"--that captures Mamet wonderfully. There's also this:

"[W]hat really revolutionized American acting wasn't the Method's naturalism. It was the emphasis Strasberg placed on facial expression....Strasberg believed that the essential instrument of an actor's creative expression was the face, and the result of his doctrine was to send generations of stage actors running to the camera from the stage, thus transforming the static, glamorous close-up of Bette Davis' day--in which the actor's face was motionless and timeless, existing for a moment outside the storyline--to the busy, emotive, and strategically timed close-up of today, in which the face and the camera work together to create thematic meaning and push the story forward. On stage, the hardest thing for an actor to do is to keep the emotion on his or her face after speaking the lines--the camera removes that hardship simply by moving off the face....To the extent that acting does seem more real today, it's because the camera moves so fast off the face that it shaves off any sliver of inauthenticity. When certain actors win the Oscar for best acting, they should thank the Lens and the Viewfinder, not Mom and Dad."

What a sharp observation--and perfectly true, when you think about it. Representing a story on a stage--or indeed, simply being a great story-teller--requires the ability to do more than speak lines and relate scenes; what is necessary is the ability to use those scenes, those words, to channel a whole mise-en-scene, a completely realized emotion, to the audience and hold it there, capturing the viewer in what's being said or done. Film can aid or undermine this kind of capacity in a variety of ways; I'd never thought about it in terms of how numerous takes are stitched together in order to create that captivating moment, but obviously a lot of what our contemporary film actors and actresses do is throw out one thing after another, until finally something sticks. A skill, surely....but is it the craft Siegel has in mind?

This line of thought leads to me wonder about those moments in certain movies when the director and performer put together a scene or two--usually simple ones, but not always--where real acting is on display: where the power or hilarity or wonder of the visual isn't due to the set-up (at least not very much), but really is a product of what the actor or actress is channeling. The result won't necessarily save a bad movie, but it usually infinitely improves what is around it--and for me at least, makes the performer's character utterly compelling. I can't take my eyes off him or her; if I'm watching a video or dvd, I replay scenes over and over; if it's something that comes on tv and I've seen it a hundred times I'll still watch it again, because the peculiar alchemy on the screen never fails to drag me in. For instance:

Kevin Spacey in L.A. Confidential
Holly Hunter in The Piano
Robert Duvall in Tender Mercies
Bill Murray in Rushmore
Michael Caine in Get Carter
Lauren Bacall in To Have and To Have Not
Toshiro Mifune in The Seven Samurai
Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot
Robert Shaw in Jaws
George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove
Orson Welles in A Touch of Evil
Jimmy Stewart in It's A Wonderful Life
Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca
Jean-Pierre Leaud in 400 Blows

I'm sure I could include many more if I thought about it. A lot of these are justly celebrated performances; others are either mostly forgotten or overshadowed by other moments in the performer's career. Indeed, not all of these films are especially great. But regardless, I could watch any of these movies over and over again, if only to be emotionally worked over by the scenes they include. Great acting, indeed.
Update: I went to bed after posting, and woke up having thought of a couple more to add. I realize that there are numerous classic performances that ought to be on this list just by virtue of critical acclaim: Siegel mentions Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront and Paul Newman in The Hustler. But maybe that's one of the mysteries of acting--even when you know it's happening, it doesn't necessarily happen to you. In the case of those two classics, for example, I don't find myself captivated, compelled to watch, as great as they admittedly are. But on the other hand...

Marlon Brando in The Godfather
Paul Newman in Nobody's Fool
Gong Li in Ju Dou
Richard Harris in Unforgiven
John Goodman in Barton Fink
Kathleen Turner in Peggy Sue Got Married
Robert De Niro in Brazil
Angela Bassett in What's Love Got to Do with It?

Anyway, no doubt I could go on and on...
posted by Russell Arben Fox at 3/2/2004 12:14:50 AM

 
Immigrants, Language, and Assimilation

Samuel Huntington, of the "clash of civilizations" fame, has written an article which applies some of his civilizational concerns to the U.S.; specifically, he's worried about "The Hispanic Challenge" which the flood of Spanish-speaking Mexicans and Latin Americans presents to America's identity. David Brooks has attacked Huntington's argument in the NYT; David Adensik and Matthew Yglesias both concur. I'm not sure they necessarily dispute any of the details which Huntington presents as part of his argument; David admits that he doesn't know "the first thing about demographics or immigration." Huntington presents a wealth of data (here, here, and here) to support his claim that this particular wave of immigrants--both legal and illegal--is larger and different from all previous waves, and certainly no one can dispute that many of our present-day struggles over education, inner cities, entry-level wages and so forth are to a significant degree functions of our complicated relationship with Mexican immigrant labor. Still, Huntington will no doubt receive a great deal of criticism for the article, primarily for exactly the reason David, Matt and Brooks don't care for it: they're troubled by the claim that English-speaking Americans possess a particular cultural accomplishment, that said accomplishment is irreconcilable with the Hispanic culture which the new immigrants are bringing with them, and that ultimately "Mexican Americans will share in [the American] dream and in that society only if they dream in English."

