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Well, I end the year with a mea culpa: I should have read the New Republic piece about Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat before piping up to defend him. But even after doing so, I agree most with this part of what one of the scholars who initially questioned the veracity of Rosenblat's memoir said: "The most tragic part is that [Herman's] embellishments have no impact at all on the essence of the story of his suffering. ... He invented a love story to go with it. I am not excusing him for doing this—of course this could be a false memory incident—but I am cautioning a note of sadness as opposed to some of the 'gotcha' things that are floating around.''
Noreen raises a good question about what in the world Mrs. Rosenblat was thinking all this time. It was after being shot in a robbery in the '90s that her husband apparently woke up from a dream featuring his mother and only then started telling people this wild story about how she had chucked apples over the fence for him to eat when he was a prisoner in a concentration camp. Was he shot in the head in this robbery or what? (Seriously. Did the shooting impair him cognitively or otherwise unhinge him?) Was his wife going along with this fabrication to cover for him? How did their friends and family react? Her family, if she had any, had to have known all along that the story wasn't true. Why did it take more than a decade for any of them to challenge the story? If someone you loved were about to go on national TV and tell an earth-shattering whopper, wouldn't that be the time to speak up? I'd like to hear a lot more from those around the Rosenblats.
And, meanwhile, am repulsed by the attitude of the guy producing the movie based on Rosenblat's fable: " 'The strength of Herman's story is in Middle America,' [movie producer Harris] Salomon said. 'Because of the candy-coated message of this story, it has picked up resonance all over. Herman's story can do more to teach people about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust in a way nothing before has done.' " Noooooooooo; please hold both the condescension and the candy coating. In defending accessibility, sugary treats were not what I had in mind.
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Emily and Hanna, you might be interested in This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Kirby Dick's 2006 documentary about the Motion Picture Association of America.
Through a side-by-side comparison of footage, Dick revealed several prevailing MPAA biases: beyond drawing distinctions that favor violent displays over sexual ones, the MPAA seems to punish homosexual and female sexual displays with harsher ratings. Additionally, Dick asserted that the MPAA is intimidated into assigning more lenient ratings to big studio films while cracking down on the content of movies that were independently produced.
The MPAA claims to be comprised of average parents with children ages 5 to 17. Dick discovered, however, that some of the raters didn't even have children and none had received any formal training for their job. This might explain why you found their ratings (ostensibly created for parents' use) to be more than a little off-base.
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Since, as Juliet points out, Herman Rosenblat probably isn't delusional, what are we to make of his wife's role in the whole affair? She may not have written the book, but she has gone on television with her husband to tell the tale, making her just as complicit in the fabrication (that's her beaming alongside Herman in the NYT article on the hoax). It's impossible, of course, to truly pin down the motivation that made him cook up the fable, but I can't help but be curious about when she decided to go along with it and why. Was it just for the thrill of notoriety?
The Rosenblat story makes me think of the fantastic tale of Joyce Hatto, the reclusive pianist whose celebrated recordings were not her own but rather a bold pastiche of various virtuosic performances by other pianists. (The stunning deception also included, by the way, a made-up backing orchestra whose fictionalized conductor was supposedly a Holocaust survivor.) Her husband, Barry, it turned out, was the man behind the curtain. His pathology was a mix of love and delusion and self-promotion that was both repulsive and oddly sweet. He told The New Yorker, "You see, the thing about her was it meant her life hadn't been a waste of time." Is that the same kind of weird psychology at work in the Rosenblat marriage—the sense that it's somehow more valid to get recognition for a made-up version of it than to quietly make peace with the real one? I don't pretend to be an expert on marriage, though I'm sure that for any marriage lasting decades there are plenty of elisions and additions to the narrative the couple tells one another and others about their own particular love story and its creation myth. But small ones. Private ones. To go on national television and completely replace the bone structure of your life seems to me a personal denial that is a tragic one indeed (though not of course as widely harmful as the other sorts of denial this story could encourage), and I wonder just what the triggers are that makes that seem like the best option.
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Melinda, Herman Rosenblat may not need a lecture from us, but perhaps he needs one from fellow survivors. If he'd written a memoir about how he kept his sanity by imagining a girl tossing apples at him, that'd be one thing. And if he were delusional, I'd cut him more slack. But from Gabe Sherman's account in The New Republic, he was fully aware of the fact that he was fabricating a story and had a great time on Oprah! It's not just his fabrication that bothers me, but the content of his fabrication. There was no young love, or apples, at Schlieben. To suggest otherwise (and here I'm paraphrasing one of Sherman's sources) is to deny the substance and reality of the Holocaust.
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Ben, your response to my defense of Herman Rosenblat made me think that maybe my post was itself too inaccessible, so let me be clearer: My point wasn't that films about the Holocaust have been made in other countries, too. (Duh.) It was that the impulse to focus on resistance fighters and the odd righteous Gentile is not just an American thing, and that prettifying is what Hollywood does. But I am not arguing in favor of spiffing up the Holocaust, for heaven's sake. And I am certainly not saying that art of any kind has to be uplifting in order to be accessible. I personally think everyone should see Shoah, preferably in a theater and on back-to-back evenings, but there are other, more accessible ways to tell the truth about the Holocaust, and they don't necessarily have to be sneered at.
I do not defend the Hallmarkization of the Holocaust; what I defend is this man who lived through it and needs no lectures from us about the truth of it. None of us knows how we would come through an experience like his, but if his way of keeping his sanity was to imagine a girl tossing apples at him, I don't think it is my place to stand in judgment.
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Here's a guest post from Ben Crair, an assistant editor at The Daily Beast who wrote an article for Slate this week on Hollywood Holocaust films.
I hoped that my article on Holocaust film would provoke some discussion, and now that some XX Factor contributors have gotten the ball rolling, I find myself unable to abstain from jumping in. (And thanks to XX Factor for the opportunity to do so).
Melinda, it's true that Holocaust film isn't "a peculiarly American phenomenon"—indeed, the subject is taken up more frequently in European film. And Europe has produced plenty of Holocaust dreck. (Life is Beautiful is from Italy.) But Europe has also given us films like Shoah, Night and Fog, and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. The first film, which clocks in at 9.5 hours, is a famous example of the difficulty and "inaccessibility" of Holocaust art, which might turn off your average moviegoer. But what about the latter two? Night and Fog is 32 minutes of more-or-less straightforward documentary footage, while The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is a beautiful love story about Jewish teenagers in Italy.
Why has Hollywood failed to produce similar films? Melinda, your assumption is that a film, or a story in Herman Rosenblat's case, must be uplifting in order to be "accessible." You ask, "But aren't there cases in which embroidering on the truth might not be a sign of insanity so much as the only guard against it?" Even if we concede that the Holocaust was, in fact, "insane," why should artists "guard against" that truth, rather than open it up and explore it? The problem with Holocaust film in general is that, in order to be "accessible," it routinely sets up such guards via some of the tropes I mentioned in my article and then passes them off as real. What else are we to make of their incorporation of documentary footage or their incessant need to remind us that they are "based on true stories"? Hollywood films try to wear the moral weight and prestige of the Holocaust, but refuse to let it complicate established and sentimental formulas.
Susannah is right: "Seeing as we live in a world where some would like to believe it never happened, it's indescribably imperative that its nonfiction narratives testify truly, rather than auctioning off fictions the public would rather be spoon-fed." What about fiction and, by extension, film? Cynthia Ozick writes that "when a novel comes to us with the claim that it is directed consciously toward history, that the divide between history and the imagination is being purposefully bridged, that the bridging is the very point, and that the design of the novel is to put human flesh on historical notation, then the argument for fictional autonomy collapses, and the rights of history can begin to urge their own force." Hollywood, I fear, has been building faulty bridges.
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Emily, this is, as they say, a failure in the marketplace. Despite years of protest and battle, movie ratings still draw lines along the old Puritan boundaries and bear no relationship to the sensibility of an actual child. They measure nudity, or language, and maybe specific acts of violence, but they are not sensitive enough to pick up something like nightmare-inducing terror. I took my daughter to see Man on Wire, in which there is a fleeting, silent-movie sort of sex interlude that flew right by her. This is an adult documentary about the Frenchman who tightroped between the Twin Towers, and she read it as a straight up inspirational tale. But in the various cartoons we've seen with violent chases or fistfights or mock torture scenes she is hiding under her seat. Some of this has to do with video-game culture and the fear factor brought on by better animation, as you say. And some has to do with our cultural tolerance of violence. Once a home-schooling mom recommended a Spiderman movie for my 5-year-old but warned me about a "disturbing scene," by which she meant not the death by impalement, or bombing carnage, but the upside down kiss. I think we need to set up our own informal rating system, based on the coming night's sleep: sound (S), light (L), disturbed (D), high possibility of night terrors (HPNT).
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On a different topic: I took my 5-year-old son to see The Tale of Despereaux this week and then cursed its apparently kid-safe G rating when he found it really scary. I looked into the meaning of G for General Audience and learned that the promise of "minimal violence" that the rating makes often isn't kept. More from me on this here. Have any of you tangled with fearsome kids' movies, and what if anything do you do about it? For my kids, the problem isn't quickie punches or even shootings. It's prolonged suspense, which movie makers often seem unable to resist. I don't try to shield my kids from everything harsh or sad, but movies exert real power over kids because of their visual impact. When a film keeps one of my kids up at night, I wish he hadn't seen it. Thoughts?
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Good points, Susannah. At least two more reasons to be outraged by Herman Rosenblat's faked memoir: It can only encourage Holocaust deniers, as Rosenblat's friends and family have pointed out while expressing outrage at him. And it's part of a disturbing pattern of falsity. Misha Defonseca claimed to be a Jewish survivor who lived with wolves in Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years; there were no wolves and she wasn't Jewish. Binjamin Wilkomirski won prizes and comparisons to Primo Levi for Fragments, his account of surviving the camps Majdenau and Birkenau—but he made the whole thing up, down to the last emotionally affecting detail. All of this is slippery exploitation, and irredeemable.
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Melinda: Reading your post, I kept expecting to get to the part where you said you were kidding. Herman Rosenblat's grotesque "reimagining" of his time spent at a Nazi concentration camp is more obscene than little harm done. As the New Republic exposed, Rosenblat's childhood tall-tale of having been fed apples thrown over the camp fence by a little girl whom he met again years later on Coney Island and then married is wholesale BS. Only after the hoax was revealed did Rosenblat admit his lies—only after he'd appeared on Oprah twice, where he was informed his story was “the single greatest love story” that his host had ever heard, only after a $25 million movie version was already in the works, only after a children's book version was published in September.
So, in response to your questions, yes, this makes Rosenblat another Margaret Seltzer and James Frey, one more writer weak enough of mind and writing ability that, in an effort to score attention and cash, they made up a story they sold as truth. If anything, Rosenblat's fabulism is more offensive and reprehensible than Seltzer's wiggerisms and Frey's fake drugmoir, because what we're talking about here, in case anyone missed it, is the Holocaust. Seeing as we live in a world where some would like to believe it never happened, it's indescribably imperative that its nonfiction narratives testify truly, rather than auctioning off fictions the public would rather be spoon-fed.
Instead of declaring Rosenblat's act amounts to no big deal, it seems this case demands the opposite. It's a "meh" attitude toward these literary deceptions that perpetuates and encourages the increasingly shoddy practices of the book publishing industry, a slow-dying dinosaur that prefers sensationalism and bottom lines to truth and fact-checking.
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Melinda, good point about Caroline Kennedy playing by the rules of the old political guard. Judith Warner, a columnist for nytimes.com, recently wrote an op-ed for the paper implying that Kennedy is not playing by the rules at all. She posits that Kennedy doesn't deserve, and has done nothing to earn, Hillary Clinton's seat in the U.S. Senate. That's Warner's opinion and of course she has a right to it, but I nonetheless found it a bit troubling, especially coming from a woman. This last line of the piece was particularly irksome: "Caroline doesn't have to be a fairy-tale princess anymore. She can be her own white knight, vaulting the Kennedy's proudly into the 21st century, if only she plays by the rules and waits her turn."
Wait her turn? Isn't that what men use to say to ambitious women who seemed too eager to scale the walls of the corporate ladder or break the glass ceiling? When exactly would Kennedy's turn come? And by what means? Imagine if the suffragists and black civil rights activists had sat back and waited for their turn to come knocking on their doors. The notion of waiting for power to be handed to us as some sort of reward for waiting patiently in the wings while others go out and get what they want is so outdated. The people preaching patience are usually the ones holding the power, and are usually unwilling to give it up without a fight. They're also the ones who usually write the rules that Warner says Kennedy should play by.
Just how is Kennedy flouting the rules if they specifically allow for the governor to appoint a replacement for Clinton? The last time I checked, Hillary Clinton had not held political office before she ran for the Senate from a state she had never even lived in until she decided to seek office. So I'm not exactly sure what Clinton did to earn the Senate seat? She ran and she won, and if Kennedy is appointed to Clinton's seat, Kennedy will eventually have to do the same thing to keep it.
I agree with much of the recent commentary and news stories—this one is a particularly fun read—about the sickening level of nepotism in politics, but I don't believe that Caroline Kennedy should be held to a different standard than the many, many other members of Congress who got their seats through familial connections or won their seats with little or no prior political experience.
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I'm having a hard time summoning a lot of outrage over the story of Herman Rosenblat, the Holocaust survivor who reimagined his stay in a subcamp of Buchenwald. In his (now canceled) and unfortunately subtitled memoir, Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived, he told the beautiful lie that a girl who lived near the camp had kept him alive by chucking apples over the fence to him. He'd already gone on Oprah and told the world that years later, in Coney Island, he and the girl had improbably met again, on a blind date, and had married. But does that really make Rosenblat another Margaret Seltzer? (She's the author of Love and Consequences, the 100 percent trumped-up "memoir'' in which, instead of growing up white and well-off in the San Fernando Valley, she's a half-Native American foster child gang-banger in South Central. Details!) Or does Rosenblat's fabulism put him on a moral par with James Frey, whose real adventures in addiction and rehab were wildly improved upon for his memoir-ish A Million Little Pieces? No and no. I guess there is a sense in which every lie is pathological. But there is also a pretty wide chasm between an addict lying to sell books, and a camp survivor lying, according to the statement released through his agent, "to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world. In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream."
You know how every time John McCain did something crappy—like oh, say, abandon the wife who waited for him the whole time he was a POW—we said, Hey, the man was in a box for five years; he's allowed! Why would the McCain Rule not apply to poor Herman Rosenblat? Of course passing fiction off as reality is wrong. And I get why Holocaust scholars are "fiercely on guard against fabrication of memories because they taint the truth ... and raise doubts about the millions who were killed or brutalized.'' But aren't there cases in which embroidering on the truth might not be a sign of insanity so much as the only guard against it?
As Rosenblat's tale is still going to be made into a movie, maybe this is just another case, as per Ben Crair, of America's weird insistence on prettying up the Holocaust by focusing on resistance fighters or righteous Gentiles or especially inspirational survivors. I don't see, though, that this emphasis is either a peculiarly American phenomenon—ever been to France?—or particular to our treatment of the Holocaust. Isn't that what Hollywood does? Could be I am just reacting to Crair's jerky line about "the most wonderful season of the year.'' But while it's true that Schindler's List is no Shoah, making the topic accessible to the general public is no crime, either, is it?
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That's an interesting question, Susannah: Why aren't women (and other) writers obsessing about Caroline Kennedy's makeup and hair, cleavage and (lack of) peep-toe pumps? I wonder if it doesn't have to do with the fact that her looks are at odds with the preferred narrative about Caroline Bouvier Kennedy, child of privilege and woman of leisure. I mean, she's a handsome woman, but she doesn't look like she spends her life getting facials and shopping, does she? If the visuals screamed Park Avenue Princess, you can bet we would be going on and on about them.
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What with all the time spent this year by women and journalists and everyone else obsessing over Sarah Palin's looks and lipsticks and wardrobe, it's hard to believe the absolute dearth of women journalists obsessing over Caroline Kennedy's physical appearance, makeup choices, and hairstyles. Why are her highlights not front-page news? I haven't a clue. Perhaps people are more interested in focusing on her politics. Just kidding! (See also: Tattoogate.) In either case, Fashionista points to Christopher Andersen's hammily titled biography of the Lady Kennedy, Sweet Caroline: Last Child of Camelot, which reveals Caroline's refusal to become Jackie O. 2.0.
According to the book, Jackie was irked a young Caroline wouldn't diet. When Caroline requested the dessert menu at the end of one meal, her mother purportedly informed her 5-foot-7, 145-pound daughter: "You're not having dessert," warning, "You'll be so fat nobody will marry you."
Caroline was not the only one suffering from the Kennedy women's obsessive body consciousness; the pressure to be was also felt by one of Caroline's favorite cousins, Maria Shriver. But only Caroline was routinely compared to her famously svelte mother, and as a result her self-esteem plummeted. In a fit of pique that bordered on the bizarre, she shaved off one eyebrow. "My face," she offered by way of explanation, "is too symmetrical."
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Poor Caroline Kennedy: After eight years that made Bush I look way less embarrassing than he used to, we've had enough of political dynasties, thanks. It's unfair, though, to blame her for representing the old way and old guard when the true knock against her is that she hasn't been old school enough, and failed to fork over the kind of campaign cash to state and local Democrats that anyone plotting a political future knows is part of the cost of doing business.
In the end, New York Gov. David Paterson will fill Hillary Clinton's Senate seat with just one consideration in mind: He'll choose the person who he thinks will best secure his own political future. But if that's not Caroline Kennedy, then all the hand-wringing about her unfair familial advantage will have been wildly off-the-mark. The open criticism of her by any number of New York Democrats has already made clear that party people aren't exactly quaking in fear of offending her family; the oligarchy ain't what it used to be. And that this is the reaction at a time when Ted Kennedy is fighting brain cancer makes me think that maybe the "dynasty" has died out already, without an heir.
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Over on the Post's op-ed page today, Lauren Stiller Rikleen laments our confused conceptions of the first lady—"the lack of clear definition of their role has resulted in first ladies facing a web of conflicting expectations," she writes—and then goes on to suggest that, to improve the situation, we saddle first ladyhood with ... a concrete job description.
Huh? This seems totally backward to me. Wouldn't it be nicer to limit the first lady's "expectations," so each occupant could make of it what she (or, someday, he) wishes? Wouldn't a rigid job description either to strain a low-key presidential partner like Laura Bush, who doesn't want to get involved in policy, or provide ammo for the critics of more wonkish partners like Hillary Clinton ("so sorry, my dear, but managing health care reform isn't in the job description")? And isn't it likely that the only duties a job-description-drafting panel could agree to enshrine in the first place are the noncontroversial (and therefore old-fashioned) ones, like picking out Christmas ornaments for the White House tree?
And why do we so often imagine that the complications that emerge when we update female roles (like motherhood) can be solved by shoehorning these roles into the contours of a traditional "job"?
If I were queen for a day, I'd go the other direction: Instead of adding a job description to the first lady's burdens, I'd take away the title all together. The word lady in pop culture suggests all kinds of negative things: the fettered, prim reserve of a woman who isn't too forward in her ambitions ("A lady doesn't wander all over the room ..."), snobbish arrogance (Lady Catherine de Bourgh), even pure evil in feminine form (Lady Macbeth). We hardly use titles in modern life anymore, anyway. How about just "Mrs. Obama" for now?
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Well, E.J., having spent several years of my adult life working as a waitress, I take issue with your post. Over a two-year period, I worked at two restaurants. For most of that time, I worked at one of the most high-end restaurants in town. Sexual harassment? That was the least of it. When I was hired, there were 13 servers. Eleven were hard-core substances abusers: cocaine addicts, alcoholics, one crackhead. There were three drug operations. Pot, coke, and whatever else you wanted to get your hands on were sold by the valets, in the kitchen, and on the floor. One night, a buser went after a chef with a butcher knife; he was fired only after he didn't show up for work because he'd been shot. By the end of many shifts, most of the servers were coked out of their heads or too drunk to talk. To reiterate, this was a very upscale place. Some of the most high-profile people in the area dined there. Maybe it took getting high to deal with the never-ending demands of the wealthy patrons upon whom we waited.
