Bitch. Ph.D.

It is rumored that the Dept. of Labor is considering rolling back the Family and Medical Leave Act. That's the law that lets you take *unpaid* leave to care for a baby or sick family member without fearing you'll lose your job.

Go. Read this post for more information, and then do what it says:

Write Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.  Her address is:

Elaine Chao
U.S. Department of Labor
200 Constitution Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20210

Write your Senators and Representative.  Even though the proposed changes are regulatory, not legislative, your elected officials can put pressure on the Department of Labor if they hear that this is a big deal to their constituents.  While you're at it, you might ask them to cosponsor the Healthy Families Act, which would guarantee workers 7 days of paid sick leave.

If you are a business owner who supports FMLA, your voice is especially needed.  The Administration is going to claim that these changes are business-friendly.  If you think that these changes are bad policy, if you think they'll encourage employees to take more leave than they need, if you've managed fine under the current system, please speak up.   Write Chao, write your elected officials, but also write the Chamber of Commerce and similar organizations and tell them your story.

PK: Mama, can we kill Boo?*
Me: No. Because killing people is wrong.
PK (angry): No! That isn't why!
Me: ??
PK: We can't kill Boo because she isn't real. And also, because she is only a person in a movie.
Me: Oh. You are asking a practical question.
PK: What does practical mean?
Me: Well, when you say, "can we kill Boo?" you could be asking a practical or a moral question. A practical question means, is it possible? And the answer is, no, because she isn't real. A moral question is, is it right or wrong? And the answer is no, because killing is wrong.
PK: Ok. Can I hit the cat?
Me: Practially speaking? Yes, you make a fist and hit her, like this (hitting the chair). Morally speaking? No. Because it is mean.
PK: And also she doesn't like it.
Me: That too.
PK: And she will scratch me.
Me: Now, that's a practical issue again.


*Boo is the little girl in Monsters Inc.

Conversation this morning, overheard:

Mr. B.: Pseduonymous kid, did you cut the bottom off this toothpaste tube?
Pseudonymous kid: Yes.
Mr. B, patiently: Ok. Why?
Pseudonymous kid: I wanted to see inside, and find out how it works.

Moral of the story? Do not turn your back on kids, ever. Of course, it could be worse: pseudonymous kid could have decided to go for a little drive.

Actually, I kind of wish he would. I have grading to do this afternoon, and it is too cold to go out, and (speaking of bathrooms) he has a stomach bug so he's not at school, but he's also not quite sick enough to really stay in bed, so he's hassling me. Supposedly it's going to snow. Again. Apparently, however, it is actually warm in Montreal. Maybe we should move to Canada not only for the nice liberal welfare state, but also for the weather.

Ok. Must get to that grading now....

Ala the Rude Pundit

Boyfriend: You are one of those liberal progressives I've heard about. Aren't you?
Me: Yeah, but don't report me or they'll send me to Gitmo
Boyfriend: You probably speak Spanish too, Attorney General Gonzales will get you. You know he's Hispanic?
Me: A little Spanish, yes
Me: So am I Hispanic, technically
Me: Plus, I own a tortilla press
Boyfriend: Like you know how to use it any more than the Attorney General does.
Me: Well, this is true. But I have a Diana Kennedy cookbook, and I'll get on that any day now
Boyfriend: Recipe: Two tablespoons Geneva Convention, place in tortilla press, smash like a motherfucker.

Pretty hard. In 2000, 87% of U.S. counties had no abortion provider, and 86 of 276 metropolitan areas didn't, either. I once lived in a city that had the only clinic in the entire state. This means, of course, that if you need or want an abortion, you may well have to travel. Of course, we know that there are places that mandate waiting periods to "think over" your decision. So, if you live somewhere where there isn't a clinic, you have to travel to the city where the clinic is, have an appointment, go stay in a hotel overnight, go back for your abortion, and then either travel home immediately after the procedure or stay in a hotel again for at least one night. Pricey, and inconvenient: you gotta take time off work, you gotta pay for the travel and the hotel room, what if you're living with your parents or someone else (a husband) who you can't or won't tell? Maybe they're abusive or something, who knows. So you have to drum up some excuse for going out of town for 3 or 4 days. Good luck with that.

And, of course, we don't want to provide emergency contraception, because that, too, would make it too easy.