Brooks puts the complaint with making this a "cultural" issue this way: "Frankly, something's a little off in Huntington's use of the term 'Anglo-Protestant' to describe American culture. There is no question that we have all been shaped by the legacies of Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. But the mentality that binds us is not well described by the words 'Anglo' or 'Protestant.' We are bound together because we Americans share a common conception of the future. History is not cyclical for us. Progress does not come incrementally, but can be achieved in daring leaps. That mentality burbles out of Hispanic neighborhoods, as any visitor can see."

Nice, but unfortunately wrong, or at least significantly wrong. What Brooks is embracing here is a not uncommon version of civic nationalism, the idea that America (and maybe other countries too, but especially America, as we are "exceptional") is a modern construct, a nation of thought and feeling and commitment, a "future-oriented" and thus fundamentally open-ended experiment in identity--and consequently, the substance of American political and social life is infinitely pliable, not bounded by ethnic or religious or linguistic borders; all that matters is being a patriot (Brooks in particular mentions how Hispanics serve in the military--and die in military service--"at comparable rates" to the native-born) and accepting the intellectual content of our civic symbols: Lincoln for justice and equality, Jefferson for individual liberty, and so forth. This idea is really a transformation of culture--which should be properly understood in terms of what Hegel called Sittlichkeit, or in other words, an ethic embedded into a historical and situated life--into something purely ideological. It's the dream of many who wish to hold on to the idea of nationality and belonging, but don't want their belonging troubled by the idea that "belonging" may require more than a common desire to get ahead. This civic escape from the hard work of situating and belonging (of making all belonging into a Kantian Moralität, a principle rationally available to all humankind) has been thoroughly demolished by numerous thinkers (see David Miller, Charles Taylor, Bernard Yack, George Fletcher, Kai Nielsen, Neil MacCormick....just start here and here). To take specific issue with the matter of language...does Brooks actually believe that his "American" vision of the future--something that isn't "cyclical," but which leaps forward with "daring"--is perfectly translatable to any other tongue, any other cultural context, without any change in meaning? What kind of philosophy of language does he embrace? Surely, when this vision is spoken in a particular language, it entails a particular range of meanings, and for better or worse that range is altered (perhaps expanded, perhaps contracted, perhaps both along different dimensions) when it is put into a different linguistic field, with it's own range of historical antecedents and associations. I'm admittedly influenced by the work of Johann Gottfried Herder here, but that's just because his arguments make sense. Consider what this scholar wrote about Herder's (I think correct) grasp of language:

"[Herder's] doctrine denies that meanings or concepts are to be equated with the sorts of items, in principle autonomous of language, with which most of the philosophical tradition has equated them--for example, the objects to which they refer, Platonic "forms," or the "ideas" favored by the British empiricists [or the simple civic visions which Brooks assumes to be the sum total of the matter]--and equates them instead with usages of words [developed over history in a particular social context]....The argument is simple but compelling: Intuitively enough, thought is of its very nature conceptually articulated, articulated in terms of meanings. But now, if concepts or meanings just are usages of words, and grasping concepts or meanings hence is just being competent in usages of words, thought's essential dependency on and boundedness by linguistic competence...[is] both established and explained. Herder gives this argument in several places...[such as when he writes]: 'What exactly is the connection between language and mode of thought? Whoever surveys the whole scope of a language surveys a field of thoughts and whoever learns to express himself with exactness precisely thereby gathers for himself a treasure of determinate concepts. The first words that we mumble are the most important foundation stones of the understanding.'" (From "Herder's Philosophy of Language, Interpretation, and Translation: Three Fundamental Principles," The Review of Metaphysics 56 (December 2002), 341, 347.)