So, sexual harassment? Uh, yes. Chefs in their 30s had sex with hostesses in their teens. Managers had sex with servers. One young, drunk waitress performed oral sex on the executive chef in the liquor closet during a shift. This extremely high-stress environment was virtually nonstop rife with sexual innuendo, grabbing, and harassment. Every table had to be served bread we cut in the kitchen, and it was a regular occurrence that the cooks would holler at us to "Shake it!" as we sliced the bread. We were regularly objectified, fondled, and solicited.
And the fact of the matter is that we women sexually harassed right back. We flirted with managers to get better shifts, we unbuttoned buttons on our uniforms to get bigger tips, we regularly used sexual innuendos, physical contact, and body language to squeeze as many dollars as possible out of the men with whom we worked and upon whom we waited. Why? For the money. Because we were desperate. Because we were broke. Because we could.
I was raised by two English professors in the most liberal place in America: Berkeley, Calif. I'm all too familiar with feminist rhetoric, with academics in ivory towers who point down at the masses to declare what the populace should and should not do, with those who seem to perceive the world as a place in which what "should" happen is what does happen. That's not reality. When it comes to sex—or sexual harassment, for that matter—the situations are often neither black nor white but decidedly gray. The idea that it's possible to eliminate or police human sexuality in any context is a fantasy.
For those of you interested in reading a moving, compelling, and insightful book about what it's really like to live and work in the trenches of America by a woman who found out the truth by sticking her head into the toilets of America's rich, buy yourselves a copy of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
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While we wonder whether our sensitivity to sexist press coverage of elite women candidates is a good or bad sign—thanks and welcome to XX Factor, Eve—ordinary working women out there are still losing their jobs because some guy thinks their breasts double as doorknobs, available for anyone to squeeze. Check out Rebekah Spicuglia's painfully specific post about how her sister lost her waitressing job at Chili's. Notice the very best part:
When my sister, Rachel Spicuglia, a five-year employee of Chili's Restaurant (owned by Brinker International), reported to her manager the escalating sexual harassment she was receiving from the cooks, which had culminated in an assault that morning in the walk-in refrigerator, the manager asked Rachel if the offending employee had gotten a "full cup" when he had grabbed her breasts.
I post this not because this case is unusual, but precisely because it isn't. This one just happens to be written up publicly. As I found while collaborating on Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even, American companies shell out millions upon millions of dollars each year to make up for truly vile sexual harassment—assault, groping, stalking, and deeply disgusting daily comments. Waitresses in particular should get hazard pay. And the waitress cases aren't as bad as the ones I read involving aspiring electricians, videographers, higher-paid factory workers, women in finance, and other cases in which women try to get "men's" jobs—those stories start reading like terror on the job.
I'll write more about this another day but reading this just now on HuffPo, I snapped. According to the largest and most credible study—of the federal workforce—approximately 3 percent of women report being sexually assaulted at work. That's millions of women a year. The lower down the food chain you are, the more likely you will be harassed—holding down your earnings significantly while you fight or flee. Which is why sexual harassment is against the law, by the way—because it stops women from earning a fair living.
Why should so many women have to risk their bodily integrity just to feed their families?
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E.J. Dionne channeled some of the I'm-fine-with-Rick-Warren arguments on this blog in his Post column today, which suggests that the brilliance of the Rick Warren choice is that it challenges everybody, not just lefties:
By inviting Pastor Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation, President-elect Barack Obama has alienated some of his friends on the left. By accepting, Warren has enraged some of his allies on the right.
There's this notion out there—call it the equivalence of outrage—that right-wingers are just as upset with Warren for agreeing to bless Obama as left-wingers are upset with Obama for asking Warren for his blessing. But where are these explosions of rage on the right happening? I can't find them. I went to National Review's lively "Corner" blog and couldn't detect any irritation. ("I haven't gotten a single angry email from a reader about this, and usually when conservatives are enraged by something, somebody emails me about it," NR's Jonah Goldberg noted.) No rage immediately evident in quick skims of Michelle Malkin, Confederate Yankee, Ace of Spades, or RedState, either. Christian Broadcasting News even rhapsodized that Obama "said he was tired of the same old 'us vs. them' mentality in DC and beyond. Well, picking Warren does the trick."
To try to get to the bottom of this—maybe it's the conservative rank-and-file that's upset?—I did a highly scientific study of three right-wing friends of mine, none of them pundits, asking them the question, "What do you think of Obama's decision to have Rick Warren deliver his inaugural convocation?" Here were the responses:
I'm not too sure yet ... On the one hand, he is trying to keep some of the dissatisfied Republicans he obviously picked up in this past election. On the other hand, the reaction from the LGBT community shows that Obama will find himself all too often ticking off either his political base OR America at large as he tries to do this.
I am mildly amused by the idea that some liberals are disappointed in Obama already.
I imagine he [Warren] would have a lot of good things to say and I will take him over Obama's pastors any day!
If that's anger, then Mister Rogers had an anger problem. I'm just not sure E.J.'s on target that "so many" on the right are upset with Warren. And unfortunately, his celebration of Warren kind of hangs on the equivalence of outrage—on the idea that Obama and Warren have both shown courage in bucking their supporters' wishes, and that Obama, in choosing Warren, is approving not of the politics of evangelical Christianity as they traditionally have been, but as they could be:
Warren appears to be genuinely interested in broadening evangelical Christianity's public agenda. In a recent interview with Steve Waldman of Beliefnet.com, Warren compared gay marriage to "an older guy marrying a child," and to "one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage." But he also called upon evangelicals to be "the social change leaders in our society" engaged with "poverty and disease and charity and social justice and racial justice."
Obama wants to encourage this move, which would be good for him and good for progressive politics. Fear that Obama's analysis is exactly right is why so many conservatives are so angry with Warren for blessing the new president's inaugural. Although I support gay marriage, I think that liberals should welcome Obama's success in causing so much consternation on the right.
Let's see Warren make a few moves that do provoke a little consternation on the right, and then we can be impressed. (E.J. actually offers some good ideas in his column.)
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Emily, totally fair point about the Iseman and Hunter stories—they were examples of other kinds of basic journalistic malfeasance. And Politico didn't point out that a number of its top press screw-ups were sexism. But neither did it really "mount a broader critique" of the media's coverage of, in particular, Hillary. All the blunders Politico named that related to Hillary (there were three) had to do with Team Hillary or the candidate's supporters crying foul on sexism in the press.
Which is a little funny, because I always thought the media's coverage of Sarah Palin was more sex-based than its coverage of Hillary. (I don't mean "sexist," exactly, but perpetually tinged—positively or negatively—by its consciousness of her sex. What's the word for this? It's like the difference between racism and racialism, but is there a word?) The condescending pats on the head from conservatives when the li'l gal did good, the sniggers at her Miss South Carolina-esque ditziness when she did bad, the titanic obsession with her wardrobe (Sen. Norm Coleman didn't get so much heat when somebody bought him fancy suits from the same Minneapolis Neiman Marcus) ... Of course, the McCain campaign invited all this by cynically selecting Palin over other reformers for her anatomical features in the first place.
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Welcome, Eve, and good call about Politico's top 10 blunders. The piece doesn't itself point out that the screw-ups it lists were sexist (though Fox does get dinged for taking two "racially tinged shots at Michelle Obama"). I'm with you in not complaining. Better to mount a broader critique of some of the coverage of Michelle and Hillary and Sarah Palin than to slap a sexist label on it. As we watched all of this unfold over the past year, what drew us in, I think, were the ambiguities and complexities, as well as the high drama. Maybe that, too, is a reason to take heart--as we got to know these women as public figures, we kept coming back for more because they only got more interesting.
Also, a quibble: I don't agree entirely with your list. The NYT's presentation of Vicki Iseman's affair-nonaffair with John McCain was an old-fashioned story without the goods—or at least, without the goods in print. I'm not sure it's more problematic than that. And the failure of the mainstream press to run with John Edwards and Rielle Hunter, after the National Enquirer nabbed them—well, nobody likes to get beat, and once the tabloids make a story their own, it's tainted from the point of view of major newspapers and TV. I'm not defending the laggards—as I said ad nauseam at the time, the Edwards story was wholly legit. But I'm not sure you can chalk up the way the press handled it to the pitfalls of covering women.
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Hey, wanna come over for some fruitcake and a long talk about Rick Warren? Me neither. But Dahlia, unless I've been blogging my blackouts, I never said he was a great man. I don't know what kind of man he is, other than one I mostly disagree with and will forever associate with my worst babysitter ever, who constantly lugged around his purpose-driven book, along with her other favorite volume, which was on how to make a fortune in 30 days. (Needless to say, her plan for raking in the big bucks did not involve providing excellent child care. And I saw her working at a Kinkos not too long ago.)
So where we differ is not so much on Warren himself, or over gay marriage, for that matter. It's not over censorship, as I'm sure we agree that the KKK can march around Skokie to their shriveled little hearts content and yay, odious speech. Though you think Obama's pick of Warren as official prayer-sayer is bad optics and I think it's great politics, even that isn't our real difference. Which is that I don't think opposing gay marriage automatically makes someone a bigot or a homophobe, and if I read you correctly, you do. But can you really write off the millions of people who read their Bible that way? (Don't they write off gay people?) Doubtless some do, but their traditional definition of marriage does not necessarily make them haters, does it? How could I view the Bible as (among other things) a cultural document and not see Bible readers as products of our various cultures, too?
The conservative Illinois town where I grew up (and where Obama not only lost to McCain in '08, but to ALAN KEYES for U.S. Senate in ‘04) was so lacking in diversity that we didn't have that much to work with, bias-wise, and the only conflict was the Christians versus the other Christians. Some of the neighbor kids who went to different churches were always letting us know that because we were Catholic (had not been baptized the right way, and had parents who drank and danced, though not as often as they would have liked) we were totally going to hell. So we'd run into the house - Oh no, so-and-so says we haven't been saved! -- and my Republican dad, whose greatest heartbreak in life is that he somehow wound up with the world's most liberal daughter - yes, everything really is relative -- never got the least bit worked up about our likely damnation, or ever, ever hit back: "That's what they believe,'' he'd say, and that would be that. Which was kind of frustrating at the time. But when I think now about what tolerance looks like, I do think of him shrugging and going, "That's what they believe,'' and I wish I were more like that.
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Poring through Michael Calderone's "Top Ten Media Blunders of 2008" in the Politico, it was hard not to notice how many of his favorite Fourth Estate screw-ups had to do, in some obvious or oblique way, with sexism purportedly making its way into the press. You've got the whole Hillary-in-New-Hampshire episode, in which Hillary wept and the media's subsequent mockery mobilized women voters on her behalf (or so the mythology goes); you've got MSNBC's choice to hand its election coverage over to Chris "She-Devil" Matthews; you've got the "Obama's baby mama" Chyron on Fox; and you've got the David Shuster pimp-Chelsea Clinton thing—along with the questionable coverage of two alleged Big Macher mistresses, Vicki Iseman and Rielle Hunter.
You could make the case that all the media's stumbles over sexism should alarm women, but I wonder if the opposite isn't the case. It shows how sensitive we've become to the various pitfalls inherent in covering women. (And, well, maybe too sensitive, but that's another debate.)
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Hello to all the XX women—major fan here. I'll be guest-blogging with you for a week, and I'm thrilled to join such an august set of old friends and admired colleagues. So thrilled, actually, I'm buying everybody a round of the "spam, egg, rice and seaweed Hawaiian specialty" that we now know our new president loves. Look for it in the mail, and please warn your letter carriers.
Before we move on to, say, the hot "Baby Alive" doll trend (" 'Be careful,' reads the doll's promotional literature, 'just like real life, sometimes she can hold it until she gets to the 'potty' and sometimes she can't'"), I do want to say I think Hanna's on to something when she calls Obama's Rick Warren move "tokenism." It is a token gesture, and that's exactly what makes it irritating. For what seems like ages, liberals have dutifully swallowed the lesson that America is a center-right country, way more in line with Warren than with Wallis; that the bulk of Americans regard liberal values with suspicion; and that any Democrat who aspires to national leadership has to mince around either shading his liberalism (think of Bill Clinton and Don't Ask Don't Tell) or mounting grand conciliatory gestures toward the other side's values (think of John Kerry's attempts to look militant). This is a pretty broad phenomenon: In my day job at the New Republic magazine, I often write about Congress, and while hoofing around the country to cover congressional races this fall I was struck—as I was in 2006, too—by how far the infinitely adaptable red-district Democratic candidates go to demonstrate their sympathies with conservative mores, while the Republican candidates tend to feel far less pressed to make those kinds of adaptations or token gestures. (George W. Bush sure didn't see the need to tap Gene Robinson or Katharine Jefferts Schori to deliver his inaugural invocation.)
Of course, it's nice that many Democrats try to rise above dogma and pitch themselves to a broader coalition. That's the Obama Doctrine, as much as anything is. But at a certain point, the frantic efforts to smooth conservative America's ruffled feathers get damned tedious. I think Rick Warren was that point for many.
And why the hotshot obsession? What with signing up first Hillary Clinton and now Warren, whom the Independent aptly called "the most popular religious figure in the US bar the Pope," Obama seems to be on a mission to get every American with ~20 million followers to stand next to him on a podium and authenticate the breathtaking range of his appeal. But I can't help wishing he had chosen somebody a little less garishly megawatt, for God's sake. Some slightly more obscure person of good works; somebody less political and less token; somebody more along the lines of Kirbyjon Caldwell during the W. years. That kind of choice, not Warren, would have been the real surprise.
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E.J., I gotta say, thank you for going through all the stages of grief re: Rick Warren so I didn't have to. Here's the thing: Really, who cares. It "sends a message"—nah, don't care. As Peggy Noonan said of Jeremiah Wright, I'm finding it hard to be truly upset about this one. Maybe just distracted by my upsetness over the questionable future regulators who will be "sending a policy" in the form of "trillions of dollars."
So the guy is a huge homophobe: Meh, sorry Barney, still don't care. As you yourself have so often observed—and I'm "addressing" Barney Frank here, for the record—"the average American is less homophobic than he thinks he's supposed to be and more racist than he's willing to admit." Why is this? Well, statistically, the average American knows at least a handful of gay people. The average American knows a handful of women who've had abortions. The average American does not think people in either camp are evil for what they have "done." The average American probably even empathizes with the pain involved in belonging to said camp in an America whose moral culture is dominated by guys like Rick Warren. But wait, let's talk about that for a sec: Rick Warren's book is called The Purpose-Driven Life. It is not called The Perverts and Babykillers Bringing the Country to Ruin. I am sure he has said a lot of ridiculous things, but has he ever likened Gay Pride parades to Murderer's Pride Parades a la Ted Haggard?
I'd like to hear the Rev. Michael Pfleger on this one. One of my favorite things about being raised in such an old and big and totally screwed-up religion is all the deviant and/or dissident clerics the Catholic Church has produced over the years, exposing on a grand and tragic and awesome scale the fallibility of humanity and the consciousness that instills in us the sense that there must be something bigger and more beyond just our own petty civilization, and we can glean what that bigger thing wants from us. My favorite at the moment is the late Father Bob Drinan, the anti-war Jesuit priest Frank replaced in Congress upon the request of a new Pope uneasy at the thought of a representative in the world's most important legislature who said of abortion "I think abortion is a terrible thing … except for women."
At some point I expect science will allow mothers to test prenatally for homosexuality, and some sort of epic crisis of conscience will force Christendom to see humanity in a more nuanced light, in part because we'll all have much more pressing matters to confront by that point, like the economic apocalypse and so on.
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Another post from Hanna Rosin, who is having technical difficulties:
Think of it this way: This is not a gesture that signifies acceptance or even necessarily a desire for reconciliation. Instead it has a faint air of condescension, even tokenism. It puts evangelicals in the position of feeling grateful to be included.
I agree with you, Dahlia. Warren will never budge on gay marriage or abortion. But the tide is turning against people like Warren. The younger generation of Christians gives gay marriage a big shrug.
Leave them out of the next four or eight years, and they'll do what they always do: rise again. Give them a place—a symbolic one, as E.J. points out—and the whole thing will go more smoothly.
Read the rest of the XX Factor's discussion about Rick Warren giving the inaugural invitation.
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Well, Hanna, I don't think anyone is advocating censoring Warren. He has the same freedom to speak as does every other American, and certainly far more access to public forums. Nor do I think that failing to ask him to give the inaugural prayer would have been equivalent to pretending that evangelicals don't exist, any more than Reagan's failing to invite the late Rebbe Schneerson to give an inaugural prayer was equivalent to pretending that the Lubavitcher Chassidim didn't exist. Or more to Melinda's point, that Obama's failing to ask Christopher Hitchens to give the inaugural antiprayer is equivalent to pretending that atheists exist. Of course they exist. Of course they are free to preach, evangelize (which Hitchens does with particular enthusiasm), organize, and speak in the public square. Go forth. Multiply. Knock yourselves out in the marketplace of theological ideas.
The objection has been to giving an extremist-someone who thinks women who've had abortions were running concentration camps in their wombs, as Katha Pollitt put it so brilliantly in the L.A. Times-the honorary job of saying the nation's prayer over the presidency.
That said, over the course of this discussion, I have somehow talked myself into the other point of view. (Or maybe spending a weekend-long blizzard locked in the house with an energetic 5-year-old has just worn me down, and I'm willing to give in on anything that doesn't involve screechy toys. Is there a special circle of hell for screechy toy manufacturers and for "friends" who give said toys? This is my prayer: Please, God, let it be so!) Giving Rick Warren the temporary job of preacher-in-chief is an entirely symbolic scrap thrown to the right-wing evangelicals. In more important news, Obama appears to be ready to launch a reality-based science policy, to authorize stem-cell research, to lift the global gag rule on family planning services, to roll back Don't Ask Don't Tell, and to take similar actions on truly urgent issues. Warren's prayer won't actually have much particular public effect-except to give Obama his reverse "Sister Souljah" moment and the cover of appearing inclusive. Fine. Fine. Prez-elect, go play with whatever preacher you want to play with. I don't care, so long as I don't have to listen to the screechy toys.
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Melinda, you are precisely right that extreme right/left black/white thinking got us into this polarized, judgmental 2008 mess, and that Obama’s willingness to get beyond such thinking is exactly why so many of us were attracted to him. But isn’t the argument that Rick Warren must be a great man because he reverse tithes just as absolutist? Nobody (except maybe Hitchens) is suggesting that Warren hasn’t done extraordinary work toward relieving AIDS and poverty and global warming. But that doesn’t change the fact that not only does he not speak for all Americans, he also expressly rejects some of their very basic rights. We can debate about whether the right to marry someone you love constitutes a basic right. But—and here is where Hanna and I probably differ—I don’t think Warren is really interested in having that kind of argument.
I also think it’s not quite fair to claim that any criticism of Warren represents some kind of generalized anti-religious bias. Too many people of very deep faith don’t make Warren’s cut. That doesn’t make us religion-haters. It just means that you can’t call it “bringing people together” if you are honoring one group’s message while denigrating another’s.
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Obama hasn't banished anyone, Dahlia, and that's what's giving us such agita. (Well, not all of us; Sara has casually lumped pro-lifers like me in with the "anti-gay bigots'' that those who are on the side of tolerance and inclusion must guard against and try to get disinvited.) When Obama ran on bringing together all Americans, did you who are horrified that he's chosen Rick Warren to offer the inaugural benediction think he meant only the right-thinking, left-leaning people you would be perfectly comfortable around—and no figgy pudding for dissidents?
Obama nation is not going to work that way, and his inauguration won't be that kind of party. Warren is not my brand of (Godly) vodka, either, but so what? Noreen, Jim Wallis is my favorite evangelical, too. But when you wish that someone who cared more about poor people than Warren does had been picked instead, whom are you thinking of who "reverse tithes" as he does, keeping 10 percent of what he makes and giving 90 percent to those in need? Did you assume that because he's a conservative evangelical minister, he doesn't care about poor people?
Among those who see Warren as a hater is, of course, Christopher Hitchens, whose umpteenth diatribe hating on believers is thought perfectly fair and funny, just Hitchens being Hitchens hahaha. But directed at any other group of people, Slate wouldn't dream of running even one such screed. And if Obama makes all of us confront our biases, then that's just one more reason I thank God he got elected.