Well, we're they're aiming to make it even more difficult, folks. Because, of course, people whose lives are complicated enough that the expenses or inconvenience of a trip out of town are enough to block them having an abortion are in the best position to raise children. Anyway, now the idea, I guess, is to shame the cheap hotels where women stay for these trips, or possibly sue them if the clinic provides followup nursing care (you know, having someone there in case you have a complication, or are in pain) on the grounds that they're allowing medical practices to happen in an unlicensed facility or some crap like that.

So let's just clarify. La Quinta Inn won't actually tell women they can't stay there. But it is telling the clinic that it can't let women know that the hotel exists in its promotional literature, or provide nurses for them after their procedures.

Fine. If they don't want women's business, they won't have mine.

I'm surfing the web as pseudonymous kid is settling down; we've read his books, watched an episode of "Mr. Bean" (Mr. B. brought it home, pseudonymous kid thinks it's hilarious), talked a bit, now it's lights out. PK is kind of looking over my shoulder as I chitty-chat with a friend. I surf over to Salon. About halfway down the page there's a little thumbnail of Buster the Bunny accompanying this story, about that PBS-pulling-the-Buster-cartoon-because-it-has-the-gays-in-it thing.

Pseudonymous kid: Wait, that's Buster!
Me: Yeah, it is.
PK: Why is there a picture of Buster there?
Me: Well, it's a news story about a cartoon of Buster.
PK: Why is Buster in the news?
Me (thinking, how do I explain this? We have friends who are gay parents and friends who are lesbian parents. So far, pseudonymous kid doesn't think this is remarkable. How do I introduce the idea of homophobia here?): Well, there was a cartoon they decided not to show, because some people didn't like it.
PK: Why? What was in it?
Me (taking a deep breath): Ok. In the cartoon, Buster goes on vacation. And he meets some other kids, and those kids have two mamas or two papas. And some people don't like that, so they don't want kids to see it. Isn't that silly?
PK: Well, what if I want to see it?

And that, my friends, is what is wrong with censoring the Buster cartoon. My kid damnwell wants to see it.

The little shit drew all over the bathroom counter with a sharpie marker this afternoon.

On the up side, the bathroom counter was pretty ugly.

This stupid, lying speech has really upset me. I went to work today because I had to teach. And the whole time I was standing in front of the class, I was having a major anxiety attack: restless, pacing, wanting to run, nausea, vertigo. I think my depressive catatonia back in November had more to do with the election than I realized. It feels personally threatening, and yet I feel powerless to do anything about it. And I really hate the hysteria of internalizing a political problem like this. I came home immediately after my last class and went to bed, where I've been working on this post all afternoon. I can't finish it, because it is just too depressing. Help me with links and I'll update it, write a conclusion, and repost the finished product.

You know what? I hate hyperbolic political rhetoric. But I can't avoid it any more: we are in real danger of fascism here. Maybe we're already there. Demonizing intellectuals? Check. Demonizing liberalism? Check. Demonizing imaginary communists? Check. Demonizing urbanites? Check. Eroding civil liberties? Check. Emotional appeals that trump or fictionalize fact and reasoned argument? Check. Invoking traditional values? Check. Constructing an imaginary bucolic past? Check. War? Check. Endless, unwinnable war against an abstract concept? Check. Privatizing social security? Check. Destroying the middle class? Check. Entrenchment of a small, elite, ruling class? Check. Exalting militarized masculinity? Check. Hatred of homosexuals? Check. Women = sentimental symbols of war, Kinder, Küche, Kirche? Check.

So yeah, I watched the SotU speech last night. I didn't want to, but I did. And I remembered why, for the first couple years after the first election, whenever that man came on the radio or the tv I switched it off. Listening to him lie and push for his catastrophic proposals makes me feel furious, impotent, and despairing. If Bush destroys social security and revamps health insurance (sorry, I can't find the link I want, I'll fix this when I do, but Update: link found, see second link in this sentence) the plan is to have taxpayers set up "health savings accounts" and get rid of the deduction for employers who provide health insurance--in other words, as with social security, to promote the "ownership society" by shifting economic costs and risks onto individuals. Remember the last time you had to COBRA your own health insurance? How expensive it was? Yeah, having us all insure ourselves as individuals is a great plan), we're gonna turn into Venezuela, I swear: a tiny elite of extremely wealthy people, and the vast majority of us so unprotected from shifts in fortune that all the middle-class shit we take for granted now--retirement, being able to see a doctor, sending kids to college--will be impossible. Welcome to impoverishing the country, people. Shit, it makes my personal pet issue of reproductive rights seem almost irrelevant: what's the fucking point of fighting for women's right to middle-class norms of autonomy and independence if no one is middle-class any more?

