Thursday, August 07, 2008 - Posts
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Wait a minute; don't you apologize, Meghan, for extending too much sympathy, even if it is to Clark Rockefeller! Because one of our most serious problems has got to be a general deficit of sympathy, especially for the undeserving. You know how in Eat, Pray, Love the author's Italian buddy Luca Spaghetti says every place on earth has a guiding principle that can be summed up in one word, and Rome's word is sex? I think Elizabeth Gilbert says power is New York's word. Anyway, I am sorry to conclude that in this country we're all so obsessed with who does and does not deserve all kinds of things—love, death, forgiveness, and, above all, help from the government—that resentment seems to be America's word. So, if you threw away your sympathy on somebody who's really rotten, my word for you is brava.
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Well, Meghan, I didn't mean to bludgeon you about Clark What's-His-Name. Meanwhile, I'm still mucking around trying to find out who gets custody more often. I've got queries out to some researchers and will post here when I get answers. Until then, here's a commentary published by Sandra Kobrin in Women's eNews last year. She has the same impression that I have: that in the 1950s and 1960s, women almost automatically got custody, but now—when custody is contested—the pendulum has swung the other way. She mentions studies that show that, especially if the mothers were battered, fathers get custody and quotes researchers who believe that's true not just when mothers were battered. She says, for instance, that a 2004 Williamsburg, Va., American Judges Association study shows that battered women lose contested custody cases 70 percent of the time. I will look for the study. Her point is that most state legislation requires judges to favor joint custody arrangements; when that's not possible, judges are instructed to favor the parent who is most "friendly" to joint custody. That obviously puts a battered woman in a bad spot: If she seems desperate to keep her kids away from a batterer or abuser, she's going to be perceived as pretty durn unfriendly to joint custody.
I don't know how this holds up beyond domestic violence situations. More stats when I find them.
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E.J., clearly you're right about Clark Rockefeller—as the evidence mounts (and boy does it seem to be mounting), it seems clearer and clearer the guy is a con artist and murderer. So yes, no sympathy there! Whatever empathy I had for him was based on the assumption that he was just a rich, eccentric dad who loved his daughter, not a murderer and liar. Thank god the child is safe. And that'll teach me not to extend my sympathies further than they're warranted!
Meanwhile, though, the intellectual issues surrounding child custody arrangements in America remain worthy of discussion ... and have nothing to do with this case.
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OK, here's a question: Years before the sex-scandal press conference or the chunky pearls, do political wives see their husbands differently than the rest of us see the mere mortals we promised to love, honor and so on? Obviously, there's no one model for a marriage in the public eye, any more than there is for a marriage only the neighbors care about—and even then, not that much as long as you keep the noise down. But I do wonder whether some of these spouses don't end up extra disillusioned because they're required to put their mates on the kind of pedestal that Mr. Ellen Tien has never set foot on. (No, that most certainly does not mean that whatever happens is on them, especially since idealizing these politicians is such a big part of their job description.) And yes, I am thinking all this because of the current John Edwards scandal, and because to say that Elizabeth believes in John is like saying that Washington is on the warm side this time of year, or Middlemarch is not a bad book.
But most mates of the contenders seem to feel that way—or maybe it only looks like that because when they don't appear to believe their men were born in a manger, we totally freak out, like how dare Teresa Heinz mention her deceased husband, the father of her children, and how unheard of for Michelle Obama to remark upon even the most minute and mundane of her husband's flaws. I keep thinking about Cindy McCain, when her husband was running the first time, telling me that she found her husband "a real inspiration'' -- and then stopping herself, quite charmingly, and adding, "I guess anyone would say that about their husband.'' No, they wouldn't; in fact, outside the bubble, I've never heard any woman say, suggest, hint, or infer any such thing, no matter how nice her husband or contented her marriage. So, without letting any of these guys off the hook, I guess my question is, isn't the public's demand for a mythic narrative that no actual person can ever live up to part of the problem?
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