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Susannah, I so agree with you. If only the dismal economy really did persuade lots of women to forgo botox injections and plastic surgery and opt instead for more natural alternative beauty therapies. I have to admit that while I am all for going au naturale and aging gracefully, I never heard of, but am definitely intrigued by, cosmetic acupuncture and other therapies that don't require a sharp knife to the face. Imagine how a widespread rejection of the plastic surgery industrial complex could cripple an industry that trades on making women falsely believe that altering their noses, chins, eyelids, cheeks, ears, etc., will make them look, and feel, perfectly beautiful. Sadly, a botox boycott is not likely to happen anytime soon; plastic surgery is more affordable than it used to be, and American women are even going abroad to have work done for less. The whole thing is so darn "Unpretty."
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A post from Hanna Rosin, en route to parts tropical:
I have to take a break from my vacation to object to this liberal groupthink. We elected Obama partly because he is able to talk to people with different views. Our standards for hearing out a religious leader should not be: Does he believe everything we believe? It should be: Is he willing to talk to the other side? Many months ago, Rick Warren gave the stage over to Obama—showing a form of open-mindedness from an evangelical leader we haven't seen since Billy Graham. Now it's Obama's turn to reciprocate. Your strategy—E.J. and others—would involve pretending evangelicals don't exist. And what good would that do?
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Michelle Duggar gave birth to her 18th child this week. The megamom is something of an icon in homeschooling and Quiverfull circles, but whenever I see her in the news, on the Today show, or on her family's numerous reality-TV shows and specials, I find myself frustrated.
I don't yet and may never have kids, but I do like them and respect the decision to have a big family if you're up to the challenge. But the Duggars bug, primarily because of their sanctimony. They talk about being debt-free as if it's a moral issue and brag about caring for the large family thanks to living frugally, but they also generate income from rental properties and, no doubt, from their TV shows and their recently released book. It seems dishonest to suggest that everyone can afford their lifestyle if they shop in thrift stores and buy in bulk when that's not what, presumably, actually keeps the Duggars financially afloat. Furthermore, while I respect their right to hold incredibly conservative views on dating (no kissing before marriage! handholding only when engaged!), gender roles, and childbearing, I hate the reverence for Michelle Duggar as some sort of supermom. According to their TV show, weaned babies are handed off to older children, usually the teenage girls, who cook all the food, do the laundry, and do the cleaning in addition to taking care of their "buddies." It seems that they do most of the work while their mother collects the glory. The girls say that they enjoy their lives and that people who think they're too sheltered should "get over it," but I wonder how many options they truly have.
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Noreen, when I returned to Dallas, the natural church for me to attend would have been the one I grew up in. But as it happens, that church has been torn apart by the debate over gay marriage. Half the church supports Robinson; half adamantly oppose him, and a significant minority want to leave the Anglican community altogether. Hell, there are even a few members who still oppose the ordination of women! Frankly, I couldn't be bothered. As someone who struggles with faith—most of the time I’m agnostic or not even that sure—I didn’t want to spend my Sunday mornings arguing with people whose views I found repugnant. So, now to the extent I go to church at all, I'm surrounded by people who think exactly like me. But I’ve sometimes second-guessed my decision as morally lazy and cowardly. I might have been well-positioned, as a native daughter of Dallas, to make the case for the pro-Robinson forces at my old church. Maybe I could have helped tilt the balance toward tolerance, and done more overall good, had I stayed.
In sum, I hate the Warren pick (and Wallis would have been a great candidate for all the reasons you say). But, maybe because I grew up among Republicans, I sometimes struggle with what real engagement with the other side looks like. My guess is that it makes everyone a little unhappy and uncomfortable. Don’t you know that there are right-to-lifers and anti-gay bigots right now who are just as furious at Warren as we are at Obama that Warren has even accepted this inaugural invitation. After all, he will be giving his blessing, in front of a national audience, to a pro-choice, pro-civil-union president. I'm not sure it's entirely clear who is co-opting whom. So, while I still wish Obama had picked someone else, and will be deeply disappointed if he backs away even one iota from equal rights for gays and lesbians at the policy level, I do think the symbolism cuts both ways.
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But Sara, aren't there ways Obama can create that dialogue without selling out his own beliefs? Picking Warren might make conservative evangelicals smile more kindly on Obama, but that choice also allows them to stay in a gay rights echo chamber, an inverted version of the liberal one you (and I) have put ourselves in. Instead, for instance, Obama could have asked Jim Wallis, the progressive evangelical who's a longtime friend, to bless his presidency. Wallis' work is mostly concerned with the plight of the poor. During his campaign to redirect religious-political dialogue away from social issues, he's in fact ended up saying some very interesting things about social issues. Like Obama, for instance, he's in favor of civil unions but not gay marriage. (Wallis: "I want churches that disagree on this to have a biblical, theological conversation and to live with their differences and not spend 90 percent of their denominational time arguing about this issue when 30,000 children are dying every single day because of poverty and disease.") People on both the left and the right recognize aspects of their beliefs in Wallis' work, but most probably also have serious disagreements with some of his teachings-isn't that sort of seductive nuance where dialogue starts?
Dahlia's absolutely correct to draw a distinction between public acts and private worship, but Obama's made it elegantly clear in the past that his religion and values shape the decisions he makes in public life. And, writer-in-chief that he is, he is acutely aware of the value of symbolism. That's precisely why this choice is so disappointing, because it means that he's given up a shot at intellectual honesty. He's not as far left on gay rights as I'd like him to be, but he could have publicized someone like Wallis who articulates the religious argument for his own position, in all its shades of gray.
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Rachael, I am so glad to be on this blog with you. You do make me examine myself for intellectual double standards. Remember, though, that we're critiquing the same politician—Barack Obama—for his ministerial choices, albeit different choices in different circumstances.
And, in response to your specific points, I do find those circumstances to be different in important ways. I found Wright's views to be appalling, but I found the Republican flogging of his views to be race-baiting. I suspected—no evidence, just a hunch—that he went to that church for political reasons, small-p political, socializing with the people who could help in Chicago politics and all that. So when Obama disavowed those views and quit the church, I shrugged off his attendance. I expect certain kinds of small compromises and hypocrisy from politicians, I suppose, and that one didn't seem especially large.
But like Dahlia, I find it to be a quite different thing to give a minister a national podium—essentially, to ask him to give the nation's prayer, to ask that minister to invoke his (can anyone remember a female in that spot?) divinity's blessing on our highest national office. How would you feel if it were Wright giving that prayer? What kind of racialized uproar would we be seeing?
And yet take a white extremist—someone who espouses what most of us see as unacceptable misogyny, someone who believes in evangelizing all people to his own religion, someone who gives voice to relatively extreme antigay sentiments (as Sara pointed out)—and give him a podium, and the mainstream nods at how inclusive Obama is.
I see a double standard here, but not the same one that you see.
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Like Dahlia amd E.J., I'm not thrilled with Obama's selection of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration, given Warren's opposition to gay marriage and many of his other views. At a time of high divorce rates and increased infidelity—and I'm talking about hetereosexuals, who are the real threat to the institution of marriage—I find it almost comically perverse that conservatives are against a group of people who so earnestly want to form committed, long-term, stable relationships sanctioned by God.
Indeed, when I recently moved temporarily to Dallas, my way of finding an Episcopal church for me and my daughter was to Google "gay," "bishop," "New Hampshire," and "Dallas." And sure enough, I quickly found the one congregation where every priest on the staff had supported Gene Robinson, and I feel right at home. But it did gnaw at me at the time that I just wanted to be preached to by the converted. After all, were I more committed to gay and lesbian rights, wouldn't I have joined precisely those Episcopal congregations where the issue is still an open wound—and believe you me, there are plenty to choose from in North Texas—and tried to persuade my less-enlightened congregants to see the light? I took the easy way out.
In this one sense, I do have grudging respect for Obama’s choice of Warren. Yes, it’s clearly a political calculation—but political in a good sense. I do believe Obama is genuinely trying to create dialogue with those who disagree with him in hopes of bringing a few more wayward souls along. If he can get even a few evangelicals to drop their active opposition to gay rights—to become more agnostic, so to speak, on this one issue—then that might, in fact, further the cause more than I'm doing on Sundays by kneeling, smug and self-satisfied, next to my fellow liberal parishioners.
Obama did, after all, actively campaign on bringing people together, and I remember at least thinking I supported that idea during the election. While I am sinfully spiteful enough after the damage of the Bush years to wish this unity would now take place under dark of night (or maybe involve issues I care less about), so long as Obama continues to push hard for equal rights for all Americans as a matter of policy, I have less of a problem with his otherwise entirely symbolic olive branch to Warren. However, if the result of such good-faith efforts is to provide an opportunity for right-leaners like Rachael to tar Obama again with Jeremiah Wright, then never mind: Bring back those good ole partisan politics.
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Dahlia, you ask if there's a difference between Obama's choice of a "personal spiritual adviser" and the public and political act of picking Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation. I agree there's a difference, but probably not in a way that you will like.
If Obama had attended a quiet, out-of-the-way church that focused on helping its congregants achieve spiritual growth, one where the kindly old minister made house calls to the elderly and infirm, sure, it would be unkind to compare that person to Rick Warren. But if Obama had attended that kind of church, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Instead, he attended a church whose preacher sought out the spotlight and sold DVDs of sermons in which he preached anti-American views. And Obama had a 20-year relationship with that church. Isn't that lengthy commitment, however personal, more telling than a brief and symbolic political act?
Let's frame this another way: If the Republicans had nominated a candidate who attended Rick Warren's church for 20 years, would it have been fair to question that person's choice of spiritual adviser? (Heck, I'd have questioned it.)
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Not surprisingly, and nevertheless unwelcomely, the Bush administration yesterday officially issued a rule barring clinics and hospitals that receive federal funding from refusing to hire medical staff who say they won't participate in procedures because of their moral or religious convictions. This is a bad and confusing idea; it takes a step down the path to nurses and druggists deciding whether you get the morning-after pill on the day you want it. Dahlia has pointed out the contradictions and hypocrisies here: The Bush administration is evincing much concern for the morals of pro-life health care workers even as it dictates a script of contested and medically inaccurate information for abortion providers. Obama will surely revoke this rule, but he can't do it with a quick stroke of the pen. In the meantime, let's at least refrain from calling this "the conscience rule," as the administration urges. It's really a rule about why your conscience is better than my conscience.
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Two things: First. A reader writes to chide me for using the word religious interchangeably with “right-wing evangelical” in my last post. Point well-taken. I didn’t mean to suggest that all religious Americans are represented by Rick Warren. Second, Rachael, surely there is a difference between Obama’s personal spiritual leader and the man he picks to bless the inauguration and his presidency? The choice of Warren in this case was a public and political act.
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E.J.,
Let me start by saying that there is probably very little outside of abortion that the Rev. Rick Warren and I agree on. My righty-ness has more to do with political and economic conservatism than social issues. I am a staunch supporter of gay rights and gay marriage, and I think the best marriages are equal partnerships, not employer-employee relationships. I don't know what the afterlife will bring, but I doubt it's a Christians-only country club.
So I respect and share your concerns about the message President-elect Obama is sending by inviting Warren to do the inaugural invocation. But isn't there an interesting parallel here? Obama attended Trinity United and listened to its pastor, the infamous Rev. Jeremiah Wright, for 20 years. Jeremiah Wright, who is on tape saying, "God Damn America," who has claimed that the government created AIDS for the purpose of "genocide against people of color," and who just a few weeks ago marked the occasion of Pearl Harbor Day by calling it the anniversary of the United States dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.
Yet complaining about Obama's association with Wright was verboten during the election. Conservatives who raised the issue were viewed as intolerant, racist, or muckraking. It was a silly issue blown out of proportion and gave no indication of what kind of president Obama would be, we were told.
Personally, I'm no fan of extremism of any stripe. So I hope that everyone who is so up in arms about Warren right now can at least take a second and reconsider whether we righties were so wrong to complain about Wright.
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E.J.,
I agree. Obama’s decision to ask Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration shows exactly what happens when bipartisanship becomes an end in itself. The president-elect continues to confuse reaching across the aisle with being principled. Sometimes the principle is just too important to compromise. Both Obama and Warren are to be credited for reaching out across the chasm that separates liberals and evangelicals in America. Each has signaled a willingness to talk and—to their huge credit—to listen to ideas different from their own. But as you explain, Warren’s views on women, stem-cell research, and homosexuality are not moderate. He doesn’t even dress them up as moderate!
If Obama wanted to signal his continued respect for Warren and for religious Americans, he could have done so in a thousand ways that would have welcomed them into the tent, without banishing and insulting those already inside.
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Now the Times suggests the recession may spell the end of beauty as we know it, particularly the 21st-century plastic kind. Apparently, the economic downturn has resulted in fewer women getting elective boob jobs and sushi-party Botox injections. God forbid that on top of a skyrocketing unemployment rate, America will be further reduced to suffer the return of sagging breasts and smile lines. Will this recession stop at nothing? As a marketing adviser to plastic surgeons queries rhetorically, "If you are going for buttock implants, do you really need that?” For some, the answer may increasingly be: "No. I do not need those buttock implants." While I'm saddened to think that women who dream of looking like the bolted-on-breasted and frozen-faced cast members of The Real Housewives of Orange County may have their dreams deferred, perhaps more women will turn to alternative beauty therapies, instead—yoga to combat gravity's pull, cosmetic acupuncture treatments that have been used since the Sung Dynasty—and grow old gracefully for less.
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So Rick Warren is going to give the inaugural prayer? Rick Warren, Jerry Falwell in sheep’s clothing, the leader of the Saddleback Church (megachurch, actually, with satellite campuses and broadcast sermons and services), who, as Michelle Goldberg puts it so pleasantly in The Guardian:
He is a man who compares legal abortion to the Holocaust and gay marriage to incest and paedophilia. He believes that Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and other non-Christians are going to spend eternity burning in hell. He doesn't believe in evolution. He recently the social gospel—the late 19th- and early 20th-century Protestant movement that led a religious crusade against poverty and inequality—as "Marxism in Christian clothing.
Or as Linda Hirshman noted on the WAM listserv (I’m posting this with her permission):
Rick Warren’s site for educating preachers, Pastor.com, has a long essay on why women should submit to their husbands. Here’s the money line: "The Greek word for 'submit' is hupotasso. Hupo means "under" and tasso means "to place in order." The compound word hupotasso means "to place under or in an orderly fashion." Paul didn't dislike women, he liked order! He advocated order in the church, order in government, order in business, and, yes, order in the home.
There have been a lot of heartbroken comments about this on change.gov.
Barack, please, say you respect women—and nonevangelicals—more than this. Please?
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Today at the deli while waiting for my egg-and-cheese I found myself speaking in affectionate tones to the obese white cat that resides by the cleaning products. It was a strange moment, because for the first thirty years of my life I had a sort of borderline autism (Catberger syndrome?) regarding my relationship with pets. I've lived with many, but never, I am not proud to report, really loved them, even during the three years I didn't eat meat (for environmental reasons, but mostly because of a boyfriend.) Reading today's Washington Post story on the Chinese protests over the cat meat smuggling trade it finally dawned on me why that was:
"Cats have a strong flavor. Dogs taste much better, but if you really want cat meat, I can have it delivered by tomorrow," said the butcher, who gave only her surname, Huang.
It was just this attitude that outraged about 40 cat lovers who unfurled banners in a tearful protest outside the Guangdong government office in Beijing. Many were retirees who care for stray felines they said were being rounded up by dealers.
It is not uncommon for people (like myself) who once lived in China to read news stories about modern-day China that describes a nation that strikes them as thoroughly unrecognizable, but still: when I lived in Guangzhou as a kid in the early nineties I lived next door to a cat restaurant. We knew it was a cat restaurant because the window was adorned with a large cartoon of a cat in a frying pan. I found this kind of gross at first, but having never had pets (allergies) the idea of eating cats did not bother me on a level much more visceral than the idea of eating bird vomit or tripe, especially once I started learning about the innumerable tragedies (see, for instance, here) that had befallen the Chinese people. Well…
The protest was the latest clash between age-old traditions and the new sensibilities made possible by China's growing affluence. Pet ownership was once rare because the Communist Party condemned it as bourgeois and most people simply couldn't afford a cat or dog.
Well what do you know? I guess the Chinese Communist Party succeeded in indoctrinating at least one expatriate kid with the notion that pets were for the bourgeois. (Admittedly at ten I was, myself, a little bourgeois.) Because it still mystifies me a little to know that the cat protest story will drive a few hundred times more internet traffic than, say, Tuesday's story about the much larger (and um, arguably more important?) protest movement in China targeted at getting the government to rein in exploitative employers and crippling inflation.
Although, to be sure, I suppose their concerns are pretty bourgeois as well:
Drivers shared plans for the strike by text message and word of mouth. Taxi driver Liu Mingsheng said the purpose of the strike "spoke to my heart."
"With my salary, I can have an ordinary life. I can buy books, toys and have medical treatment when I need it. But I can no longer have money to pay the bills and to go to dinner and drinks with friends," said Liu, 38, who used to work as a chauffeur for a state-owned company.
Break my bourgeois heart! You know how I feel about drinking with friends. And come to think of it, the last time I got really drunk I ended the night practically spooning a friend's dog. There's a bestseller in there somewhere.
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Emily Y., Emily B., and Melinda, you all make very important and good points about Caroline Kennedy's possible anointment/appointment to Hillary Clinton's Senate seat. The level of nepotism in Congress is unseemly and does send a negative message to those young people—heck, to adults, too—who are not from rich or famous families and are not politically connected, that they should not even consider going into politics because they have little chance of breaching that increasingly elite wall that separates members of Congress from Average Joe peasants. But I beg to differ a bit with Emily B, who liked the idea of a woman taking over Clinton's seat but wondered if it was right to "overlook Kennedy's lack of most of the usual qualifications, like holding public office?"
Kennedy would not be the first member of Congress to lack that particular qualification. Hillary Clinton had not held public office before becoming a senator either. Even though during the presidential primaries she counted her time as first lady of Arkansas and of the United States as political experience, no one actually elected her to those positions. Using Clinton's logic, if her stints as first lady are to be considered as political experience, then why shouldn't Caroline's membership in a political dynasty be counted, too? After all, she did live for a time in the White House, albeit as a little girl. Other political wives have been similarly appointed to Congress (to fill the seats of their dead spouses) and then went on to win, or lose, re-election. (U.S. Rep. Mary Bono, widow of Sony Bono, and former Sen. Jean Carnahan, wife of the late Sen. Mel Carnahan, come to mind.) Wouldn't it be nice, though, if more members of Congress were like U.S. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy and got there by dint of their own hard work?
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So Barack Obama has chosen poet Elizabeth Alexander to read at this January's inauguration. Who is she, and why her? It's a choice that reflects his serious, pragmatic side. Alexander is an African-American, born in Harlem in 1962, who has published four books; the last, American Sublime, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A professor of African-American studies at Yale (from which she also matriculated), Alexander writes poems that are metaphorically and linguistically dense, layered, and subtle. Her work speaks about black experience (see the excerpt from The Venus Hottentot on her Web page). But she can't be said to privilege identity politics over aesthetics; her poems work more at being complex than didactic. In this sense, she's an analogue to Obama, who doesn't privilege identity politics over his strategy of inclusiveness. Her choice also reflects Obama's faith in the meritocracy: a poet with a Ph.D., Alexander comes across as methodical and hardworking. I saw her give a reading last fall at Princeton with the wonderful young poet Terrance Hayes, a witty former basketball player (whom I'd half-hoped Obama would choose; he would've reflected the president-elect's playful side). Alexander was businesslike: There was no quipping or flirting with the audience.
Though only four poets (I think) have ever read at inaugurations, Alexander won't actually be the first African-American woman to receive the honor —Bill Clinton asked Maya Angelou to read at his 1993 inauguration. Alexander doesn't have much else in common with Angelou, though; she's more like Robert Frost, who read at Kennedy's inauguration. Her best poems are imaginatively expansive as well as philosophical. Here's a representative poem, called "Stravinsky in L.A." You can imagine Obama liking the end:
Stravinsky in L.A.
In white pleated trousers, peering through green
sunshades, looking for the way the sun is red
noise, how locusts hiss to replicate the sun.
What is the visual equivalent
of syncopation? Rows of seared palms wrinkle
in the heat waves through green glass. Sprinklers
tick, tick, tick. The Watts Towers aim to split
the sky into chroma, spires tiled with rubble
nothing less than aspiration. I've left
minarets for sun and syncopation,
sixty-seven shades of green which I have
counted, beginning: palm leaves, front and back,
luncheon pickle, bottle glass, etcetera.