There is not necessarily any important political point here; only that, well, language matters--and hence, it is worth pondering the possible truth of Huntington's warning that "continuation of [Hispanic] immigration (without improved assimilation) could divide the United States into a country of two languages and two cultures...[and while such a transformation] would not necessarily be the end of the world, it would...be the end of the America we have known for more than three centuries." That's a real question, not one that can be ignored. Which is not to say that Huntington's framing of the question isn't weak--it is. Matt's basic objection to Huntington is correct (he writes that: "It's true that it often takes several generations before English fully displaces Spanish as the language of choice...[but] the same things were true of other large immigrant populations"); there's a xenophobic undercurrent to Huntington's specification of this wave of immigrants being a truly problematic wave as opposed to all previous ones. But still, neither are Huntington's basic premises incorrect. The English language spoken in the U.S. is by no means the sum total of American identity, but it is a vital part of it. America is a whole lot more than an "Anglo-Protestant" culture, but that doesn't mean that heritage can be completely dispensed in understanding how it is that our country perpetuates itself. Assimilation, in one sense or another, is a real issue, and a hard one, and easily disregarded by universalists of one stripe or another on both sides. When folks like Brooks say that being an American just boils down to having "a common conception of the future," he's dealing in platitudes that make it easier for xenophobes to justify themselves. And when folks like Huntington impose rigid civilizational lines on complicated questions like, for example, language assimilation, it makes it easier for liberals to think that "culture" needn't mean anything at all.
posted by Russell Arben Fox at 2/24/2004 10:26:21 AM

 
My Nader Mea Culpa

Hmmm. Chun the Unavoidable has defended Nader's decision to run for president. This has inspired a great and reflective sigh from Timothy Burke, wondering why Nader-voters, and nothing else, ignites his youthful, inner flamer. Eric Alterman is, of course, simply appalled--but not necessarily worried, for (as Todd Gitlin and Ryan Lizza both show), it seems that Nader's efforts this time around may be more farce than anything else. Still, Chun's frustration with what he labels (unfairly, I think, but not entirely inaccurately) as the sanctimonious efforts of some liberals to trash the very idea of voting for Nader rings a chord with me. Given that some of the participants here (Burke, Chun, Invisible Adjunct) are talented, passionate bloggers that I definitely wouldn't want to have on my case, I'm not sure I should expose myself this way, but...

It needs to be said: I happily wrote in Nader for president in 1996, and happily voted for him for president in 2000. Why? Did I think he would be elected president? Nope. Did I believe he would make a good president if he was? Not at all. Did I vote for him because I was a Green? Not really; I'm more a Christian Socialist, one of those socially conservative leftist communitarians (I believe there are four or five of us) that thought (and still think, by the way) that Gephardt would have made a fine president, and would have been an even better one if he hadn't flipped his position on abortion rights back in the 1980s. Well, did I vote for Nader because I like the idea of third parties making their mark on the electorate? Partly; I do in fact think that the more than century old Democrat/Republican institutional dominance of electoral campaigns is a bad thing. That said, I had no illusions that, for example, if Nader had gotten the magic 5% and received federal matching funds that the Green party would have overthrown the two-party system anytime soon. So then, did I vote for him because I'm a believer in generating revolutionary crises? Er, no.

What does that leave? Tim's accusation that I "think of a vote rather like the little gold stars that elementary school teachers give prize pupils, as a badge of their virtue," I'm afraid. Except that I have a somewhat different understanding of (civic) virtue than Tim, I think. Do end states matter? Of course. Are they all that matter? Of course not. Political life, as everyone from Aristotle to Arendt has taught us, is not full (and thus not fully empowering or fully worth its costs) if it is not at least partly an expressive act, a putting of oneself into the agora, a contribution to the appearance of the public, as it were. (One of the reasons I greatly fear that, as Chun believes, Kerry will be annihilated is that there is little or no expressivity behind his impending nomination at all; his support is built primary out of metaparanoia about how "other" voters--the mysterious swing voters, perhaps--will react when Doomsday arrives.) Is any of that an argument for not voting strategically? Not at all. An idea or ideal can be expressed relative to or in conjunction with any number of different institutional or long-range intentions. In my case, I didn't believe for a moment Nader's overblown claim that there was no real difference between Clinton and Dole, or Bush and Gore. But I did worry about trade, and globalism, and systematic poverty, and the power of corporations over our civic life. Are those the most important issues in the world? Perhaps not. Were either Clinton or Dole or Bush or Gore talking about any of them in a serious or constructive way in either 1996 or 2000? No, not really. So was it worth putting forward my two cents as a citizen, and signaling a concern for issues that otherwise were going to be treated cavalierly, at best? I think so.

My caveat, which you can take for whatever you think it's worth: I lived in Virginia in 1996 and 2000, and Bush was going to (and did) take that state easily. Would my thinking have been different if I'd lived in Florida, or Oregon, or Wisconsin? Possibly. Knowing what I know now (or at least think that I know now), post-9/11, post-Iraq, about Bush and Gore, do I wish I had voted differently in 2000? No, if for no other reason than the above Virginia residency caveat. If I'd voted the way I had and had lived in Florida at the time, would I now be wishing that I hadn't voted the way that I did? Absolutely. (Counter-factual enough for you?)