But I thought, "I can't blog this, because I don't really have anything coherent to say about it, I'm not a great analyist, there are other places where people will do a better job of breaking down the bullshit in that speech." Also because listening to that crap, I swear, makes me feel absolutely helpless. Have you seen The Pianist? Leaving aside the implication that I'm comparing Bush to Hitler, which I'm not, what struck me when I saw that movie was the way that it addressed the question of "why did people go along with this?" Because each incremental change is something that, as individuals, we feel powerless to do anything about. There's a scene where the comfortably bourgeois Jewish family is discussing the new law requiring all Jews to wear armbands. A couple of them declare they'll never do it. A couple are frightened. But, in the end, they do wear the armbands. What can you do? You can bitch, you can protest. But you'll do what you're required to do, in the end. And part of the problem is that, with the comforts of being bourgeois, of being civilized, it's impossible to imagine things degenerating past a certain point: you're immobilized by incredulity.*

Anyway, so then I ran into this post at Crooked Timber: Will you go bankrupt before Social Security?, which boiled down my fear and shock into a couple of nice paragraphs. The rest of the post is wordier and less powerful, and as usual (what is it with the people who comment over there?) the comment thread degenerates into a bunch of blame-the-victim bullshit about people who don't manage their money well, but these two paragraphs are great:

"In his push for Social Security privatization choice personal accounts abolition, George Bush is raising the prospect that, some time around 2050, Social Security will go bankrupt. This claim has been refuted quite a few times, so let me raise a different answer.

If you’re a young working-age American, don’t routinely pay your credit card balance(s) down to zero each month, and don’t have top-flight health insurance, it’s odds-on, based on recent experience1 that you’ll go bankrupt at some point."

And how likely will it be that you'll be financially ruined if your employer doesn't provide health insurance and your government doesn't provide social security? Fait accompli. Welcome to the new American order: endless war, but who gives a rat's ass, because we're all too fucking poor and disenfranchised to care about anything beyond our own survival.

*Of course, the answer is, we can't let ourselves be immobilized. We need to push the Democrats to obstruct and fight, we need to work on the midterm elections, and we need to make a big fat stink so that even the Republicans worry about reelection. But emotionally, I can sure understand why people just freeze.

The scene: Mama is reading the new New Yorker. This is a rare event, as usually they pile up, unread, but for some reason Mama has her down time shit together this evening, and is eschewing the internet. Having told several stories of a mouse plumber who happens to also be a kid--a kid mouse plumber, not a grownup--and having also told a story of Hermione and Harry Potter ("make Hermione sick, Mama"), and having read New Year Be Coming (a favorite kids' book, with nice illustrations--check it out), Mama is feeling like a good Mama who deserves to read the New Yorker in peace.

Pseudonymous kid: Mama, put on this blindfold and close your eyes.
Mama (complying, good-naturedly): Ok.

The blindfold doesn't really cover Mama's eyes, so she peeks underneath and continues to read her magazine. Pseudonymous kid goes off, doing something with some toys. Expecting some kind of clever surprise, Mama contentedly keeps reading Louis Menand's discussion of the movie biz. Time passes.

Pseudonymous kid: Mama, I figured out how to throw this ball with this slingshot thing.
Mama (expecting to be unblindfolded to observe this new, somewhat naughty, skill): Oh?
Pseudonymous kid: Yeah, it's neat.

Pseudonymous kid continues to play. A few more minutes pass.

Mama: Pseudonymous kid, why am I wearing this blindfold?
Pseudonymous kid: I don't know.

Am I a traitor to the cause if I say that Daddy Zine is my favorite mommy blog?

Original parental intention (ca. 2002): Our kid would choose to enjoy organic vegetables due to our careful nurturing.

Current working solution (ca. 2005): We generally offer our kid a choice of a number of healthy and perhaps less healthy foods; she tends to choose the one closest in spirit to macaroni.

What makes it into the blog (2/1/2005): An anecdote about making my kid and her friends pink pancakes for lunch!

What an incautious reader might assume: This guy feeds his kid crap! And writes self-absorbed drivel re: same!

What I may have intended: Hey, sympathetic reader, how about that incongruous gap between idealism and praxis in attentive parenting?

There it is, in a nutshell: if you talk about the incongruity of your own life, some readers will get it, others will judge you as a hypocrite, a narcissist, a fraud. We can shut up, and perpetuate the true hypocrisy of pretending no gap exists between ideal and praxis, or we can speak the truth of our own experiences, relying on the sympathetic readers to bolster our sense of humanity.