One day I will comprehend the different
grades of red. On that day I will comprehend
these people, rhythms, jazz, Simon Rodia,
Watts, Los Angeles, aspiration.
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(Okay, Kim Kardashian would probably be a lot worse.)
So, I hope it doesn't violate any unofficial policy to discuss times certain of us XX Factorians have interacted "In Real Life" because I am going to mention the fact that some of us met Eliot Spitzer on Monday night at the Slate holiday party. Not because I care if he's sufficiently sorry for screwing prostitutes—I'm with you on that, Susannah—but because my brief conversation with the fellow speaks to a concern I have about the woman—and you won't be surprised I'm glad she's a woman!—Obama just appointed to helm the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mary Schapiro. Spitzer agreed with me that the campaign of incoming Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to oust FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair was worrisome, because it suggests Geithner is exactly what you'd fear of someone with Geithner's credentials (Clintonite, New York Fed, Council of Foreign Relations, Kissinger Associates)—an insider. Now we have Schapiro, current CEO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the supposed "self-regulator" of the financial services industry.
If any regulatory body involved in this disaster has been a more abysmal failure than the SEC, it's the "self-regulator" that was supposed to monitor all those concerns the real (i.e., paid slightly less than $2 million a year) regulators had so steadily deregulated out from under them over the past 10 years: mind-blowing overleverage and the attendant counterparty risk, unbridled short-selling, the over-the-counter derivatives that amplified the current crisis, etc., etc. What was Schapiro doing all that time? Cracking down on over-the-top Wall Street …
Parties! (What, you thought I was going to say "bonuses"?) Excuse me while I shoot myself in the face for a second. Would it have killed Obama to appoint someone with the perspective to understand that all those unseemly parties wouldn't have been possible if not for the phony "profits" Wall Street booked selling everyone on their mathematical model-supported certainty that everything would keep going up forever?
Schapiro also took credit in an October speech for pushing to regulate credit-default swaps, the "insurance" contracts on mortage-backed securities written with reckless abandon by many of the recipients of our trillion-dollar bailout. I'm no expert, but nowhere have I read that Wall Street's bank-funded self-regulatory trade group was a leading voice in favor of getting the government to regulate the financial instruments Wall Street claimed it could self-regulate. Even ickier, this smacks of the same sort of retroactive flip-flopping (flip-swapping!) Geithner's promoters have displayed in trying to advance the notion that Geithner, had he been "left to his own devices," would not have allowed Lehman Bros. to go bankrupt. We know who did advocate regulation of derivatives—Schapiro's successor at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born. By all accounts, Born was less "popular" in the post than Schapiro had been. Now more than ever, we need a few good unpopular people in these positions. Why not someone like Born or Bair? Or even less popular right now, a certain Slate columnist? A little exile can be an edifying thing, but no one seems more insider-y than Geithner and Schapiro. (And ugh, for that matter, Caroline Kennedy.)
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Sometimes, Hanna, the self-parody is so much funnier (and sadder) than anything people can make up. The Daily Beast has a first-person account by Alexandra Penney, who lost her life savings in the Bernard Madoff scheme. Not only is she going to have to sell her cottage in West Palm Beach, Fla., (her second home) but
I love beautiful things: high thread count sheets, old china, watches, jewelry, Hermes purses and Louboutin shoes. I like expensive French milled soap, good wines and white truffles. I have given extravagant gifts like diamond earrings. I traveled a lot. In this last year, I've been Laos, Cambodia, India, Russia, and Berlin for my first solo art show. Will I ever be able to explore exotic places again?
Now, I have a measure of sympathy for those who lost their fortunes to Madoff. They did nothing wrong except to trust him with their money. I hope that our legal system metes out the proper punishment for him. (I will try to set aside my inclination to remind people that the first rule of investing is Diversify! Diversify! Diversify!) And normally I don't hate on people for enjoying the finer things in life. But when hundreds of thousands of people are losing their jobs or having their hours and benefits cut, and all of us are cutting back on expenses, neither can I get too worked up about someone having to give up her Hermes bags.
That wasn't the only thing that bothered me about Penney's story, though. She recounts how, in the 1970s, she was married to "a talented industrial designer. We lived right off Park Avenue and had a son. But the chichi uptown lifestyle was not for me." So she gets divorced and brags about leaving without taking a penny, opting to work three jobs to support herself and her son. Because "I was a feminist and I would make it on my own." But isn't that as much foolish pride as it is feminism? She could have refused spousal support but taken child support and worked a bit less, enabling her to spend more time with her son.
I realize I'm looking at this from the perspective of 2008 and not the 1970s, when she made her decisions. Was feminism that much different then, that motherhood was seen as secondary to being independent?
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Jacob Gershman's New Republic spanking of Eliot Spitzer for not appearing contrite enough upon his return to public scrutiny by way of a new Slate column is causing a minor blogosphere kerfuffle. As Gershman sees it, Spitzer isn't sufficiently sorry for having sex with a call girl, cheating on his wife, and, according to a former Spitzer aide, "the fact that the entire state government ground to a halt." Instead, the New York governor turned Luv Gov should endure a period of professional mourning, throw himself into public service so he'll be re-seen as wholly contrite, and then slowly but surely earn back the trust of the hopefully forgiving (and forgetful) American public.
Unsurprisingly, Salon's rabid legal dog Glenn Greenwald doesn't exactly agree. Greenwald, whose general modus operandi involves identifying one wrong, comparing it to anything the Bush administration has ever done, and deeming the supposed wrong a right by comparison, posits prostitution as a victimless crime for which Spitzer should never apologize. Rather, he presents Spitzer as a pseudo-victim who committed a "minor, consensual, victimless, private crime," a teeny-tiny not-even transgression for which he was "forced to resign as Governor, had intimate details of his sex life voyeuristically dissected by hordes of people driven by titillation masquerading as moral disgust, and was as humiliated and disgraced as a political figure can be." Sniff. Dick Cheney should apologize! he trumpets.
Back in January, I launched an online project called Letters From Johns. While call-girl stories aren't all that uncommon these days, there wasn't much known about why men pay for sex. I put out a query, asking men to send me their anonymous stories about why they'd paid for sex, and the letters started coming. While many of the men I heard from were contrite and conflicted, many were not. Take, for example, "I Am Ashamed of Nothing I Have Done." Unlike Greenwald, I don't believe prostitution is a "victimless crime"—the business of buying and selling sex is far too complicated for sex workers and johns alike to be summed up so succinctly—but I don't know that I understand why Spitzer should have to apologize for what other men do, too, private actions that sometimes sit in stark contrast to their professional lives. The only difference is that Spitzer got caught. Maybe he could apologize for that?
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All the talk about Blago's fundraising in Illinois makes it harder to hear the talk about Caroline Kennedy's potential fundraising in New York, don't you think?
I mean, rationally, one has nothing to do with the other. On the contrary, the country's most entrepreneurial governor (we hope)—and Kennedy are from such different parts of the jungle that Blagojevich's apparent thuggishness is something of an argument for her candidacy: Her granddaddy was a bootlegger, so his descendants didn't have to be, and she isn't likely to be tempted by the kind of pay-to-play schemes that seem to have so consumed Blago's brain that I'll be amazed if he doesn't wind up pleading insanity.
Still, you hear that story about how Jesse Jackson Jr.'s wife may have been passed over for a big state job because she wouldn't be held up for $25,000 by her extortionist of a governor, and that can't help but effect how you hear Harry Reid's comment about all the lovely pots of money that Caroline K. could raise for herself and other Democrats: Ugh, right? As Emily B. points out, that should not be the yardstick we use to take the measure of a candidate.
Whether we talk about it or not, though, the ability to raise pots of cash is, in fact, a huge part of the job. So much so that my distinct impression back when I used to cover the New York congressional delegation was that they had very little time to learn about public policy—through no fault of their own—because they had to spend so much time dialing for dollars and attending fundraisers. As a result, I don't assume that her potential competitors who've been serving in the House are necessarily so much more steeped in policy than she is. And while I agree with Emily Y. that nepotism is demoralizing for those of us who are have-nots when it comes to family or other connections, our current system virtually guarantees political dynasties and other celebrity candidates, like Reagan and Arnold and Al Franken, maybe even as a protection against Blago-style graft. As long as name ID equals campaign cash and the candidate who raises the most so often wins, how could it be otherwise?
I also take issue with Emily B's feeling that New York Democrats don't have to worry too much about campaign cash anyway, because they'll surely hold on to Hillary's Senate seat in 2012. The likely Republican candidate, Peter King, is so reasonable, likeable, and well-funded that I'm not at all certain of that; he's no Rick Lazio and should not be underestimated.
Mostly, though, I like Caroline for the job for reasons that have nothing to do with money: Because her Uncle Teddy has done such an admirable job on so many issues that are high on my own list—health care, anti-poverty programs, pushing for worker protections—I can't help hoping that his favorite niece has learned from him and could take up where he leaves off. She's a plain old-fashioned great story. And for perhaps silly, sentimental, even tribal reasons, I'd like to see her happy.
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Last week, we put out a call for a parody of the "Feel the Crunch" series in the New York Times. Here is our favorite, by Elizabeth Lazar of Chicago:
"As the Recession Worsens, Rich Teens Show Character"
This fall, Morgan Wellington began her senior year of high school much like the other privileged students at Kenilworth High, on Chicago's suburban North Shore. Her parents were providing a weekly allowance to cover basics such as a spa regimen, bento-box lunches and gas to cover the strenuous 8-block school commute.
But in October, Morgan's dad lost his top-paying job managing his father's investment firm, Wellington Fund in the Loop. He was forced to take a lower-ranking executive position with more hours and less pay at the nearby Wellington Family Foundation. Morgan's life changed almost overnight.
First to go was the school morning spa ablutions, a daily package which included black-soap body cleansing, steam room, deluge of freezing water, Spanish-whirlpool followed by a brief massage.
"I had to start showering at home twice a week," said Morgan, who is 17. "At first it was really hard and my pore size almost doubled, but now I'm totally used to it. I've gotten really good with the exfoliator."
It is impossible to quantify how many hyper-affluent parents have pruned allowances in recent months—or how many of their offspring, in turn, have adjusted their lifestyles to meet the stringent terms of the newly pared budgets. But interviews with dozens of North Shore teenagers, parents and teachers suggest that many youngsters in the area seem to have developed a new work ethic as the economic crisis that has jeopardized their parents' investments has also led to reduced spending money for after-school shopping sprees at the local Marc Jacobs or study-group hangs at the Michelin 5 corner spot up the street.
"I told my friends just to meet me in my home library wing for exam crams because by the end of the week I was starving and couldn't afford anything on the menu except the veal carpaccio appetizer. I was embarrassed at first, but my friends have been really supportive."
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Emily B, great catch on Caroline Kennedy selling her mother's handbags as tag sale dreck. I also agree with you that however admirable her volunteer work is, it's ridiculous to say this qualifies her for appointment to the Senate (even while acknowledging it's hard to fathom what qualifies many senators for the Senate). But I disagree with your Palin analogy. However ill-prepared Palin was for the vice presidency, she was chosen to run because she got elected governor of Alaska. And she did that without money, connections, or a famous name. Melinda eloquently wrote about wanting to see Caroline take up the Kennedy flame. But I would rather to see it doused. This country is ever more becoming a nation of haves and have-nots. By "haves" I don't just mean the rich. If you are lucky to have caring parents who are good role models and nurture good habits in you, you have an advantage in life—but you still have to work to make something of yourself. But there are many kids who have nothing—some of them go to the New York public schools Caroline Kennedy raised money for—who think there's no point making an effort because everything is already wired for the haves. They think that when the haves want something, all they have to do is pick up the phone and life's opportunities are handed to them. So Caroline Kennedy picks up the phone and announces that for her first full-time job, she'd like to be senator from New York, and thus is annointed. That's a bad message to send.
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Melinda, I see the appeal of framing whether Caroline Kennedy should get to be New York's senator in terms of whether she'd be good at it. But why should we take only her measure, as opposed to weigh her against other candidates? I'm with my fellow Emily, choking on dynasty fatigue. What especially irks me about this example is the wielding of Kennedy's fundraising potential as an argument for appointing her. (Thank you, Harry Reid.) It's bad enough that name recognition gives candidates a big money edge when they run for election. Can't the playing field at least be level when a candidate is getting appointed and doesn't actually need to run a single ad or print a single poster? Whomever Gov. Patterson chooses will have years to amass the war chest of an incumbent. He shouldn't make this appointment based on who starts with the biggest money edge. Especially since New York shouldn't be tough terrain for Democrats in this new blue era.
Nor do I see much in Kennedy's lovely public service record to demonstrate why she'd be a great senator, either. I'm glad she helped get the Gates Foundation to give $51 million to the New York public schools even though schools chancellor Joel Klein helped sue Microsoft as a Justice Department lawyer in the Clinton administration. But that's about rich and famous people courting other rich and famous people. It's not proof of a deep mastery of policy. Or even skill at handling constituents or fellow politicians. Obviously for some women (including me), it's exciting and somehow fitting to imagine a woman taking over Hillary Clinton's seat. But is that reason to overlook Kennedy's lack of most of the usual qualifications, like holding public office? Framed this way, how different would her ascension be, really, from the pole vault that Sarah Palin tried?
One more pressing question: The NYT reports that at a Central Park tag sale Kennedy put together for the schools, some bargain hunters, "unwittingly, walked away with evening bags that belonged to her mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis." Does that mean that Caroline K. sold off her mother's things without saying whose heirlooms they were? And she's supposed to be a fundraising goddess? Think how much more those handbags would have sold for if they'd been auctioned off as a piece from Jackie O.
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A few weeks ago, I posted about Women’s Wear Daily’s gallery of inauguration looks for Michelle Obama. Many of the top designers who submitted sketches made Michelle look white, rendering her skin in cottonball hues. This week, WWD asked designers to envision what Barack should wear on January 20. The resulting sketches are much more 
representational—and much darker skinned—than those of Michelle. Sure, Marc Jacobs offers a stylized white blank, and Brioni’s sand-colored sketch looks like a Modigliani portrait of Little Richard. For the most part, though, there is a real sense of comfort with Obama’s skin color: The president-elect looks handsome, recognizable, and discernibly black in these sketches from Nautica and Brooks Brothers. Tommy Hilfiger also gives Obama brown skin (although, in an amusing act of ego, he adds a face that looks just like Tommy Hilfiger’s). There’s also a distinct vein of photo-realism here: Sketches from Ferragamo, Sean John, Turnbull and Asser, Richard James Savile Row, and Zegna all look uncannily like our prez-elect.
I wonder why designers rendered Barack more accurately than Michelle. It’s tempting to credit the fashion industry’s habit of ignoring black women, but fashion isn’t crawling with black men, either. The discrepancy may also be explained by fashion culture: Perhaps womenswear designers are expected to be fantastical while menswear designers (used to dealing with less imaginative clients) typically produce more prosaic sketches. But I suspect designers had fun incorporating Obama’s face into their sketches because—particularly on the Shepard Fairey-style posters that were ubiquitous this year—it’s become as familiar as a logo. Barack’s features and skin color are now as iconic, emblematic, and chic as the Chanel C's or the Lacoste ‘gator. Designers are thrilled to employ them.
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I, too, was fascinated by that Washington Post piece on pregnant high school students—and very conflicted about it. Making it as easy as possible for pregnant teens and young moms to get an education is admirable, but it also, I'd imagine, establishes unrealistic expectations for these girls. Once they're done with high school, even if they qualify for assistance, as many of them do, they'll face far more obstacles. It seems highly unlikely that they would have access to on-site day care in the real world, for instance.
Ann, I love your idea of having a new mom speak at the "family life" courses—and maybe she can be joined by a young mother who got pregnant as a student and has spent a few years trying to juggle work and getting a toddler to (and paying for) day care. That might help the girls and guys alike realize that the school's Tiny Titans is not something to be taken for granted.
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Susannah, I'm surprised at you: Can't you see how much we've accomplished in Iraq, that Bushie was pelted with shoes and not IEDs? ("We will be hailed as liberators. They will throw flowers. Or boots; stuff happens.'') Can you imagine footwear flying at any other world leader, and the only response being laughter all around the world? I am for peaceful demonstrations, and in these tough economic times would not waste any Louboutins on our soon-to-be ex. But used Payless sandals, maybe, left in front of the White House? Barefoot for Bush could really catch on.
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Did anyone else see the piece about teenage parents in high school in the Washington Post Outlook section on Sunday? It's rare to get the kind of close-up look offered by Patrick Welsh, an English teacher at Alexandria's T.C. Williams High School, where 70 girls—almost all low-income black or Hispanic students—out of a 2,000-plus student body are either pregnant or already mothers and now have an in-school day care facility, Tiny Titans. He focused on an issue blurred in the Bristol Palin coverage: mainstreaming adolescent parents and its dilemmas. Welsh was unsettled less by the absence of stigma and more by the not-so-tacit atmosphere, and assumption by the girls, of approval. Sure, there is a required "family life" course at school that duly covers the dangers of teenage sexuality and pregnancy, and the Adolescent Health Center is a few blocks away. But as a social worker in the support network put it, "I don't personally accept it, but once a girl is pregnant, I have to be all open arms."
It made me wonder if schools have considered even more mainstreaming, with a twist. What might be the impact of having teen mothers—after they're done boasting about their pregnant bellies (as they evidently do) and deep into dirty diapers—help give those "family life" classes? Welsh quotes one mother who sounds ready to give her classmates an earful about "how difficult their lives are going to be if they have a baby." Are there enough others to be a group of peer advisers? If the adults can't convey disapproval, maybe the kids could help—and convincingly.
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Pipeline points out that a pair of women's spiked Louboutins would have made for a better shoe-weapon to be hurled at Bush in Iraq, rather than a simple pair of men's loafers. They suggest a Burberry studded heel or Louboutin for Rodarte with gold spikes, although I, myself, might have selected an Alexander McQueen's crystal-heeled boot for its goring potential. Elsewhere, Fighting Liberals suggests sending your old shoes to the George W. Bush Presidential Library, and Boing Boing has a roundup of amusing Shoegate GIFs.
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Have to say, Emily, that your case against Caroline Kennedy for Hillary's Senate seat is a lot more convincing than Richard Bradley's argument that she'd been too tough on him but might not be tough enough to campaign or legislate. (Huh?) And when she heard that Gary Ackerman had compared her to J.Lo., I hope she laughed her tushy off. (Cee K from the Block for Senate? Isn't that a lot like John McCain comparing Obama to Paris Hilton?) Still, I find the whole idea of her second act in Obama's Democratic Party completely irresistible.
She's already come a long way since she stood by her Uncle Teddy at American University last year and endorsed Obama; in retrospect, that seems to have been a turning point both in the campaign and in her life, just a beat ahead of her uncle's cancer diagnosis and her discovery that she not only wanted to pass the baton, but run with it. I find it moving that it took Obama to call her to public service, and think it would be awfully compelling to watch her function as both keeper of the flame and confidante of the change-agent-in-chief. As someone who never wanted to get in the game before, she could be a bridge between the old guard and the new politics.
It is true that suffering and experience are not the same thing—though they were confused often enough during all those arguments about why Hillary ought to get this or that job simply by virtue of all she'd been through. But for me, the question isn't so much whether Kennedy "deserves" the seat. (If politics were about deserves, Nita Lowey would be in her second term as New York's junior senator, and we wouldn't even be having this conversation.) The more important question is whether she'd be any good at it, and I'd have to vote yes on that—then watch with intense interest to see if she proved me right.
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In a weekend New York Times op-ed on hook-up culture in high schools and colleges, Charles M. Blow writes as if casual sex instead of dating is a new-millennium thing: "Dating is dated. Hooking up is here to stay. ... When I first heard about hooking up years ago, I figured that it was a fad that would soon fizzle. I was wrong. It seems to be becoming the norm."
It's not so new, Mr. Blow. From the Vows column from this weekend's NYT, on a couple who met in 1975, married in 1985, divorced in 1995, and remarried on Nov. 29:
They first went "moon eyed" for each other in 1975, skipping past the dating phase, and, in the spirit of the times, jumping into a live-in relationship.