Incidentally, Nader has no appeal to me this time around. Different world, different concerns, different ideas and ideals to be expressed, different needs to be met. Ralph Nader may have been, arguably, a historically important vehicle of expression in the America of the 1990s. Given that he isn't even bothering with the Greens anymore, I can't see how he could possibly be so today.
posted by Russell Arben Fox at 2/23/2004 05:24:22 PM

 
Update to the Update (Talking Parenthood and (Relative) Poverty)

Laura is having a far more negative reaction to the Slate discussion of nannies and motherhood than I have had. Perhaps it's right that she does--after all, she's much closer to the environment which these writers (Caitlin Flanagan, Sarah Mosle, and Barbara Ehrenreich) inhabit than I am, and therefore is probably a lot more sensitive than I to the agendas lurking behind their words. Yesterday, I was pleased as punch to read Ehrenreich make what I thought was the crucial point about class in this whole discussion: that employing nannies simply enables upper-class mothers to abstain from the real struggle for decent childcare for all. But Laura has thrown a wet blanket on my thinking, and maybe she's right to do so:

"Good childcare for everyone would be nice. But I am not sure what it would look like. I've never seen it myself. My kids have been in okay situations that have not harmed them in any way, but they've only been there part time. Even if childcare was free for all, I don't think I would use it full time, but that's just me. I would like a little more childcare, more opportunities to work part time, a chance to return a full time career in a couple years, and more respect from feminists like Ehrenreich for my work at home."

Maybe Laura is misreading Ehrenreich; maybe she isn't. Ehrenreich, waving her old-fashioned (or is it?) feminist flag, does claim that:

"Our goal as 'old libbers'...was to share the childcare and housework among the adults in the household, boyfriends and husbands included. We lost on that one, or gave up the battle, or whatever...[W]hen women moved into the workforce, men never picked up on their share of the domestic work--and, speaking as a total fool for anyone under 3 feet tall, I would add domestic pleasures....[Don't] confuse feminism, which is a political movement, with the movement of (upper-middle-class) women into the workforce. There's a connection, of course: Feminist activism helped open up the professions to women, and many young female aspirants to the professions were feminists. But they're not the same thing. Feminism is not a particular lifestyle, defined by having your own job and checking account, for example. It is a moral stance and one that has always valued the stay-at-home mothers just as much as the corporate strivers. Hence, for example, the feminist resistance (coming from NOW and not just from lefties like me) to welfare reform in the mid-'90s. We felt poor women, like affluent women (and ideally men too), should have the option of staying home with their kids--that the work of caring and nurturing should be valued just as much as flipping burgers, sorting inventory, or cleaning offices at night."

See, I think this is strong, smart stuff. But it is also, of course, not a little revisionist and rigid. For NOW and other "old libbers" did, in fact, mock and deride the (often, but not always, socially conservative) women who chose to give up careers and activism for the sake of their children; Ehrenreich is correct to claim that feminism is a moral position, concerned with delivering autonomy to women in all positions in society, but it's a little rich to claim--especially when we look at the actual life choices of the sort of nanny-employing women who write books like Flanagan's!--that there hasn't ever been a presumption against child-rearing as a truly "liberated" form of empowerment. There is a sort of class bias present in their writing which Laura picks up on, a bias which discriminates, now that I think about it, against exactly the sort of off-the-clock, "slacker," give-up-on-ambition-and-submit-to-the-rhythms-of-ordinary-life parenting which Laura and I have praised. Laura has employed sitters, she's used daycare, she's seen elite nanny-centered families up close, and wants to be able to say that compromises in one's own life and family duties shouldn't be a badge of shame. And she's right: agonizing over how one should treat one's nanny, or how one can better argue for "universal" childcare, or how we can (as Mosle concludes) turn this all into a campaign to bring systematic reforms to the low-wage labor (i.e., nanny) market, hides some fundamental rationalizations; in Laura's words, a basic "unwillingness to take on even a part of the boring, messy business of watching kids." They avoid more simple questions, like (Laura again): "Is it worth it? Could one parent work less hours, make less money, and have less childcare?" And Laura's invective, even if I don't entirely agree with it, reminds me that such questions are, when it comes to dealing with you and your child (which is really what any debate over nannies or childcare should be about!), far more important than any others.