"People didn't date," remembered Ms. Kallir, 54. "You hung out and then you slept together."
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So, Caroline Kennedy has apparently decided she would like her Uncle Robert's Senate seat (about to evacuated by Hillary Clinton). One of the refreshing things about Caroline supporting the presidential race of Barack Obama over Clinton was that it signaled a rejection of dynastic politics. Yes, that was ironic coming from the Kennedys, but, fool that I am, I thought it meant that they, somehow, were recognizing the end of their own dynastic ambitions. Shortly afterward Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with brain cancer, and I read that said upon his death, he wanted his wife, Victoria, to get his seat. And now Caroline Kennedy, who has famously led a very private life, has deigned to allow that she will accept an appointment to the Senate. This depresses me. One wonderful thing about Obama's election is that is says in America if you have the drive, the smarts, the will you can come from nowhere and get to the top. The appointment of Caroline Kennedy just says what we all know—if you want to get to the top, the trip is a lot easier and shorter if you're born there.
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Here, under the rubric of "Feel the Crunch," the Times profiles 17-year-old Jodi Hamilton, who has had to give up her $100 allowance and her weekly pilates private. Also, no more takeout sushi. You know where this is going: It's time for the parody. Readers, please send us your best writeup for the "Times Richest and Neediest" to doublex.slate@gmail.com. The winner will be published here next week.
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Not that there's anything wrong with Obama's future chief of staff Rahm Emanuel talking to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich about the list of contenders for Obama's Senate seat, as Fox Chicago News has reported. In fact, it would have been plum weird if they hadn't talked about it. Still, this is not exactly in keeping with Obama's statement that he'd had "no contact'' with Blago's office, is it? Please no Clintonian "depends what the meaning of contact is'' nonsense. Please remember that thing about how it's the cover-up that'll get you, even if you're covering up very little, or nothing at all. Please just come out and say Rahm talked to him or whatever actually happened and basta. Please do not delay.
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Funniest thing on TV in days: The Daily Show's Hall and Oates tribute to Alan Colmes.
Least funny showcase of stereotypes that makes me want to rap someone's knuckles with my ruler: Jon Stewart and Philip Seymour Hoffman on same, discussing Catholicism and Hoffman's new movie Doubt, adapted from the great John Patrick Shanley play about a (potential) pedophile priest, which I saw twice (and liked Eileen Atkins even better in it than Cherry Jones, of The Heiress and 24).
Stewart: The idea of holy folks, the priests and the nuns, having an argument, it's just something that never occurred to me that they would have, like, an office argument.
Hoffman: I know, you kind of don't think they're real when you're a kid. You think they go behind closed doors and something strange happens but it's magical and you shouldn't know anything about it. It is kind of strange, because I didn't have a big connection to the Catholic Church—I mean I was, but when I was playing those scenes, I remember actually in the scene walking into the room and action, cameras rolling, and still having this odd feeling of "What do we do here?''
Stewart: There's a priestly or religious figure sort of countenance that you imagine that never turns out and you forget that oh, you're just like, you're just some schmuck that decided never to have sex again.
Hoffman: And also, "I'm a man, so therefore I have all the power." Which is something that I don't—I don't live in that world ...
Stewart: Right ... I wonder, it's probably almost harder to hold on to your bearings in that, because it's, the rules of engagement are so different I would imagine in the clergy in any religion, and you do have this, not only do you have the power over those that work for you but you also have this pipeline to God. People have to come to you and be like, "Do you think he's going to be mad at me about the whole ...''
Hoffman: I was told, which I didn't know, that before all the changes happened in the '60s with the Catholic Church, the whole service was done with the priest's back to the audience. ... Because they had to talk to God through the, everyone basically like poltergeist through the priest.
Stewart: He's like Dixie cups with the string; it's fascinating stuff.
Philip, babe, loved you in The Savages, Capote, even State and Main, but don't talk about what you don't know. Sister Mary Melinda has your penance now: Read a bleepin' book, for heaven's sake.
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It was REAGAN all along, after all these years!
"The financial crisis is not only a cause of our national malaise," says Good's Jeffrey Sachs, "but also a symptom of the deeper wrong turn that America made decades ago, when Ronald Reagan declared that government had to get out of the way to restore the national economy. After a wild decade of high inflation and soaring energy prices in the 1970s, Reagan made government the enemy. From that point on, the name of the game was to cut taxes, shrink government, and allow the magic of the market to deliver the goods."
Cutting taxes? Shrinking government? Relying on the free market? The horror!
But that's not all, Sachs rails. For those playing at home: Reagan and his "fervid movie-land imagination" (fervid?) ruined the economy; destroyed the community; decivilized capitalism; founded partisanship; sneered at disease, hunger, and poverty; told us all to stop caring about the future; laid waste to the environment; and brought on the shadowy darkness of changing climates. When did the man SLEEP?
Luckily, Sachs proclaims, all is not lost. We've entered the age of Obama (who, incidentally, happens/ed to like Reagan and what he did for our country—at least until he realized he wasn't supposed to), and as soon as we learn to stop worrying and love ... taxes—which are, apparently, "the price we pay for civilization" and the only choice we have, with "the budget pushing toward $1 trillion"—then we'll fix the world, walk on water, community will be restored, and our blasted economy will stand up on weak legs and dance.
So long as we screw Reagan, who didn't, like, pick the country up off the brink of a major recession; create 17 million new jobs; cut black unemployment in half; do a little tax reform; restore the idea that the private individuals/businesses, not the government, were the source of prosperity; and work out a few minor misunderstandings with the Soviet Union ... or anything like that.
Right. Seems to me like Obama realizes what Sachs doesn't: that the economy he's been dealt has strong resemblance to the one Reagan revived, and while he had his failings, the "great communicator" got a few things right. For starters, preaching "the right message at the right time."
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Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the signing of the gorgeous U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, worked on by Eleanor Roosevelt (among many others). Like so many statements of high-minded ideals, it has been honored, alas, more in the breach than in the reality. But at least the world has these beautiful paragraphs as a goal at which to aim, a kind of Holy Book or Ten (OK, 30) Commandments of how governments should treat people.
The particular human rights violation that has preoccupied my attention for the past year has been corruption in international adoption—in particular, the way that Western adoption agencies’ disproportionately large payments for “adoptable” babies have induced unscrupulous locals in poor and corrupt countries to buy, coerce, defraud, and kidnap babies. The stories of families (in Nepal, Guatemala, Cambodia, Vietnam, and elsewhere) that have unwittingly lost their children forever to foreign countries have broken my heart. So have the stories of adoptive families who learned that their older children—adopted purely to save a child from terrifying want!—were sold or stolen, traumatized, and desperately missed their first families.
Foreign Policy published my central investigation into the supply-and-demand cycle of international adoption, titled “The Lie We Love” and now free online. We’ve loaded a lot of the background research and documentation (and are still adding more!) on the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism Web site. Today the Boston Globe published my short essay warning families to be wary of pulling an Angelina Jolie and adopting for humanitarian reasons—lest, instead of saving an orphan, they inadvertently create one. Did any XX’ers know that international adoption could be this ugly?
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Actually, E.J., I read Gail Collins this morning and thought, well, I needn't have been such an old sourpuss. Nothing wrong with copping a laugh, especially when the general sitch is so not funny. And Emily, your case against dynasties, political and otherwise, is exactly (and ironically, maybe, on this one occasion) why I'm all for affirmative action: Because without it, even now, the merit in meritocracy all too often means "worthy enough, after Daddy got me into Yale and Uncle Potsy used his piston at the bank." As most Americans share your view, why do the sons and daughters of privilege and power continue to enjoy such an electoral advantage? Because name ID equals campaign cash, of course. Which is why, if Jon Stewart ever asked me that question he puts to a lot of the official types who go on his show about what they'd do if they had one crack at a magic wand, I would say: Money out of politics, many problems solved. (Yes, I have heard of the First Amendment, but refuse to believe there's no way to get a lot closer to a level playing field than we are right now.)
As for the presumption of Jesse Jr.'s innocence, of course you are right, and it's perfectly possible that he neither offered Blagojevich anything in return for the Senate appointment nor deputized anyone else to do so. Or, maybe he did make some vague noise along the lines of, "Sure, I'd be happy to support you in any future race,'' when what the thought bubble really contained was, "Haha, what future race? The only contributions you're going to need are to your defense fund, or for cigarette money when you're in the cell next to Ryan in Terre Haute." What I have a harder time believing is that Blago could go a full 90 minutes—the length of time he apparently spent meeting with Jackson on Monday—without talking moolah. Or that Jackson had no idea that Springfield's Monty Hall was looking for a quid pro quo; since Gov. Potty Mouth seems to have been raising his favorite subject with everyone he sat by on the El, that would make Junior sort of uniquely out of the Loop, wouldn't it?
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Melinda, Emily, Jack, of course you are all right. Of course Blago’s misbehavior is quite horrifying, and at the same time, not yet proven to be illegal. It's appalling to think that Blago may have perverted the Illinois Senate race and may have implicated Jesse Jr. If this were happening in my state, I would be utterly glum. I am duly chastened. Please accept my apologies at having been so unseemly gleeful about Blago’s comic-novel over-the-top misbehavior. I may be more affected than I realized from the cabin fever that comes with having been alone at home sick for a week (and out of both orange juice and ginger ale!). Or maybe my reaction to the Blago news was just relief—after a week of listening to public radio while drifting in and out of sleep—at getting to hear about something other than world financial apocalypse, something that seems easily punished?
Unlike me, Gail Collins today hit exactly the right note of bemused (and, yes, dismayed) schadenfreude, so let me defer to her. No more laughing from me. And to rehabilitate myself, I promise to post next on something about which I can be serious.
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Hey Melinda, you're right about the question that's everywhere today, Did Jesse Jackson Jr. or a Jesse bagman "pay to play" with Blagojevich? With all due respect to worthy speculators everywhere, I'm going to soberly concentrate on assuming the best until I see evidence of worse. I'm feeling duly chastened by Jack Shafer's piece, in which he points out that we're all ready to convict Blagojevich for selling a Senate seat before he's even indicted on those charges. (Money quote from the legal expert the NYT relies on today: "He's dead.")
I've got a different bone to pick with treating open Senate seats as ice cream sundaes with the cherry on top. Are we really so impoverished for political talent that Chicago will pick a Jackson, New York a Kennedy or a Cuomo, and Delaware (in two years, after seat-warmer Edward Kaufman goes home) a Biden? This is boring. It is like legacy admissions run riot. And it's reminiscent of Tudor England. Which as you may recall didn't last all that long.
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If Blago is cracking you up, E.J., then there are a lot more laughs in store, because this will not be over any time soon. Was it just coincidence that Obama's friend Valerie Jarrett suddenly said she wasn't interested in the Senate seat on the same day Blago Inc. held a long conference call - with some unnamed party in Washington on the line - detailing what he wanted in return for the seat? If business as usual compromises our best shot at reform and at rewriting the manual before Obama's even sworn in, ain't none of us going to be laughing. Today's question: Did Jesse Jackson, Jr. (aka Candidate 5 for the Senate seat, as laid out in the criminal complaint) really agree to raise $500,000 for Blago in return for the appointment? Unclear, but the Gov. doesn't seem like the sort of guy who would spend 90 minutes just kicking around Junior's hopes and dreams, does he?
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On my blog, I wrote at length about what Obama's attorney general pick may mean to the adult movie industry. I've been writing about the sex business for over a decade now, and while every previous presidential election has seen some discussion around obscenity, this one was remarkable for its total lack thereof. As Declan McCullagh opined on CNET, Eric Holder is a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to free speech. A decade ago, as deputy attorney general under Janet Reno, he pushed U.S. attorneys to prosecute pornographers, although the Clinton administration took a mostly hands-off approach toward obscenity prosecutions. Interestingly, Clinton's leave 'em alone attitude toward the adult industry spawned one of the most dramatic changes in the business, as the largely unchecked business of making porn movies became increasingly more extreme. These days, most liberals believe the less government intervention the better when it comes to free speech, but in Porn Valley, "anything goes" isn't always the best answer when it comes to the hardcore day-to-day lives of adult performers.
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TELL me that the Illinois governor's idiocy isn't entertaining. Melinda, please don't take this personally. How absolutely dumb and jaw-droppingly venal can you be? Openly selling a Senate seat? Shaking down the Chicago Tribune's editorial board: Did he really think the newspaper wouldn't expose him? You couldn't put this in a comic novel: It's too ridiculous for fiction.
Maybe I'm finding it hilarious because I just spent a week in bed with bronchitis, and I really needed to laugh out loud (albeit wheezing a bit). Maybe it's because I assume that politicians are often doing nasty things behind our backs, and I love to see them get their comeuppance. Or maybe it's because my very first political memory is of coming home eagerly every day from junior high school to watch the Watergate hearings. How much fun was that?! The evil henchmen Haldeman and Ehrlichman! The upright whistleblower John Dean! The irrepressible Martha Mitchell! The haplessly loyal Rosemary Woods! Oh golly, that was so much better than watching game shows or my mother's soap operas. And in Watergate the bad guys actually paid for their wrongdoing—unlike, say, the Reagan administration for its constitutional violations in Iran-Contra, or W.'s administration for eliminating habeas corpus, violating the Geneva Conventions, and lying to take us to war?
Come to think of it, maybe that's why I'm lapping this one up so happily: It sure looks like Blago will quickly go down, and other evildoers with him. And because it's so nice to have a good old-fashioned influence-peddling scandal to follow for awhile, something purely about self-interest and money—instead of a pointless sex scandal, where we have to debate Whether and Why We Care What He Does With His Zipper. (Boring!) The Blago cast of characters looks like it will be lovely as it unrolls in the weeks to come. The Upright Patrick Fitzgerald! The (so-far) Honorable President-elect Barack Obama, whose push for an ethics bill may have set the ball rolling! The Lady Macbeth, played by Patti Blagojevich! Who else will we meet in the weeks to come?
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In light of various conversations as of late regarding the sex lives of young women, I was amused to see Trend de la Creme's clever coolhunter take on the phenomenon. Pointing to an array of recent studies and stories on female sexuality gone wild, Jill Sherman spotlights the advent of one-night stand "kits" marketed to women. "[I]s this fem phenom behind the proliferation of one-night stand kits made specifically for the woman who wakes up in dire need of a fresh pair of panties? Or did women just get tired of gifting fruit baskets to their girlfriends, driving demand for something a little more interesting?" she wonders. From the "Just in Case" overnighter to the "Ho on the Go" set to the "Walk of Shame" kit, the results suggest there's a market in pandering to women with a morning-after guilt complex about casual sex.
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Moe,
I think your response was both perceptive and accurate. And you referenced freaking Fukuyama, which I just have to respect. If we weren't on the same page before, we are now. Except maybe about the whole we-drink-because-of-the-pill thing, 'cause, I mean, we get fat because of the pill, everyone around us wants to drink because of the pill; it doesn't usually drive me to bemoan my lack of social capital. Maybe the lack of chocolate chips in my belly... but not my lack of social capital.
No, no, I got your real point, and I deeefinitely found it a little sobering (or not! ha, ha?) that the only place where the Royal We can find trust these days is in the poorly lit, boozy confines of the last social institution standing. Or kind of standing, if you're frequenting the right bar.
After reading your post, a friend of mine raised a point I thought you'd find interesting: He said that the lack of trust in circulation these days is a result of the decline of our "stabilizing institutions" (his term) and the trust they once fostered. He came up with four institutions: the family, the community, the church, and the government, all four of which, he argued, were mindful of their proper roles and capable of serving humanity at some point and time.
Not recently, perhaps. Regardless, we don't trust those institutions any longer, and so we've withdrawn from them (possible explanation for the disappearance of the moral hazard?). We've gone in search of new communities and found them online—which is the other place, I'd argue, we go to find trust besides the bar. But when we sign off, you're right, we go where everybody knows your name/ and everybody's glad you came. And with a buzz and the hope of "getting out there and making some bad decisions" (great wisdom from the mouth of Vince Vaughn!), we find ... trust? Or ... something like it. I guess everything really does look better after a few drinks.
I suppose it'll have to do, anyway, until those old stabilizing institutions step up their game and figure out a way to regain a little trust themselves.
Until then, we'll be at the bar.
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We're pleased to announce that Jessica Grose is coming on board as the managing editor of Double X, Slate's new women's web magazine launching in the spring. Jessica comes to us from Jezebel, and before her stint there, Spin. Jessica, welcome—we're very glad to have you.
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Just finished reading the Blagojevich complaint, which I shouldn't have looked at so late at night, because it only woke me up and raised all kinds of perplexing questions. Like, did the man never see a single episode of The Sopranos? There he is, on his very own phone, endlessly babbling "me want payola'' (OK, that is a paraphrase). He even talks about news reports that the Federal investigators who've been after him for years are tapping his phones!
Love his wife's cameo, in which the first lady of Illinois is screaming so loudly while he's on the phone that the wiretap picks her up, too, raging that he should withhold state assistance for the Tribune Co.'s sale of Wrigley Field unless the Chicago Tribune fires its editorial writers for being so mean and critical of their fine governor. How was it Mrs. B so charmingly put it? Oh, yes, here it is: "Hold up that fucking Cubs shit ... fuck them." But this is exciting: Singled out for the ire of the Blagos was ... my son's lovely godfather, editorial writer John McCormick. According to the criminal complaint, "ROD BLAGOJEVICH asked HARRIS [his chief of staff] whether he told Deputy Governor A that 'McCormick is going to get bounced at the Tribune.' (McCormick is believed to be John P. McCormick, the Chicago Tribune's Deputy Editorial Page Editor) ... HARRIS stated, 'I had singled out McCormick as somebody who was the most biased and unfair.' " Later, the guv is mad when despite his machinations, John survives the latest round of cuts. (Dude, we knew you had role model potential!)
More than anything, though, Blagojevich just seems delusional, ranting that maybe that f'ing Obama can get Warren Buffet and Bill Gates to fund an "issue advocacy organization''—that advocates for his enrichment and deals solely with the heartbreaking issue of a certain corrupt governor who wants $$$. And here's clear thinking: He imagines that if all else fails, he can appoint himself to fill Obama's Senate seat and voilà, legal problems solved. At least when his predecessor George Ryan knew his days were numbered, he did one decent thing he'll be remembered for: He emptied the state's Death Row. Next to this guy, Ryan was a hero.
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We're looking for a publisher for Double X, the women's Web magazine that Slate is launching in the spring. If you're entrepreneurial and you have deep experience leading sales and marketing efforts for digital media properties, we'd love to hear from you. Candidates should have a track record of closing sales. They should also have experience managing sales and marketing teams, and collaborating across editorial, tech, and marketing sections. We also want to find someone with good industry contacts, including relationships with ad agencies and clients relevant to Double X.
If all of that sounds like you, please send us an email at doublex.slate@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
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I have always marvelled at Christie Hefner. Because of her, it was possible to believe (perhaps for way too long) in Hef's vision of porn as a "lifestyle," something for the pretty girl next door who's won the lottery. And if you read and loved Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife, as I did, you would have in your head the image of Hef as an American pioneer of a sort, instead of the cartoon he later became. Christie was always unabashed about presiding over his empire: She claimed to be a feminist and a businesswoman and an intellectual and not see the contradictions. In that way, she was from the '80s superwoman age of feminism. Now that she's gone, porn is just back to its dismal, daily grind.
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For five years, I worked for Playboy Enterprises. I worked for the cable TV end of the business, but Playboy is like an octopus, its tentacles flailing everywhere, so we were all privy to the inner-workings of what was already a financially struggling company. On the inside, everybody knew the trouble was Hef. While he was proudly taking Viagra to support his love life, he had less to work with when it came to making savvy business decisions for one of the world's most recognized brands. Yesterday, his daughter Christie announced she would be stepping down from her position as Playboy's CEO, a job she's held for the last 20 years. Subscriptions are down, the stock is falling, and the outlook is grim. At this point, it's hard to know who or what's responsible for sending Playboy down the tubes: the rise of adult content on the Internet that rendered Playboy a soft-core throwback to bygone days; Hef's staunch refusal to let the Playboy aesthetic change from his original vision of it in the 50's; or self-described feminist Christie's inability to capitalize on a titillating brand that couldn't compete in today's market, amidst the Pink Tacos and the Hooters. Regardless, it looks like porn has won the sexual revolution that Playboy helped spawn.
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Jennifer,
I don't think my reaction to 'Gender Bender' was so different from yours. Ultimately I just found it unsatisfying. Because you're right: it's a problem both genders share. So why? What does it signify? And what can be done?
About 10 years ago I took a class with the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who was in the process of publishing a book called The Great Disruption about the breakdown in social capital or "trust" in the Western World that resulted from the social upheaval of the sixties and seventies. "Trust" -- the mystical ingredient that prompts people to shovel their driveways and pick up litter and correct inaccurate Wikipedia entries, join bowling leagues and not cheat on their taxes -- is also, in Fukuyama's view, what made Toyota the undisputed leader of the auto sector and much of East Asia such a manufacturing powerhouse. And I would argue that "trust" is largely what many members of my generation --"Kate" the bitchy I-banker who drinks to seem more "fun" around her male colleagues included -- is trying to replace when we get bombed.
And that is where feminism becomes relevant. Fukuyama famously blamed the Pill, among other innovations, for destroying social capital in the process of emancipating women from the confines of monogamous, procreative relationships. (You might call it "procreative destruction"!) In hindsight Fukuyama's singling out of the Pill seems somewhat packaged to appeal to his then-neoconservative "base," because I do remember thinking it was secretly subversive. Because the political right had long since replaced America's belief in "trust" with a crippling fear of the "moral hazard" that might accompany it. Right now we mostly equate moral hazard, which describes the shift in behavior that accompanies the removal of risk from a certain activity, with the reckless financial institutions in which the Fed is now "injecting" funds. Those financial institutions now seem equally bent on convincing us that renegotiating mortgages for people facing foreclosure would create a similar "moral hazard" just as welfare creates the moral hazard that people will be lazy, the Pill perpetuated the moral "hazard" that women who took advantage of it would have more sex earlier and fewer children later in life and being thrust from suburban automobile-reliant upringings into a city with a bar downstairs that's open till '4 might disincentivize abstemiousness.
And yes, all that has happened. But life without "social capital" is no life, and we must take it as part of a virtuous overall phenomenon that our generation devised a few ways to replace it during those years during which we put off having kids. We repopulated cities, we found "virtual" friends through blogs and grassroots political movements. Where real estate was too costly -- and it has generally been so for my peers in the ever-downsizing industries -- we figured out how to meet regularly with one another in public spaces. And it so happened that bars were a natural, not generally being managed by corporations bent solely on increasing turnover times or transaction size. They're open late. They're everywhere. And many of them -- and many of their regulars -- have been around for generations, connecting us with our pasts and a less complicated period in history in a way that is comforting.
And sure, drinking five nights a week is a less-than-ideal way to achieve all this. But it can't be denied that to patronize a bar regularly, tip forty percent or whatever you can afford, catch up with a regular
group of friends, spend nine dollars at the jukebox playing songs you just heard on your iPod because they sound better in the presence of other people and escort home anyone who overindulges all in the confidence that the phone you forgot will be there in the morning -- all that generates and sustains trust. Hazards also: every densely-taverned town invariably houses an equally-fertile network of AA meeting places, halfway houses, and rehab centers, staffed in large part on a trust basis by people who invariably spent a big chunk of their lives being highly un-trustworthy. Maybe a larger percentage of my generation will wind up patronizing the latter category of venues in our imperfect quest to fulfill this basic human need, but in the meantime behind the slips and slurs and self-mockery exists an earnest effort to prevent that from happening to the people we care about. If anything, Alex Morris's story is merely evidence of that.
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Moe,
We came away from that piece yesterday with entirely different thoughts. You reacted to the condemnatory tone and the assertion that hard-drinking women are drinking to be like men (which I thought was a shaky point, too). I reacted to the fact that, from what Morris said, these self-proclaimed feminists seem to be drinking their way to self-fulfillment.
Today, I have a somewhat different reaction. I don't think it's about gender, feminism, or equality. More than ever, both women and men are looking for a way to tune out the drone of their daily lives and just have a little fun—looking for a place where they feel free and soothed and courageous and everything else Morris said.
But self-fulfillment doesn't come from a bottle. When the buzz wears off, life and all of its pressures are still there, waiting. Another drink or two or 20 won't ever erase that fact. (Not to mention that, as you might have heard once or twice, heavy drinking destroys your liver and kidneys and lends you all the professionalism of a college frat boy.) The only "equality" here is that, male and female, we've got the same problem, and we need to find another way to deal.
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Just when I was feeling all elevated and proud to hail from the Land of Lincoln and 44, here comes Gov. Doo-doo Head, aka Illinois Democrat Rod Blagojevich, along to remind me why I could never, ever say with a straight face that I've never been anything but proud of my country/state/church or party. He was arrested this morning for trying to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat. Alexis de Tocqueville was wrong, that's all. He thought that one thing that made Americans so darn exceptional was that chez nous, anybody at all could aspire to a fortune. But I'm pretty sure he did not foresee a politician so venal as to view an inspiring, history-making election that showed America at her very best and think: Ah, quick-buck city! Come to papa, you beautiful dollars and board appointments! "I want to make money,'' off the appointment, he reportedly said on a wiretap; let's just say that subtlety is not a hallmark of corruption in my state. I guess he figured that if his Republican predecessor, George Ryan, could milk bribes out of driver's licenses, then he could ride the hope train all the way to an ambassadorship. Blagojevich was elected in 2003 on promises to clean up Illinois government—and just like that guy who ran for Mark Foley's congressional seat on family values, well, he did exactly the opposite. Should we maybe start reading campaign promises as campaign threats? Because I grew up in the Louisiana of the Midwest, I will not pretend to be surprised. But how he could go so low—or imagine that he would not be caught—is something I guess he will have ample time to kick around with Ryan when he joins him behind bars.
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If there is a cultural phenomenon about which I can really do without the expertise contained within the average weekly magazine feature on the subject, it is the one about women who live in New York and drink more than they ought. Still, I am a female contributor to a female-centric blog, and women have savored women-getting-wasted stories at least since Anne of Green Gables got Diana sloshed on that raspberry cordial, so I dutifully began to read it this afternoon for possible posting purposes and indeed found myself snickering in recognition over this passage:
FEMINIST ONE: You would be proud of me. I drank alone last night!
FEMINIST TWO: I am proud! I should have called you. I was too drunk.
FEMINIST ONE: I opened a bottle of wine—a good bottle that I had been saving—poured some into a juice glass, and watched The Age of Love. My dad called, and he was like, “You know that drinking doesn’t solve things long-term?” And I was like, um, that’s a lie.
FEMINIST TWO: Hahahaha!
FEMINIST ONE: I know. I was so serious too.
FEMINIST TWO: Yeah, it solves things long-term, as long as you commit to drinking.
FEMINIST ONE: I told him booze was no different from Klonopin and it’s cheaper!
That's so funny! I thought upon reading the first few lines. I have had IMs exaclty like…
Oh ha, indeed, the IM had originally appeared in a July 2007 post on Jezebel, a women's site I co-founded which the New York story dubs "very pro-alcohol." (I am "Feminist Two," and for the record I have never tried Klonopin.) But more importantly I really don't think of myself, or anyone else on the site, as "pro-alcohol." Pro-pleasure, sure, pro-"honesty" or "candid examination of the human condition as experienced by women at this particular cultural moment," maybe. And insofar as our treatment of women and alcohol ab/use during my tenure was concerned, I think the site was probably best described "very pro-jokes," as one might glean from, say, my posts chronicling my adventures with alcohol-cessation drugs.
But no: the author illustrates me and certain of my former colleagues as "misguided" budding alcoholics drinking to reach some warped form of boozer parity with the men in our life men by a rationale "akin to the type of reasoning that paints Girls Gone Wild participants as sexually liberated."
I think this is unfair. Women make mistakes. Women do embarrassing stuff. Women regret that stuff sometimes. Women cope with it by joking about it, growing out of it, getting pregnant, getting help, or in lieu of all that, drinking more. That is the problem with alcohol: it can be a vicious cycle -- the way you drink too much, stay out too late, get too little sleep, wear yourself out the next day working late, blow off steam getting drunk all over again. But that's how it is for guys too. Sure, our bodies are different, and while drinking certainly has an added appeal to anyone who is experiencing menstrual cramps, what woman with a drinking problem would lay the blame on all the societal pressure to match the ounce-per-ounce consumption of our male drinking buddies? (Because that woman probably has bigger problems than her drinking problem, just saying.) Because I personally drink a lot -- less than I used to, more than I'd like -- and I can't even approach what my male companions can regularly put down, and I'm not trying to pretend that is good news. In other words, yes, New York, we have a drinking problem, but just like so many other problems it seems to be affecting all of us.
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You probably wouldn't have known it by looking at him, but your Dunkin' Donuts clerk this morning wasn't thrumming his fingers to the latest Soulja Boy bastardization. According to John Parker's sprawling piece in the Economist's quarterly offspring, Intelligent Life, he was probably pumping a little Pavarotti—maybe a This American Life podcast, a choice bit of Faulkner, or some Sartre on the side.
Or it could have been Soulja Boy, but only if he'd already finished Atlantic.
We know this is true because Parker says, thank God, that we're all getting smarter. It's the age of mass intelligence, where high culture reaches low IQs, transforming the ignorants into erudites—or at least ignorants with erudite taste, as in the piece, intelligence seems to be quantified by cultural consumption:
"Millions more people are going to museums, literary festivals and operas; millions more watch demanding television programmes or download serious-minded podcasts," Parker writes, and a festival director notes that her "audiences increasingly want 'the buzz you get from working that little bit harder.' "
Parker quotes Ira Glass, This American Life creator, to reassure us that it's not as bad as Paris Hilton & Co. have led us to believe. "When people talk and write about culture,” says Glass, “it’s apocalyptic. We tell ourselves that everything is in bad shape. But the opposite is true. There’s an abundance of really interesting things going on all around us.”
Glass lost me when he cited the fact that there are "really interesting things going on" as evidence for the fact that we're all doing just fine, but nonetheless, I'd love to believe Parker. I'd love to side, like he does, with Philippe de Montebello, director of the Met, who apparently "is fond of saying 'the public is a lot smarter than anyone gives it credit for.' ”
Which is why I was willing to stick it out for Parker's reasoning:
"It’s unlikely people are more intelligent than they used to be. [Blogger's note: Yes. Yes, it is.] Perhaps the elites that enjoy high culture are now bigger for some reason? Perhaps popular tastes have changed in such a way as to benefit high culture? Or perhaps it has nothing to do with changes in the audience, and more to do with the artists and institutions, who have become more skilled at attracting people? Answer: all of the above."
Unfortunately, Parker doesn't figure his explanation along the lines of his "all of the above" but instead goes on to note, among other things, that "educational standards have risen appreciably over the past 40 years" and that (shock!) people with degrees are more likely to visit museums than people without degrees.
He does take a paragraph to point out that the smartest among us often make stupid—blissfully stupid—choices when it comes to culture, which explains many of my otherwise brilliant friends' addictions to Gossip Girl, which I totally cannot relate to at all, ever. *cough* Apparently, Parker's "elite market" is more likely to be nondiscriminating "cultural omnivores," rather than "univores," devouring both high and low culture with unquestioning enthusiasm. "One of the features of the market for mass intelligence," says Parker, "is its heterogeneity.
Which is exactly what de Tocqueville, who basically predicted this entire phenomenon, found so terrifying—that the consumer would begin to consume art produced at the lowest, most consumable level, and that art would deteriorate accordingly. He writes in Democracy in America:
"Many of those who are not yet rich begin to conceive [ a taste for the fine arts ], at least by imitation; and the number of consumers increases, but opulent and fastidious consumers become more scarce.... No longer able to soar to what is great, they cultivate what is pretty and elegant; and appearance is more attended to than reality."
And this is why I don't share Parker's self-described "Pollyanna-ish" outlook on the revitalization of mass intelligence. Yes, I believe that society is consuming more high culture, but why? Is it because we desire to learn, or because we want to appear that we've learned—that we're cultured, intelligent, and eclectic? Since, particularly due the hipster oeuvre, intelligence is the new chic.
Chic, and easy to attain. Learn to pronounce Foucault, drop a well-placed Freaks and Geeks reference, read a few Great Books, subscribe to HBO and the Economist, mix in a little ironic Lil Wayne appreciation, and suddenly, you've got class, intelligence, and culture. And everyone perusing your Facebook knows it. Appearance, not reality.
So, my question to you ladies: Are we, the masses, getting smarter, or are we just omnivorous culture frauds—plain-bellied Sneetches who sewed on our own stars?
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Dear Mattel CEO Bob Eckert,
Happy holidays! You're welcome!
Background: Just over five and a half years ago, I wrote a story about something I found totally hilarious: It turned out the Bratz dolls, a multibillion dollar line of dolls with pouty lips and dazed barbiturate-addled eyes that emerged from nowhere to utterly excommunicate the Barbie from the dreams and hopes and play patterns of millions of young lives, were actually concocted inside your own design center! The line had been scrapped because you didn't want to cannibalize your precious Barbie brand! Especially on her 40th birthday!! Ha ha, yeah, that strategy sure sucked! And no one within your executive suites even seemed to know about all this. The designer who'd sketched the original renderings upon which the Bratz were based was still working for you—while another rogue designer who'd been on her team had ripped off the sketch and brought the idea to a scrappy little toy company up Highway 101 that would turn it into a multibillion-dollar powerhouse overnight.
Well now you own the Bratz, thanks to my "discovery" and an ensuing gazillion dollar legal battle (in which someone on some side of the thing paid me a whole $43.50 for my deposition services, a check that is still sitting on my nightstand purely out of laziness; don't worry, my employment situation will surely force me to pump it back into the economy at some point.) According to an insane story penned by my successor in crack toy industry coverage, Nick Casey, the challenge now is to … well, scrap or not to scrap the Bratz. Certainly the Bratz have wreaked nothing but ruthless, middle-school-style havoc on your beleaguered company. Certainly there are also millions of concerned moms who would not mind if you condemned every last Bratz to whatever campy eBay storefront purgatory brokers in Abercrombie's "wink wink" thongs for 7-year-olds.
But Barbie is 50 now, and she should be the "bigger" doll and let the Bratz live. It's not only Mattel's fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders; it could reinvigorate both brands, as well as the one industry that—for better or, well, let's face it, probably worse—unites children of all classes, colors, credit ratings, etc.
1. Barbie and the Bratz get to "collabo" now! It worked for Hello Kitty and the Paul Frank chimp, right? Kids love it when two characters from different "worlds" meet. When I was a kid my favorite show was Superfriends, which introduced Wonder Woman to her male superhero counterparts and taught powerful lessons in the universe-saving powers of teamwork, the whole equalling more than the sum of the parts, etc., etc. Since you will now have a few once-competing design, production, and marketing "teams" to work together, you will no doubt have loads of real life inspiration for this dynamic on store shelves! Oooooh, idea: Make a "Caribou Barbie" boxed set, with a snowmachining Ken and a tanning bed-equipped house full of Bratz kidz! (Willow totally deserves her own Bratz.)
2. Bring back Jill Barad. I never met the controversial former Mattel CEO, a onetime beauty queen who was briefly the highest-profile female CEO in America before being ousted from the company in a $50 million golden parachute after colossally overpaying for the software company behind "Carmen Sandiego" during the Internet frenzy. But Barad loved Barbie. Some folks speculated that she projected her own identity and aspirations onto Barbie. She also apparently dyed her hair blonde like Barbie and wore a lot of pink, also like Barbie. Barad was blamed for refusing to nurture competing brands like the Bratz within Mattel. But as Mattel struggled after her departure to recast Barbie as "cool," most longtime toy industry observers opined that Barad would not have allowed such humiliation to befall her beloved doll. In the toy industry, see, it is important for executives to take their products a little bit personally. Which, incidentally, most toy-designers seem to do. And yet quarter after quarter you punish them by pursuing the safest possible options and blaming "focus groups" composed of children who are naturally inclined to prefer toys that are already being advertised on TV. Look, kids don't know what they want until one of their friends has it, period. That's why everyone who sells to kids has to employ a few key adults who act in many ways like overgrown kids. Luckily, you are based in Los Angeles.
3. Stop making so much total crap. Barad's successor, Bob Eckert, was widely hailed on Wall Street shortly after his arrival for cutting costs, streamlining and consolidating businesses, and pumping up gross margins. Whatever: Most of this stuff is easy to do, and a mypoic focus on eking out a certain profit margin can be death on a toy brand, especially when the company has certain assumptions. Mattel didn't think it could sell a lot of dolls for $20 or $30 like the Bratz did, so it focused on manufacturing the chintziest, most disposable stuff ever. The conventional wisdom is that Bratz succeeded because the dolls themselves are so visibly utterly unredeeming, like the rest of vapid oversexed tween culture. And while that is somewhat true, the Bratz probably wouldn't have prevailed had it not been for the little details: cloth handbags with piping unlike the plastic purses Barbie got; elaborate ensembles that managed to incorporate fishnet, lace, and lame; rhinestone detailing on real denim jackets that in Mattel's world would have been downgraded to cheap cotton dyed pathetically to look like stonewashed denim. Look, it does not give me any great pride to tell you I have noticed these things, but if I have, I am pretty sure your customers have. That's your job.
4. Experiment. When I wrote the aforementioned story, you were fighting back at the Bratz with a line of more aggressively hip-hop-themed dolls called "Flavas." The Flavas were rushed into production and then just as swiftly rushed out after they "bombed" on shelves one season. A bunch of executives got fired over the line's failure, and the Flavas were proclaimed to be a disaster. This is how consumer products companies work, of course, but it's stupid and wasteful. The Flavas were ridiculous, but in a cute way. They might have been launched in January quietly and "exclusively" -- say, in partnership with novelty and collectors shops and specialty chains like Spencer gifts and all your big accounts in Japan, that sort of thing -- and demand might have more gradually and organically gotten out to kids in time for the following Christmas or something. It might make less money this way, but it also loses a lot less, and it forces you to interact with consumers on a grassroots level a lot more. Which brings me to:
5. Be more like Nike. It pains me to say this because Nike is the most salient microcosm for the most perverse kind of income redistribution scheme American consumerism had come up with before this whole subprime debacle—let's get minority kids who can't afford them to spend thousands of dollars a year on cool kicks produced for $10 a pair thousands of miles away by minority women whose bosses punish them, also perversely, by forcing them to run laps in their own unbranded canvas non-shock-absorbing shoes, then pump the billions of dollars we make into cool commercials and cool houses where we host cool celebrities at cool parties and employee stock options and the already bloated bank accounts of idolized professional athletes!—but. Nike "gets" a few things, especially when it comes to interacting on both a micro- and macro-level with consumers of various stages of obsessiveness. Mattel and Nike both have near-pathological collector communities—but while Mattel has generally treated its collectors' division as a high-margin cash cow and has been sued by Barbie fan clubs for copyright infrigement, Nike has so nurtured its obsessors that it actually at some point succeeded in making sneaker fetishism a kind of cool thing for dudes. And while I don't necessarily endorse this trend, I have found such sneaker autistics on the whole to be more stimulating company than, say, the average Uggs-wearer. But beyond that, engaging the obsessors pays dividends over the long term, as Bratz (whose "creator" Carter Bryant had long toiled in Barbie's collectors' division) proved. Nike pays such close attention to consumers that most celebrities at this point endorse the brand for free. Which brings me to a telling anecdote in a Vanity Fair profile of Kimora Lee Simmons a few years back in which Kimora's daughters clamor for Bratz dolls even as the mortified designer/diva/whatever had inked a contract with Mattel. Similarly, a few years back Reebok was constantly paying rappers and entertainers to endorse their shoes only to open a magazine to find said entertainer in Nikes. (Fabolous notably told Slam magazine, and I can't believe I remember this, that Reebok wrote him checks, but he was more of a Nike dude himself. I have no idea what Fabolous is doing now, but that is sort of the point I guess.) In any event, you have to make toys that celebrities will endorse for free. If you don't think you know what those toys are, you should maybe ask the designers who invented the Bratz. Many of them still work there.