As I said before, we've never employed a nanny, because we've never needed to, wanted to, or been able to afford to even if the need or want was there. My wife has worked as a "sitter" (to use Laura's term), and she's seen the weird kind of envy, resentment, dependency, and judgments which follow from being, or being forced, to turn away for the length of a workday from one's own kids. So I've got no patience with those who rationalize and agonize from their upper and upper-middle class perches. But I still like what Ehrenreich has to say, because even if she's oblivious to how her position and attitude may compromise her message, at least she's sending it out. It's a message that gets at the heart of the issue of autonomy and equality, themes which I tend to think about philosophically, but which have a real practical edge to them as well. In a world of competition and material structures, there are ingrained patterns of inequality and dependency; some (the wealthy, the majority, the culturally dominant) have more autonomy than others. Figuring out how to redress that inequality is hard, much harder than simple redistribution of resources and opportunities (though that obviously helps!). I tend to read political contests and trends in light of these abiding, class-based, culturally manifest patterns, and I'm delighted when I see someone else discovering them in the context of otherwise unnoticed social phenomena (like in the maintenancece of public museums, or in this case, in the issue of childcare). I read Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed as soon as it came out, and thought she'd expressed so much truth so well. But to be sure, there were limits to the "truth" she was able to put into those pages. A concern for the institutionalized socio-economic patterns which exploit many does not translate into a complete sympathy for those exploited, or a complete understanding of the ways in which people may be "empowered." For example, I remember that Ehrenreich, towards the end of that book, allowed that it wasn't the case that the working poor with whom she'd spent several months were simply inhuman, oppressed machines; they carved out lives for themselves in the midst of exploitation. She mentioned that she'd known a fellow housecleaner who'd written a science fiction novel in her spare time. I wanted follow up: did Ehrenreich ever read it? Was it any good? Was it fan-fic, or what? Did Ehrenreich just take this information and file it away, or did she ever consider maybe entering into her coworker's social or imaginary world, validating and enriching it through her contributions? I doubt it; in all likelihood, her coworker's economic condition is all that mattered.

Poverty and deprivation of all forms is bad; I know that. And I know the solution must involve something larger than just paying nannies better wages; and I'm a fan of anyone who helps reveal the structures and social obstacles behind the wage which should be our real targets. But targeting those structures, class-based though they may be, is not simply a matter of economics; it is a matter of how (and if) we can achieve humane autonomy and recognition. Dependency takes many forms besides financial; conversely, empowerment can happen many places besides at work. It can happen in one's imagination, it can happen at home, and it can (and should!) most definitely happen with one's kids. We shouldn't ever shy away from the hard issue of labor exploitation in the home--to say nothing of how we husbands contribute to such!--but Laura was right to indirectly remind me that, should we (as perhaps these women do) frame that exploitation in ways which internalize our own perspective ("oh what can we, the sort of women who already prefer the sort of arrangements which entail employing nannies, do to make our preferences just?"), then our solutions to it will be limited indeed.
posted by Russell Arben Fox at 2/19/2004 10:23:05 AM

 
Update

I hope you're following the Slate discussion of Caitlin Flanagan's article about nannies and parenthood, which I mentioned below. Because if you aren't, you're missing the comments of Barbara Ehrenreich, and damn, is that woman right about so many things:

"In the golden days of the feminist second wave, our moral vision included high-quality childcare for all. What makes this 'nanny war' talk seem a little precious to me is that only about 20 percent of Americans are in any position to contemplate employing a nanny; the rest are scrambling for other, often group, forms of childcare....One thing that really bothers me about the nanny trend—in addition to the exploitation of so many nannies—is that it has removed the upper-middle class from the struggle for decent, universal childcare, just as the turn to private schools has removed them from the struggle to upgrade our public schools."
posted by Russell Arben Fox at 2/18/2004 11:29:59 AM

 
Nannies and Autonomy

Laura over at Apt. 11D has spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks asking questions, and seeking answers, about the household economy, about who does the laundry, about fathers and mothers and others raising kids today. Frequently, in the midst of all these posts, she's pointed us to an article by Caitlin Flanagan (not available online, unfortunately) in the latest Atlantic Monthly. The article in question, "How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement," takes a hard, painful look and the divide between working mothers and stay-at-home mothers, and how it has come to seem necessary--indeed, almost expected--for the former group to make use of nannies and domestic help in order to enjoy the benefits of the women's movement. Not a new story, of course, but well told, just the same: in the modern world, too often the material autonomy of women--who are and, until genetic technology outstrips us all, will remain the members of our species who actually bear children--depends not upon some mighty transformation of the marriage relationship (as necessary as that might be), but rather upon low-wage workers to change the baby's diapers and generally care for it, in some cases practically full-time. For enlightened liberal women, this arrangement is a scandal, albeit one that no one is comfortable talking about.

There's a lot my wife could say about this--we've never had a nanny (couldn't afford it, and never desired one anyway), but she worked as one for a while; even took our two children along with her when she tended someone else's. For the time being, I will note two things. First, an interview with Flanagan is online here. Read it: Flanagan has many challenging and difficult things to say, about her own choices and those of others, about how her reliance on nannies made her part of an exploitive economy, about her envy of traditional (even fundamentalist Christian) mothers who give themselves over to creating loving environments for their children, and about her reluctant acknowledgement that, envy aside, she could never do that: as much as she loves her children, the idea of being a full-time mom scares her to death.