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Julia and Marjorie, thank you for pointing out these designers' complete (and amusing) inability to draw a black woman. How behind the times these ethnocentrists will be in just a few short weeks, their limited talents overtaken by events! (My own stick figures are SO superior.) Your posts reminded me—[alert: this thread now being hijacked]—of the astonishing skill of Alison Bechdel, the brilliant "cartoonist" who can reveal differences in ethnic background, gender identities, and class attitudes with the slightest of strokes, no after-the-fact coloring-in or cartoonish exaggeration needed.
Bechdel broke into wider public view with Fun Home, a stunning graphic memoir that NYT's Dwight Garner said "knocked a lot of people, myself included, right over." It had a narrative and metaphoric depth that was literary in the best sense—meaning not "poetic" but profound. But some of us can boast that we already worshipped Bechdel's pen. Like every other lesbian of a certain age and attitude, I've been addicted to—infatuated with—Alison's work since she began chronicling and gently mocking our shared subculture with hilarious precision in Dykes To Watch Out For. Back in the day when the only place to find gay news was in weekly lesbian and gay newspapers (remember newspapers?), some of us would turn first to the back pages for our Alison fix. Every week, her characters, apparently based in Northhampton (aka "Lesbianville"), were working themselves up into soap-operatic fevers over love and politics all at once. Who else could intertwine (and send up) discussions of the perils of dating and monogamy, the unitary executive theory, bisexuality, Guantanmo, sex toys, the dot-com bust, academic jargon, internal debates over same-sex marriage, credit card overspending, and the problems of parenting with such kind, laugh-out-loud accuracy? Her work, over time, has added up into a kind of Dickens-like chronicle of my generation's sociopolitical world.
Now she's published the Essential Dykes To Watch Out For collection—which means I needn't keep trying to find back issues of my life (er, old collections of her strip) in used bookstores. For anyone who wants to know what a certain slice of feminist lesbians have been worrying about for the past 25-ish years, buy this book! And if, um, the publisher wants to send me a free publicity copy, I wouldn't send it back.
Bechdel is a goddess—and, to my regret, taken. (Note to my prosecutor: So am I, baby, nothing to worry about!) But seriously, folks: I have no idea why Alison Bechdel hasn't yet received a MacArthur Genius Award. She's the real thing, walking amongst us.
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Julia, I too found some of the renderings of Michelle Obama questionable and also troubling because of their subtle use of stereotypical imagery. Christian Lacroix's Michelle is a sneering, mean-looking lady, much like the "angry black woman" the Obama haters accused Michellle Obama of being. Why is she frowning in every sketch? Doesn't she have every reason to be happy? After all, her husband is the soon-to-be leader of the free world. You'd think the new first lady is smile-challenged. Same goes for Zak Posen's scowling, slouching Michelle, an obviously sullen black woman. They might as well have thrown in the controversial New Yorker cover sketch of Michelle as black militant for good measure. Betsy Johnson's sketch was a bit too graffiti-artisty for my taste. Maybe Johnson was going for whimsical, but it seemed to me that she was trying for an urban (read: black, or inner-city) look. Her Michelle looks out of sorts with the crazy big hair and all those distracting handwritten notes surrounding her; they might as well be graffiti tags spray-painted on a wall. While some of the designs were indeed gorgeous, some of the drawings of Michelle's facial feautures were so suspect that they drew attention away from the dresses.
And by the way, the other black female nonmodels to grace the cover of Vogue were Marion Jones (2001), Jennifer Hudson (2007), and Oprah Winfrey (2007).* Vogue Editor Anna Wintour only let Oprah appear on the cover after she agreed to lose weight first. I can't believe Oprah, media powerhouse Oprah, even agreed to such nonsense.
You're also right, Julia, about the fashion world being inhospitable to black women. That's why my radar always goes up when I see questionable pictures or drawings of black women. If Michelle does land on the cover of Vogue, I hope they won't try, and I bet she won't allow them, to depict her in the same way they did Jennifer Hudson: slightly bent over with her mouth open wide, hair flying, and ample cleavage on view. Think loud, fat, black woman. Annie Leibovitz and Vogue were rightly criticized for the photos.
I've seen this sort of thing too many times for it to be a concidience. Just take a look at any of those obnoxious bridal magazines and notice how the women of color—the few token black and Lationo models even in the mags—are photographed. They are often wearing the more revealing dresses, their mouths are usually open or pursed in suggestive fashion, their makeup is heavier, and their hair is sometimes styled to suggest wild-haired raven. The subtle suggestion is that they are looser, or whore-light, and the imagery is stark when compared with the prim and proper, virginal-looking white models photographed with their hair done up in sophisticated buns.
You asked if it was hard to draw a woman with black skin, and I think the answer is no, at least not for those artists/designers who don't reflexively see, and thus imagine, black women in a stereotypical light.
Correction, Dec. 12, 2008: The original sentence included only Hudson and Winfrey.
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Not to, like, stereotype of course!
The media is instructing feminists to direct our feminist outrage at Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell over a wholly innocuous especially for Rendell comment he made in support of a female potential cabinet member. Normally I would file this under the category of never-clicked headlines I call "Media Doesn't Matters" in reference to the lefty media watchdog organization that kept such tiresomely relentless tabs on Chris Matthews' venal sins of sexism during the Democratic primaries as to render the cable news blowhard a viable candidate for Senate in Rendell's state. But today I worry something more insidious is at work, because the Rendell gaffe successfully diverted attention away from a far more serious charge of chauvinism in government that could have potentially deleterious consqeuences for the economy: incoming Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's attempts to oust FDIC chairman Sheila Bair, a Republican whose sterling reputation on both sides of the aisle conservatives feared she might be appointed to Geithner's job, thus fulfilling Obama's pledge to put Republicans in his cabinet with the most liberal GOP member not to have actively campaigned for Obama. Geithner reportedly accuses Bair of not being a "team player" -- which of course also begs the question as to what the hell team Geithner is playing for, as Barney Frank points out to Bloomberg:
“I think part of the problem now, to be honest, is Sheila Bair has annoyed the ‘old boys’ club,’” Frank said today. “To some extent, bank regulation and mortgage foreclosure have made a situation where we have several regulators up in the tree house with a ‘no girls allowed’ sign -- and it’s aimed at Sheila Bair - - who’s been really good.”
Sheila Bair was the American Prospect's pick for Treasury Secretary. Sheila Bair is Barney Frank's favorite regulator. Sheila Bair even seems to command the respect of the generally reflexively pro-Wall Street commenter population over at the blog Dealbreaker. Because Sheila Bair has been working tirelessly for years to get failed mortgage lenders and homeowners to negotiate more workable terms to save the system from the massive financial and social costs of foreclosure contagions. Her results have been mixed, which is only about 1000% better than we can say for the results of Hank and "Government Sachs" to leverage the power of Big Numbers to save the financial system from the systemic risk of the panic wreaked by the sudden system-wide acknowledgement of the Big Numbers it had squandered in the systemic risk binge of the past five or seven or ten or so years.
Tim Geithner is notable for…looking young for 47, swearing a lot, and snowboarding. Early reports added "skateboarding" to the list of pastimes, but Fed spokesmen played them down, offering that he was not an active skateboarder.
I wanted to like Geithner. Despite the extreme sports and Kissinger/Council of Foreign Relations/elitist plutocrat cred he does not appear to totally fit the jet-setting obnoxiously well-roundedly overachieving handbag designer marrying Type Freaking A Clinton guy mold. Like Obama (and also me) he spent formative years in Asia, and the college sweetheart he married 23 years ago is not easily findable on society party pages or anywhere that might suggest that Geithner, like Bob Rubin and Rahm Emanuel, is at heart himself not much different from the financiers whose fortunes swelled so large over the country's three decade orgy of oversightlessness he helped accelarate during his years in the department. But this is just the sort of episode I feared when the market went so irrationally exuberant over (see #5) the appointment of another straight white guy from Wall Street to make right the multitrillion dollar disaster that is Wall Street. He's one of them. That doesn't make him bad. It just means he has been a party to a lot of incredibly bad decisions made using a lot of incredibly flawed assumptions that lined the pockets of a lot of already incredibly rich people. One of them is Hank Paulson, who at least seems somewhat humbled by the catastrophe. I guess Geithner has another few decades before he has to learn what humility is.
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In light of recent conversation here--"Do You Really Want a Sugar Daddy?", "Sugar Daddies We Love," "True Romance"--inspired by college senior "Melissa Beech"'s "My Sugar Daddy" story on the Daily Beast, I thought it would be interesting to hear from an expert. After all, since Slate has given a john a column, it's only fair a former sex worker gets to speak here, too. I asked my friend, blogger and retired courtesan Debauchette, what she thought of the piece and discussion. Is Beech a savvy romantic, a "sugar baby," or a prostitute in denial?
Debauchette writes:
"I read the Melissa Beech piece with interest, which discusses her relationship with a sugar daddy. I don't have much love for the term 'sugar daddy'--it's infantilizing and makes me think of tiaras and baby talk. That said, this 'daddy' aspect of the term is a reminder of where the power lies in this sort of arrangement. Sugar babies sleep with men for money and material perks, but when that perk is a credit card or an apartment in someone else's name, it results in financial dependency, not financial freedom. This is why I prefer prostitution.
My first client was a sugar daddy type. He was very charming, very kind, and very married, and when I met him, he offered a similar sort of arrangement. His reasoning was that if he couldn't offer commitment, the right thing to do would be to pay me for my time, time that might be better spent elsewhere. It was sort of a cost-benefit balancing act, and it worked because I never felt like I'd wasted my time with him. But unlike Beech's arrangement, I didn't want gifts or a monthly stipend. I wanted to be paid for time spent, like an attorney, or a therapist. And it worked. For the time we spent together, it felt as though we were two independent people put on equal footing with the exchange of cash, and that transaction freed us to have a very open, honest, and sexual relationship. Six years later, he remains one of my closest friends.
A friend of mine believes that every relationship involves a transaction, that everyone makes an emotional compromise for end goals, like marriage, or family, or financial stability, or a life that isn't spent alone. Personally, I don't believe that all relationships are transactional, but I do think it's common, and I think that might be why Beech's piece has provoked such a response. She appears to be committed to one man who's offered to cover her financial needs and wants, and her relationship developed from a clearly articulated transaction. The thing is, this doesn't just remind me of sex work. This could apply equally to marriage."
I couldn't agree more.
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According to an article published in the London Times today, we Brits are now the most promiscuous nation in the world (of the western industrial nations, that is). In terms of one-night stands, total number of partners, and our "relaxed" attitude to casual sex, we beat Australia, the United States, Italy, and France. France! Where having extra-marital affairs is a favorite national pastime! If nothing else, at least now we might lose our reputation for being frigid and repressed.
In all seriousness though, Britain has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Europe as well as the highest teen STD infection rate in Europe (although both are significantly lower than here in the United States, where abstinence-only sex education doesn't seem to be helping much). Premature sex education in British schools (it can be taught to children as young as 4) has long been blamed for the epidemic, along with the inappropriate sexualization of children by toy manufacturers and the media. But here's a thought. In Britain, we also drink more than any other country in Europe (apart from Ireland and Finland, bizarrely), and our alcohol-related death rate has doubled since 1991. We've also, according to this reasonably insulting story in the New York Times, been causing havoc on summer vacations with our abhorrent, booze-soaked behavior. Could there be a correlation somewhere between the beer goggles and the newfound sluttiness?
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Not sure what we should or could do about baby-brained grown-ups who suffer from a total lack of sense, Emily. But you are so right to point out that cyber-strega Lori Drew didn't "cause'' that poor girl to kill herself. Not to give this horror show of malignant, helicopter mommying a pass, but these arguments over who or what ever "make'' someone do such a thing always seem to undermine the most important thing we know about suicide, which is that the culprit is pretty reliably the disease of depression. (I was reminded of this a few years ago when a friend took his life. Oh no, I told another friend; he called me last week, and I never returned the call! Gee, don't think that's why he lost hope, she answered--snap.) And I also agree that we cannot criminalize every invitation to "Oh, go jump off a cliff!''--whether issued on the Internet or nose-to-nose.
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I can't believe I'm posting this, since these are not the arguments I would make at all ... but for anyone in need of wasting a few minutes laughing, check out "Prop 8—The Musical" at funnyordie.com. It includes Jack Black (in a role that's very much against type), Alison Janney, Andy Richter, Margaret Cho, John C. Reilly... have fun. And if there's anyone near you, put on your headphones before clicking.
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I've been chewing over the conviction of Lori Drew in the MySpace suicide case, with super-blogger law professor Ann Althouse here, and here in Slate. Torie pointed out last week that Drew should have stayed out of the teenage realm of MySpace. I agree, but I'm also left feeling like cyberbullying is a problem that parents, not the government, have to chip away at. I realize, though, that there's a harsh edge to that. It's not as if telling parents to look after their teenagers is a panacea (or hasn't been said many times before). I wonder if any of you wiser moms have thoughts?
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Sean Avery, hockey's self-confessed bad boy, was suspended indefinitely yesterday by the NHL for making remarks to a reporter about "how it's become a common thing in the NHL for guys to fall in love with my sloppy seconds." The vaguely gross remark was aimed at exes Elisha Cuthbert and Rachel Hunter, both of whom are now dating other pro hockey players. It was also a deliberate stunt by Avery, who walked up to a group of reporters during a morning skate and asked them if there was a camera present before delivering his comments.
Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I don't really see what's all that terrible about the term "sloppy seconds." Juvenile, yes—but making disparaging remarks about the wives and girlfriends of your opponents is habitual within professional sports. In the 1998 FIFA World Cup, David Beckham was given a red card for kicking Diego Simeone, who had reportedly made graphic and insulting comments about his wife, Victoria, aka Posh Spice. More recently in the 2006 World Cup final, Zinedine Zidane was sent off for head-butting an Italian opponent who had called his sister a whore. Sean Avery's always been an expert at aggravating his opponents. Unfortunately, this time it was the last straw for the NHL.
Avery, who is frequently targeted by his teammates for his love of high fashion, was one of my fellow interns at Vogue this summer. I never actually met him, as he was rarely in the office past his first two weeks, choosing instead to do decidedly more uninterny things like attending fashion shows in Paris and guest-editing Men's Vogue online (their Web traffic skyrocketed). So I really have no idea if he's as much of a pig in real life as he seems to be on the ice. However, everyone at Vogue loved him, particularly the older editors, and he was very good about giving out signed autographs and pictures for friends and family. The Sean Avery Fashion Story is reportedly set to become a movie, so regardless of his character he's an excellent self-publicist.
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Women's Wear Daily has commissioned fashion designers from Betsey Johnson to Peter Som to imagine outfits Michelle Obama might wear to the inauguration. The resulting slide show, published on Monday, is full of sumptuous looks: I favor the clean lines of Isaac Mizrahi's sorbet-colored gown and the sparkly white kimono envisaged by Diane Von Furstenberg. (Monique Lhuillier should keep her superfluous ruffles on the red carpet, if you ask me.) But paging through the entries, I was struck by how incapable the world's top fashion designers are of sketching Michelle. The fashion world is notoriously inhospitable to black women—if Michelle Obama lands the cover of Vogue, as has been rumored, she’ll be one of the few black nonmodels ever to grace it—but these sketches suggest a discomfort with blackness that’s truly startling. Check out Karl Lagerfeld's “Mrs. Obama”: Leaning heavily on the peach cray-pas, he produces a woman who looks more like Jackie Kennedy than Michelle. Badgley Mischka’s Michelle is a buff-colored, collagen-lipped blank; Michael Kors goes for bronze; Marc Jacobs and Koi Suwannagate both produce sketches with recognizably Michelle-shaped hair but skin that registers somewhere between alabaster and geisha. Of course, fashion sketches are stylized, not representational, which gives these designers plenty of wiggle room. (This may or may not explain why Zac Posen’s Michelle looks like a dying guppy.) But still: Is it so hard to draw a woman with black skin?
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To Hanna's question about whether any of us feel we could pull off a "fake romance," a la those high-end prostitutes who "date for months before pairing up'' and stroke more egos than anything else: Most women are pretty good actors, I think, having been trained from the beginning to smile and make people feel good. But what I wonder is how fake these romances for hire really are; if that Pennsylvania college student is so gaga for her sugar daddy, how is that different from what the Real Housewives of wherever feel for their rich hubbies?
When I was single, in another century, I finally eased up on judging women who seemed to be chasing dollar signs when I realized that it wasn't so much that they were making some kind of moral compromise or settling for security as that they just found money sexy, the same way I found it a turnoff. No kidding, wealth was a mark against a guy in my book, which was filled with social workers, dollar-a-word writers, and men struggling with possible religious vocations. Not because I'd taken a vow of poverty or was making a stand on principle, but because that just was my taste, same as that college girl Meghan wrote about goes for Louboutins and the "poshest'' hotel in Atlantic City.
Either this "be your own pimp" option further blurs the definition of prostitution or it brings clarity to the trading of sex/youth/looks for money/power/security. But that's a trade that sure is taken for granted in our culture—or so it seems on all these "win a rich bachelor" reality shows. And though it's our own bargains we should worry about, it's hard not to look at the people on both ends of those deals and think: Wow, you get what you pay for (and pay for what you get.)
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Noreen, I haven't read the Vanity Fair profile of my girl crush Tina Fey yet—maybe it makes me a new-media traitor, but I like my Vanity Fair, New Yorker, and other long-form journalism best when I can read it on paper instead of my computer screen. With that caveat, I do think that Tina Fey herself is acutely aware of and conflicted about her babification. 30 Rock regularly addresses how women try to look right for their jobs, whether it's in politics or TV. In one episode, Alec Baldwin's character tells his congresswoman girlfriend, who confessed that reconstructive surgery after a bizarre accident left her "much better-looking," that he "thought she made love like an ugly girl. So present, so grateful." One story line in Season 2 addresses how a lead actress' weight gain will affect her career, with Baldwin's corporate exec character advising, "She needs to lose 30 pounds or gain 60. Nothing else has a place in television." (He gets all the best "so-wrong-but-so-funny" lines ... I hope you'll add me to your quote-swapping list, Noreen!)
Even more fascinating in 30 Rock is how Fey portrays herself. Her character, Liz Lemon, is mocked by her superiors and subordinates for her clothes (her shoes are called "bi-curious," her favorite necklace is a broken rape whistle, her date-night dress makes her friend think she's headed to a funeral), her poor social skills, and her body. ("Are you finally going on a diet?" someone asks her in one episode.) It seems that Fey might have become a hottie, but she still writes like she's the awkward girl in the ugly dress. I'm not sure I entirely agree with Jezebel's Jessica, who has argued that "Tina Fey's self-deprecation is good for women," but I do like to see the two sides of Fey battling on-screen—her relatively new good looks and the lingering sharp wit and bitterness cultivated not necessarily by being ugly, which I don't think she was, but by being a bit different, a big awkward, a bit uncomfortable.
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Like you, I watched the Britney documentary on MTV. What really bothered me wasn't Britney's mental state (at times she was sparkling, charming, hilarious—performing send-ups of her father that sent her entourage into stitches) but the way she was being treated. Britney's conservatorship (which is rarely implemented legally unless severe mental disability can be proven) denies her any rights whatsoever beyond those of a 7-year-old. Her father makes her breakfast. Her assistant picks out her clothes. She's obviously still heavily medicated, and the paparazzi following her make her a prisoner in her own blacked-out SUV.
Which brings up the question: If Britney's capable enough to record an album, two videos, a documentary; perform on hundreds of TV shows promoting said album; AND rehearse for an upcoming stadium tour, isn't she capable enough to maybe have a bit more control over her own life? Yes, I infinitely prefer this glossy, funny, sad, sedated Britney to the crazy, bald trainwreck who attacked a pap with an umbrella, stripped to her underwear in the middle of a paparazzi storm, and drove incessantly from drugstore to drugstore in a bright pink wig. But I do think she's being manipulated.