Second, I'll put on my philosopher's hat, and note that the uncomfortable dependency that modern autonomy has on the servitude of others is not only not a new discovery, but one covered in detail by one of the most discomforting thinkers of all time: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who was pretty pathetic in the child-rearing department as well, for what it's worth). He writes: "What! Can liberty be maintained only with the support of servitude? Perhaps. The two extremes meet. Everything that is not in nature has its drawbacks, and civil society more so than all the rest. There are some unfortunate circumstances where one's liberty can be preserved only at the expense of someone else's, and where the citizen [substitute: mother] can be perfectly free only if the slave [substitute: nanny] is completely enslaved." (The Social Contract, Book 3, Chp. 15) Rousseau was talking about the way we delegate authority, the way we turn away from autonomy, because we refuse to countenance slavery. His point, however, was simply that being autonomous in a world of material dependency requires the constant exercise of that autonomy, and never letting it slide: if that means we need to find serfs to do the shit work, well...Rousseau isn't defending such an arrangement; he's just telling it like it is. Flanagan's moral sensitivity is greater than Rousseau's was, I'll warrant, but still: I'm sure she'd take the point.
Update: I've just discovered that Slate is running an online discussion between Sara Mosle, Barbara Ehrenreich and Caitlin Flanagan herself, discussing Flanagan's article, here. I'll be checking it out all week. According to Mosle, Flanagan is "an odd breed politically--a conservative on social issues and a liberal on economic ones, at a time when it's popular to be the opposite on both." Hurrah! That makes, oh, I don't know, about eight of us. Now I have to read more of Flanagan's stuff.
posted by Russell Arben Fox at 2/17/2004 05:11:54 PM

 
AFOE Update

I've posted a couple of pieces over at AFOE: a long one on James C. Bennett's recent discussion of the rise of "network commonwealths," and a short comment, via Stanely Hauerwas, on the value of a socially "established" religious environment, particularly in connection to education. Check 'em out.
posted by Russell Arben Fox at 2/17/2004 10:28:16 AM

 
Blogs and Blogging

A few quick introductions, and an announcement. Some folks I know have taken up blogging recently, and three more different blogs than these you're not likely ever to find linked together in one post. (That's one thing I'm especially grateful for in my life: a wide variety of intelligent, opinionated, and sympathetic friends.) First up, Matt Stannard's The Underview. Matt is a debate coach (and a very successful one) at the University of Wyoming; he is also an old and dear friend, a committed Marxist and radical thinker, who was at least as responsible (if not more so) than anyone else for my engagement in things political and philosophical. I always had those leanings, I suppose, but knowing Matt back at BYU in the early 1990s, watching him and learning from him as he protested the first Gulf War, articulated intelligent critiques of power structures all around us, and (as the years past) went through some very difficult times of his own, gave me inspiration, energy and direction. I've since veered off in a different direction than the one Matt and I were both on back in the day (and maybe he's veered a little too), but I'm as anxious as ever to hear what he has to say. I trust that sooner or later the rest of the strong left/socialist blogosphere will stumble across his writing, and stand up and take notice.

Rob Fergus is also an old friend from BYU (he and Matt and I actually all worked on an underground student newspaper together), and his politics are also much more radical than mine--and as with Matt, I like hearing what he has to say, because it keeps me on my toes, and helps me get to the heart of things. I don't know how much politics will appear on his blog, Urban Birdscapes, but I do hope a little sneaks in here and there. Rob is a dedicated environmentalist, and is very interested in turning critiques of our social and material economy into plans of action to help create more sustainable environments, for us and all our fellow creatures (particularly, if you couldn't guess, birds). One of these days I have to get down to Texas and go birdwatching with Rob. Until then, I'll just read his blog.

Coming from a very different point of view, Julie Sorrell is one of my graduate students here at ASU, and it's a delight to regularly read up on her thoughts at her blog, Julie's Cafe. Julie is a homemaker who has decided, now that her kids are (mostly) grown, to return to school and engage the world in a new and different way. Her mind has been set on fire by political ideas and international conflicts, particularly the war in Iraq. She's quite conservative, witty, fast thinking, at times sentimental but more often cynical (but in a good way), and willing to push her ideas as far as they will take her. (Not many women returning to school for the first time in over a decade would throw themselves into politics of the Middle East and Islamic culture.) Show your support, and stop by regularly.

Oh, and the announcement? I'll be guest blogging at A Fistful of Euros for the next week or so. I'll link whatever I write there on this page. If you're not reading AFOE, you should be.
posted by Russell Arben Fox at 2/16/2004 09:12:46 AM

 
Slackerdom, Religion, Temporality, and the Kids

Laura is asking about raising kids and the role of fathers in the home; Harry Brighouse is asking about the ways in which one can raising "counter-culture" kids--and whether religious believers (specifically American evangelical Christians) have something to teach secular liberals in this regard. In many ways, I think they are looking at the same thing: namely, how can you prevent the "outside" (the economy, the office, social expectations, what's on tv) from dominating what you're trying to do with your family and your children on the "inside"? Harry, to his great credit, isn't being suckered in the usual liberal nostrums of making sure your kids watch PBS instead of something else: he's willing to take on television entirely. Laura, meanwhile, urges her girlfriends to avoid careerist types, and marry the slackers: "They might not make senior partner, but they'll make your dinner and play with the kids. You might not be able to afford a house in a town with a good school district, but so what? He's made lasagna for dinner." As someone who just praised "slackerdom," how could I disagree?

Keep up with Harry's and Laura's comments, as I'm sure there is going to be plenty of good ideas and good arguments tossed around. But I'd like to make a more theoretical point, which may connect a couple of, I think, very important concerns. Harry's inquiry into parenting shows a lot of sympathy of religious believers, and their well-documented ability to create a rival--and, Harry acknowledges, in many ways better, especially when it comes to raising children--culture all their own. What is it that I see "slacking"--in the sense of being turned off by the world's fairly obvious agenda of, as Harry put it, "manipulat[ing our] children into bugging [us] for more toys, more fast food, more candy, more, more, more"--and "believing"--in the sense of being attuned and committed to something literally not of this world--as having in common? Well, perhaps not very much, sociologically speaking. But one thing I have noticed, in regard to which believers very much are "slackers," if not vice versa, is their attachment--or perhaps detachment--from time.

By time I don't mean simply the limits they may place on their own or their children's use of time, but the sense of time, or temporality, itself. As a lot of insightful people--like Charles Taylor and Sheldon Wolin, among others--have observed, modernity is significantly a function of a single dominant tempo, or pace: all the world is on the clock, and we need to fill up all this empty temporal space (through acquiring, improving, progressing, etc.) before our time is up. Religious believers, especially those labeled (rightly or wrongly) as "fundamentalists," have a different attitude: they believe that "time" might actually end, that there's a judgment awaiting us, that we are always being held accountable in light of those ends, and not by anything temporal. (I should note that I would not be considered a "fundamentalist" by any but the most stringent secularist criteria, but that's not to say I don't have a fair amount of sympathy for them.) As a result, such believers are actually well equipped (theoretically speaking) to challenge the dominance of a timetable which is indistinguishable from the marketplace itself--always racing forward, always revising itself, always fallible, yet always improving, addicted to the newest, busiest, most "progressive" (read: technological) thing. Of course, environmentalists and Marxists and all sorts of others resist this kind of measurement--but do they actually have a sense of a different temporal order, a sense of where they came from and where they are going, that will empower them to step outside the material(istic) world, to "slack off," to say, as Christians like myself often say (and try fervently to believe), "take no thought for the morrow"? We all have our beliefs, our myths. But can they withstand peer pressure, commercial pressure, cultural marginalization? I'm grateful for my faith, because even though it isn't nearly strong enough, it helps me be content with what I've got, focus on my children, and get off the clock.

To put this in more philosophical terms, here's what I wrote on this subject some years ago, with some interjections (it's not available anywhere online, but you can buy the book that contains this essay here):

"On the one hand, the modern worldview has allowed its harmonized temporality and deliberate inclusion of difference to shape pluralistic and liberating public habits...; on the other hand, this slow but sure replacing of any belief in ends with [modern] fallibilistic presumptions has left us unmoved or uninvolved in substantive, collective rituals, leaving us all...open to an impersonal, automatic temporal acceleration against which we only have weak, individualistic myths to keep us secured....[Sheldon] Wolin suggests that in the midst of what is essentially a temporal dilemma [wherein we have little or no time which is our own, to think or act fundamentally or counter-culturally], something old must be invoked: not a new revolution, for revolution has already been appropriated into a commercial myth [borderless neoliberal capitalism's appropriation of the rhetoric of global empowerment, anyone?], but rather something collective and ritualistic and unexpected: something, perhaps, like belief." ("Can Theorists Make Time For Belief?" in Vocations of Political Theory, pg. 106).
posted by Russell Arben Fox at 2/10/2004 12:19:03 PM

 
Generation X Walked...