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This Vanity Fair profile of Tina Fey, written by Maureen Dowd, has been making a big splash in the blogosphere the past couple of days, mostly because the thesis, boiled way down, seems to be that Fey's only made it big since she lost weight and prettied up her look while keeping her decidedly non-diva personality. For the most part, as a huge Fey fan, I lapped up the profile uncritically. What struck me, though, were the accompanying photos (to echo Nina's point about the power of a magazine's art department). Annie Leibovitz styles Fey as Wonder Woman-ish on the cover and Sasha Fierce-era Beyonce in the music video shots—obvious Glamazon girl power images. Then there are the shots of Fey in a low-cut white button-down and killer red pumps, which are supposed to be Fey as her own sexy librarian self, right? But I couldn't get rid of the feeling it was another reference to, perhaps, another tart social critic who's gotten a lot of buzz for using her feminine wiles to her advantage—the outfit and pose look an awful lot like a Maureen Dowd pastiche. So what's Vanity Fair trying to say—is it just a clever reference to their smartly assigned byline? Or are they explicitly setting up Fey as the new, updated version of Dowd, the smart, pretty woman all the dorky girls want to become? (For the new millennium: now younger, more neurotic, on TV instead of in those dying newspapers.) I trade 30 Rock lines with friends the way I e-mailed them Dowd's columns a few years ago. Fey certainly was the woman with the most incisive political satire this election season, and that's not even her day job. But did she only get to supplant Dowd in that role because she became more Dowd-y than dowdy, someone for whom the attendant sexy self-possession of a Beyonce reference isn't so crazy?
The piece closes with these lines:
Everybody wants to be Tina Fey, I tell her. Who do you want to be?
"I don't want to be somebody else," she says.
And why would she?
I'm not sure Vanity Fair entirely agrees.
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Planned Parenthood has an alternative for Indiana shoppers who were uninspired by this year's exceptionally bleak and cheerless Black Friday. Instead of stocking stuffers, residents of the Midwestern state can instead give their loved ones gift certificates in increments of $25 that can be credited toward any of the organization's services and products from birth control to abortions.
According to Chrystal Struben-Hall, VP of Planned Parenthood in Indiana, the gift certificate campaign will provide options to women who, in light of winter expenses and the economic climate, may have shunted health care costs to the bottom of their priority lists.
Struben-Hall maintains that the certificates aren't specifically intended to dissuade the cost of abortion, but critics of the program have objected to the lack of an official restriction preventing this. I have less of a problem here. In theory, the financial empowerment of women to take advantage of their right to use contraception or abort seems like a good idea to me. And while the organization would certainly take a financial hit if the demand for abortions and birth control slumps along with the economy, Planned Parenthood's marketing scheme seems motivated more by genuine concern than capitalism. Struben-Hall's point about women's health care sinking in priority during economic hard times is a valid one. And if women feel financially pressured to cut corners on birth control or regular pap smears, this could lead to life consequences for them that persist even after the recession subsides.
In practice, however, I can't imagine a scenario in which the presentation of a $50 gift certificate to Planned Parenthood would be either desirable or appropriate. Which market is Planned Parenthood targeting here--the boyfriend-husbands? The parents? Forget the holiday sweater that's worn once out of sheer politeness; these certificates--be they for morning-after pills or pelvic exams--take the reception of unwanted Christmas gifts to new levels of awkward, potentially encroaching upon more than a woman's fashion sense. At best, the certificates may be considered an unsolicited bodily imposition. At worst, they could be (and have been) misinterpreted as commercializing some extremely personal choices that have already received an uncomfortable amount of criticism this year.
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Nina, I agree with you that the worst thing about Alex K’s New York Times Magazine article this past Sunday—about her surrogate pregnancy and motherhood—were the slyly critical pictures and Alex’s class-cluelessness. Moe suggests (as do many others) that adoption might have been less genetically vain than surrogacy. But that suggestion presumes adoption isn't exploitive—and, after a year spent investigating problems in international adoption, I can tell you that's not always so.
Sometimes adoption is good for all concerned, especially if the child is older, sick, or has special needs. But not everyone is prepared to take on those needy children. Far more people are lined up for healthy infant adoption—which isn't easy, it turns out.
News flash: Worldwide, there are more families seeking healthy infants than there are healthy infants in need of new families. Some of the international adoption programs are arguably surrogacy in disguise—but without real payment or protections for the birth families. In some countries, a significant portion of women appeared to have been getting pregnant to sell the babies; in others, babies were being coercively purchased or defrauded or even kidnapped away from the birth families. (The big exception is China, where the adoption program is carefully overseen, but China has become more restrictive.) And that doesn't count the birth families whose children were defrauded, coerced, or flatly kidnapped away from them. (For detailed and heartbreaking stories about this, check my institute's Web site, where we've been posting our adoption documentation and research.)
Adoption depends on tragedy and loss of some kind—like organ donation, except with less oversight or regulation and with much more money to be made for the brokers. As with organ donation, in adoption there are more people on the list than there are children available. I haven't looked as deeply into domestic adoption but have heard enough to know there ARE coercive practices and serious regulatory failures; birth mothers DO get coerced, and adoptive parents get less consumer protection than if they joined a gym.
In surrogacy at least everyone goes into it with eyes open; the surrogates are screened for their emotional stability and are more or less fairly compensated. I’m guessing it’s less exploitive than renting out the body parts that Meghan and Hanna are discussing below. But maybe that’s just me.
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Meghan, this is why I am looking forward to Sudhir Venkatesh's book about the new world of high-end prostitution. In his Slate piece on Eliot Spitzer, he previews some of his findings. The Internet has made it possible for prostitutes to fly solo and not get burned. They interview potential johns in public places, usually expensive restaurants. They "date" for a long time—sometimes months—before agreeing to pair up. They may even hire a private detective to check the guy out. For the men, these relationships are about boosting their egos. "The last time I met him, I gave him a bath," one such call girl told Venkatesh. "I told him he was the most sensitive man I'd ever met. I never tell him he's a piece of shit; I make him feel like Superman." About 40 percent never do anything physical beyond light touching or petting.
Venkatesh is a sociologist. He interviewed several hundred sex workers for his book. So why do we have trouble believing this scenario? I think its because we can't get beyond the image of Belle, the prostitute with the heart of gold. She is always there for Rhett and plays her part but then sighs heavily when he walks out the door. It's hard to accept that women can just participate in the theater of romance without getting caught up. When they do pull it off—Linda Fiorentino in the The Last Seduction, Nicole Kidman in To Die For, they are sociopaths or spies. So, ladies, could you pull off a fake romance?
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Sometimes I feel like I am the last sane person to insist on not believing the worst about everyone. I never believed Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country or faked her pregnancy to cover up Bristol's. I don't believe our economic crisis can be blamed on greedy jobless people who signed onto mortgages they knew they wouldn't be able to afford. I don't even believe it can be blamed entirely on evil rich bankers like Dick Fuld and Joseph Cassano or their evil deregulation-happy allies in the federal government. I don't believe Angelina Jolie is an evil tyrant who forces Brad Pitt to fill a vial with his own plasma and promise to adopt three more impoverished children every time she finds a text from Jen on his iPhone. And so yeah, I did not believe Michelle Obama demanded—in the grand tradition of … well, at least two neglected spouses of high-achieving but invariably tragically flawed black men I can think of (if Sasha Fierce counts as Jay-Z's wife)—a $30,000 blood diamond in exchange for her campaign trail toil.
It's not that I necessarily want believe the best about people. It's just that there is obviously a lot more money in making people look like assholes. Sometimes they truly are assholes, of course. The other night I was watching the (seriously highbrow) competition reality program Stylista in the company of one of its two "judges," Elle editor Anne Slowey. Again and again, I found myself glancing over at her wide-eyed, pleading for her to assure us of the contestants: They can't truly be this despicable, right? Ha! Wrong. They were indeed just that horrible and more! Because they'd learned how existence works from reality shows!
Most people behave badly—or vulgarly, or selfishly, or materialistically—because they believe they must, that that is how it is, that it's a cruel world out there and they've got to get what's theirs, etc. I'm entirely too constitutionally lazy to have ever adopted this philosophy myself, but I'm always gratified when someone more motivated than me recognizes it to be a lot more trouble than it's worth. Which brings me back to Michelle Obama, or more specifically an anecdote I read once about her brother Craig:
Her brother would have the same epiphany while working on Wall Street. He had earned an MBA from the University of Chicago and gone to work first for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and then as a partner in a boutique investment firm. For a while, he enjoyed his wealth, then realized that the job wasn't making him happy.
"I'm so embarrassed to admit it," Craig told a New York Times sports reporter in 2007. "I had a Porsche 944 Turbo. I had a BMW station wagon. Who gets a BMW station wagon? It's the dumbest car in the world. Why would you buy a $75,000 station wagon?" Concluding that "I've got all this stuff, and it hasn't made my life any better," Craig, in his late 30s, left investment banking for a job he loves: coaching basketball.
Now, I don't want to entirely condemn buying useless crap. I am not trying to start the Great Depression here. I'm just pointing out that there are more affirming ways of going about one's life than, say, stampeding to the front of the Black Friday line to get the cool new thing, especially if it's just because you assume that everyone else is doing the same thing, too.
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Has anyone else read this designed-to-provoke piece in the Daily Beast about a young woman and her sugar daddy? “Melissa Beech,” as she calls herself, is a senior in college in Pennsylvania. He is a businessman with a seven-figure income and a profile on seekingarrangement.com, a “dating” Web site (a misnomer if I ever met one) for men and women seeking to enter into a relationship based as much on cash as romance. They meet cute when she interviews for a job (like, a real job), and he suggests instead that she join him in a…. mutually beneficial relationship. They meet and discuss it over dinner. She draws some lines (no sex till she gets to know him). He interviews her to find out what books she likes and whether she reads the newspaper. She seems to feel that this is kind of him. Soon they strike up a deal and begin dating and sleeping together; he spends, she estimates, $5,000 a month on her and takes her to places like the Borgata (the “poshest” hotel) in Atlantic City, N.J. She sees this as a “great career” and a way to score Christian Louboutins, to boot.
Now, I love Louboutins as much as the next girl. And as someone who didn't have a lot of money in college or afterward, I know just how good the money must feel. But what is troubling about the piece is the way the language of romance keeps intruding on Beech’s supposedly cool-headed business calculus. She writes that she is “swept off her feet” by the guy; she speaks about the possibility of seeing “the most amazing and beautiful places” with him; she describes waiting three months before she was “ready to make a physical commitment to him,” and describes him as a “lifelong friend.” The last may end up being true. But she has not made a physical commitment to him, and he has not made one to her. They have entered into a contractual financial relationship about sex, a relationship that’s gilded with the patina of romance but has none of actual density of it. Because what’s certainly true is that she is sleeping with a man who is willing to pay her to fulfill his needs while promising nothing in return, and as soon as his needs change, or she stops fulfilling them, the business arrangement will be over, and she’s going to be left feeling majorly alone with her bills, her heart, and her red-soled Louboutins. She’ll also have developed a habit of expecting this kind of material status in the world. Maybe she truly is the type of young woman who can see clearly that her Sugar Daddy’s ultimate withdrawal has nothing to do with her value in the world. But by putting a quote on her value, and selling it to him, she’s made it very complicated for herself, to say the least.
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Because my taste in entertainment can tend toward the awful, last night I spent 90 minutes watching "For the Record," a faux documentary starring Britney Spears as the fallen pop starlet trying to stage a wobbly comeback. In sum total, it was pretty sad. The tired-looking, droopy-eyed, beweaved Britney comes across like a horse that's been ridden to the brink of exhaustion, and yet her minders continue to drive her onward, regardless of the fact that she's a barely functioning zombie on the verge of collapse. (All in service of a new album, fittingly called Circus.) In a nice deconstruction of the spectacle, Choire Sicha deems Spears "sick," and she sure looks it. Shots of the girl in action reveal her staring dully out car windows as the paparazzi bum-rush her ride, spacing out in chairs as she gets dolled up by makeup artists and hairstylists again and again, seemingly grinding through one more day to score a comeback that she denies she needs to make to regain her Princess of Pop title. The only time she lights up is when she's looking in the mirror.
While Britney's personal "revelations" range from the mundane to the strange—"What was I thinking?" and "Everyone shaves their head" among them—what's really mind-boggling is the constant swarming of the cameras around her as she attempts to live her life. This time, we see the view from inside the feeding frenzy—and it's pretty tragic. As her caravan emerges from a subterranean parking lot, the mechanical door rolls up to reveal a crowd of onlookers that resemble the Earthlings encountering the space aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Without a doubt, what we're watching is a 21st-century freak show, and Britney is its star. Since the show aired, some bloggers have denounced Spears for courting the cameras that she claims she wishes would leave her alone, but the fact of the matter is that the slobbering media hounds work for us, the American public, and if Britney Spears is a monster, we're the Dr. Frankenstein who made her.
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Well, I never wanted the Clintons to divorce on our account and don't think they ever will split up, either—for one thing because she would get all of the art and all of the friends while he would get the "art'' and be stuck with the "friends.'' (B: "No, you take Terry McAuliffe.'' H: "No, darling, you.'') But as fantasies go, Emily, it is fun to imagine her throwing him out because she can and because she might just take up with that 24-year-old Sharon Stone broke up with after losing her custody battle. (You know, the one in which her ex accused her of suggesting that their 8-year-old son use Botox to fight foot odor.) Now that it's official for Hillary as secretary of state, I do want her to do well there. And to enjoy this moment, with or without the Mr.
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I'm with you, Susannah, on Alex Kuczynski and her (college-educated!) rent-a-womb. There are worse villains to vilify at a time like this, Internet haters! Right? Why does it continue to be so profitable for self-respecting media institutions to incite reader rage over harmless rich socialites who are not asking for as much as a penny of TARP funds? (I mean, imagine if wealthy men got pregnant! Imagine what impoverished, uneducated communities they'd be outsourcing the job to. Oh wait, there's a thriving surrogate industry in India as it is.) Which is to say, um, was there not something off-putting about the economics of it? In vitro, while certainly not covered by most health care plans, is covered by some—and in any case, it's certainly a tax-free expenditure of a hundred grand. And for a quarter of that, Kuczynski finds a whole woman—a college-educated woman!—willing to carry around Kuczynski's child in her own goddamn womb for nine months? Hey, and now she's written a story about it; she can write off that money, too! (Plus, she probably made about exactly $25,000 writing the piece anyway.)
God, so what does it mean? Well, on one hand, that's the free market at work, folks! And yet, on the other hand, Kuczynski—who wrote a book about cosmetic surgery and a regular Times column critiquing fancy retail "experiences"—has this way of positioning herself smack in the middle of industries that thrive off the most loathsome markets! Take in vitro and cosmetic surgery: Both draw in some of the nation's most talented doctors by freeing them from the migraine that is haggling with insurance companies, the same insurance companies that have helped make basic health care costs so expensive that regular college-educated ladies like Kuczynski's surrogate are willing to be implanted with alien zygotes and carry them around inside her for the better part of a year. (Oh yeah, and did I mention, quit drinking? While Kuczynski gets to … not quit drinking? ) It's just no faiiiirr, not to mention creepy, and while I'll gladly admit it's a bit of both to the anonymous cow whose teat to which I fully intend on outsourcing my milk production if and when I ever have kids, it's a little different when you're talking about people, right? And I guess I'd just feel better if it seemed like Kuczynski had thought about it this way. Because there are a lot of people in this country who are wealthy enough to spend 25 grand outsourcing their pregnancies, and there are hordes more who are desperate enough to rent out their wombs, but once upon a time we lived in a country where the former camp would have been more inclined to adopt from the latter half. At least, that's what I've always been told.
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Here's a post from Slate contributor Nina Shen Rastogi, who's having technical difficulties:
Susannah,
I think the galling thing about Kuczynski's Times piece wasn't her decision to have a child via gestational surrogacy—I think lots of people can relate to the intense desire to have a baby that's genetically related to you. (As Shakespeare noted ominously: "Die single"—i.e., childless—"and thine image dies with thee.") What was upsetting about the piece was her sheer tone-deafness. Take the following passage, for example:
When we came across Cathy's application, we saw that she was by far the most coherent and intelligent of the group. She wrote that she was happily married with three children. Her answers were not handwritten in the tiny allotted spaces; she had downloaded the original questionnaire and typed her responses at thoughtful length. Her attention to detail was heartening. And her computer-generated essay indicated, among other things, a certain level of competence. This gleaned morsel of information made me glad: she must live in a house with a computer and know how to use it.
A lower-income person who's "coherent" and knows how to type—gee, that's just like finding a mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy! Kuczynski just ends up seeming patronizingly elitist and sort of oblivious throughout the piece. I found myself wanting something deeper, more insightful—some real, felt evidence that the experience had actually taught her something. I would have also been happy with a nice middle-finger retort to anyone who would question her choices—but her faux-genteel, halfway-apologetic stance didn't fly with me. (Though I will say, I did really like this line on Page 8: "She could be seen as the fertile, glowing mother-to-be as well as the hemorrhoidal, flatulent, lumpen pregnant woman. I could be the erotic, perennially sensual nullipara, the childbirth virgin, and yet I was also the dried-up crone with a uterus full of twigs.")
But honestly, Kuczynski didn't have a chance in hell of winning my sympathy once I saw the accompanying photos. There's Cathy, the birth mother, literally barefoot and pregnant on a dirty porch. And then there's Kuczynski, looking regal in her neat separates, on the lawn of her sprawling Southampton home, while a black "baby nurse"—seriously, that's what the caption says—stands smartly at attention (but without pulling focus). Even the cover is a doozy—couldn't someone have ironed Cathy's khakis? Or at least told her to close her mouth?
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Last Monday, British singer Amanda Palmer wrote on her blog that her record label wanted to reshoot scenes from her music video for "Leeds United." She says:
they thought i looked fat. i thought they were on crack. dude. i'm a vain motherfucker. i know when i look fat. ... but THIS?? this was just nonsense. i thought i looked HOT.
The music industry's insistence on well-toned abs is nothing new. (See: the uproar about Britney Spears' so-slight paunch at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards; the plus-size Martha Walsh being swapped out of the video for "Gonna Make You Sweat" in favor of a svelte lip-syncer.) But this case is genuinely puzzling. Palmer did look hot. Her bared stomach looks lovely to me—I'd wear those abs proudly. The cabaret-style video doesn't dwell on her body, anyway. Most of the shots are long, taking in the rest of the performance and the audience as opposed to focusing on Palmer. And shouldn't record execs have people on hand at shoots to check out the costuming and ensure that their strict standards of acceptable appearance are being met?
I'd never heard of Palmer before this—my knowledge of music is sadly limited. But I do love that song now. The blogosphere outcry on her behalf has got to be good for her sales—and her self-esteem. A little misogynistic endorsing of unrealistic body ideals can be a good thing if there's enough of a backlash.
(via Feministing)
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In last weekend's New York Times Magazine, beauty writer, Botox fan, and Beauty Junkies author Alex Kuczynski writes about how, after she'd spent more than $100,000 on in vitro fertilization and suffered multiple miscarriages, she hired another woman to carry her baby for her. So far, there are more than 400 comments on the article, many written by women, most blasting Kuczynski for having the gall to rent a womb. You should have adopted! You're a spoiled brat! You're a kept woman who sees a baby as one more purchase! I say: Give her a break. She was infertile. She'd lost multiple babies in utero. She had the means—thanks to her writing career and her wealthy husband—to have her egg and her husband's sperm implanted into the womb of a woman who was willing to carry her baby for $25,000. I'm not sure what Kuczynski's bashers expected her to do. Follow their directions? Suffer silently so as not to offend anybody with her money? Do ... nothing? Something about this outpouring of female vitriol reminds me of the tarring and feathering of Sarah Palin. Maybe you don't agree with this woman's choices or that woman's beliefs, but who are you to deny her the choices that she has the right, power, or money to make? Sounds like envy to me.
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Isn't it time for Hillary Clinton to get a quickie divorce from Bill (it can be done; it took about 20 minutes for Madonna to dissolve her marriage) before her confirmation hearings start? The New York Times reports that over the last few weeks of negotiations between Obama's representatives and Bill, he has agreed to various restrictions on his business and philanthropic dealings to keep Hillary from getting mired in a bunch of scandals and conflicts. He promises to "submit his future personal speeches and business activities for review by State Department ethics officials and, if necessary, by the White House counsel’s office." Yeah, that should work, because if we know anything about Bill Clinton it's that a) He responds well to being on a short leash, and b) He's really good at filing timely paperwork.
Surely Hillary will not have trouble getting confirmed, but her hearings will be all about Bill—Sen. Richard Lugar virtually promises that. As her presidential campaign made clear, not only does Hillary not need Bill anymore, he has turned into a liability (except financially, and she would come away with a big settlement). And just think, if she divorced him, it would be the first time that their relationship made sense.