Kevin Drum asked a seemingly simple question, and opened up a floodgate: why don't kids walk to school anymore? (He cites his own observations, as well as a study showing that less than 1/3 of kids between the ages of 5 and 15 who live within a mile of their school walk or bike.) The responses were numerous and revealing: fear of crime (real, sometimes, but mostly imagined), poorly designed neighborhoods without sidewalks, loss of cross-walk guards and other services, heavy backpacks, addiction to driving, overprotectiveness, insanely busy schedules, obesity and laziness, two-career families for whom the drive to school is the only real opportunity for parents to interact with their children one-on-one, and so forth. Any one of these is worth picking up on and thinking about at length. (Keiran Healy uses the question as an opportunity to revisit the empirical complications of the "tipping-point" phenomenon.) Lots of good thinking all around.

What I personally found most interesting was the flavor of many of the comments on Kevin Drum's site. Kevin's crowd is very much a liberal Democratic one, yet again and again, if you read them closely, you can see language straight out of the conservative playbook: "times have changed," "kids today don't know how to play," "things really were different back then," "it's a changed world," etc., etc. Some of the commentators try to tie this into their general anti-Republican political orientation (blaming it on SUV addiction, or Bush's culture of fear, or some such thing), but most just let their complaints stand alone mournfully.

I can sympathize, and I wonder at the sociodemographics at play here. Some people like to make a big deal out the (ambiguous) evidence that younger people are turning conservative; others mock--or are appalled by--the very idea. I can't speak for the youth of America, and I wouldn't want to put such a broad label as "conservative" on whatever ideological transitions are taking place out there anyway. But there was a time when I--born in 1968, grew up in the 70s and, yes, walked or biked to school almost every day--fiddled with writing an essay titled "When Generation X Sends its Kids to School." Not surprisingly, I started thinking about this when our oldest daughter, Megan (now 7), started kindergarten, and Melissa and I felt ourselves surrounded, overwhelmed, by advice and strategy and counsel about how best to educate our little girl, and how to keep her productive and safe, and which schools would offer what and how much, and what we should fear and how we could be ready to overcome or circumvent it. We felt baffled and distracted. A lot of it was our own doing, of course--first child going off to school and all that. There was a fair amount of class and regional anxiety involved too (lower-middle-class family, breadwinner just out of graduate school, leaving Washington D.C. for a one-year position in Mississippi, of all places). But above and beyond it all, there was something down deep that Melissa and I both felt: that the education of children in America--both in and out of school--has become in the public mind a very big, very important, very delicate, very nerve-wracking affair, when really, it probably shouldn't be. This is not to ignore the very real problem of failing schools or dangerous neighborhoods or anything else; we we're fully aware of that. But the high-pressure, time-sensitive, goal-oriented world of today's public schools felt very odd to us, and not a little bit wrong.

I realize that this is much too heavy-handed a generational stereotype, but maybe those in their 30s today remember a time when neighborhoods were (more or less) intact enough, and teachers were (more or less) trusted enough, and the streets were (more or less) safe enough, and families were (more or less) stable enough, to allow children--namely, us--larger amounts of time, space, and responsibility. Bike to school. Be home by dark. Catch the bus downtown. Climb a tree. And so forth. This sensibility doesn't drive any kind of "conservatism," necessarily, but it does, for many of us at least, solidify a real discontent we have with a social world that (for economic and cultural reasons) has been so mercilessly measured and surveyed and risk-assessed. Not long before our experience with Megan, I'd read David Brooks's extremely depressing (for me) article on "The Organization Kid"--the child of baby boomers who has been prepped and watched over and groomed to excel. Heavy backpacks and programmed time with the parents forms the basis of this type of person's interaction with the world. The parents of my generation, on the other hand--the older siblings, perhaps, of those who rebelled (my dad listened to Elvis in high school, not the Beatles)--somehow missed out on the need to change the world, and the micromanagement it (not doubt unintentionally) entails. And they raised us to be slackers. A bad thing? In some ways. But if I can somehow make sure my daughters have the power and opportunity to slack off--to find their own way, make their own mistakes, develop their own little world, perhaps all while taking the time to walk to school--in the midst of this high-pressure, paranoid world, I'll feel that I've done some good.

Incidentally, Megan has yet to walk to school; we've always lived too far away from her building. And thanks to strapped budgets and tax cuts and that old tipping point phenomenon, the minimal bus service the districts we've lived in have provided would have required her to be out of house down on the corner by 7:00am. So again, it's not like my, and other Gen X-type's, sensibilities necessarily require typical small-government-conservative positions. On the contrary, I want more and better bus service, upkeep of the sidewalks, and planned neighborhoods. In the face of change, to conserve something precious--like "slacking"--takes money and collective effort. So again, in so many ways, if this is "conservatism," it's a new kind under the sun.
posted by Russell Arben Fox at 2/4/2004 09:30:36 AM