Know ye not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Rod Dreher (oh, and Ross Douthat) have been having a back-and-forth the past little while on family values; specifically, Rod Dreher’s general condemnation of unmarried mothers and fathers versus Coates’ specific family experience. And to be frank I’ve only been following the one side; I’ve little use for the Crunchy Conservative, and only so much time in my day. —But something about the most recent exchange, the last exchange, made me click through to see what Dreher had to say for himself.
Here’s the set-up, from Coates’ penultimate:
Social conservatives are interested in encouraging one model, and stigmatizing all others. I’m interested in encouraging practices and stigmatizing others. I’m interested in encouraging active involvement in your child’s school, and stigmatizing ignoring the teacher’s phone calls. I’m interested in encouraging fathers to put in as much manpower as they can summon, and stigmatizing those who walk out.
My point wasn’t that my family structure, then or now, should be held up as model. But that in families which social conservatives dismiss on paper, you can find the same values and behaviors that you’d hope to find in a nuclear/traditional family. Ross is effectively arguing that these families should be dismissed anyway—regardless of whether they hold the same practical values that social conservatives hold. Social conservatives are arguing for a world where people are stigmatized for being unmarried. I’m arguing for a world—and have argued for a world—where people are stigmatized for not performing the most elemental of duties.
And this is Dreher’s response:
It seems normal to me that you would stigmatize having sex and having babies outside of marriage, while at the same time loving and trying to help those who have babies outside of marriage—help them to do the best they have with the situation they find themselves in. That’s life. Why does trying to do the latter mean you cannot insist on the former? You don’t help someone deal with the consequences of wrongdoing by pretending that they didn’t do wrong in the first place.
Coates wants to tag the parent—wed or unwed—who slags on their basic responsibilities to their kids. Dreher wants to tag the unwed parents, period, whether or not they meet those basic responsibilities.
—When someone opens the comments under Dreher’s post by rather rudely asking how, exactly, Dreher proposes we go about stigmatizing the unwed, Dreher properly stigmatizes him. But: it’s a damn good question. After all, Dreher demands we stigmatize anyone who falls into this category, even his sterling interlocutor, for the collective good of all our children, whether or not what any particular unwed individual’s doing is working for their particular kids. And the sorts of stigma that have historically been applied have generally been such to make the already difficult task of raising kids that much the harder. —How does he propose to square the circle of stigmatizing the sinners while loving the sinner? Commenter after commenter chimes in, wanting to know.
Mealworm, I’m about to be off the blog for a while, so I will trust others here who share my perspective will be able to give you a more complete answer. I would simply point you to the story from the Gospels in which Jesus defends the woman caught in adultery from the men who were going to stone her. He reminded them of their own sin, and sent them away. But—this is crucial—he did not tell the woman she had done nothing wrong. He only said, “Go forth and sin no more.”
That’s it, right there. Uphold standards as best you can, but be as merciful as you can to those who fail them.
Which—question-ducking aside—is fine, and even dandy, but makes far more sense when applied to Coates’ standard of stigmatizing specific people who fail their specific duties, and not much sense at all when your goal is to stigmatize entire classes of people for the greater good. —The best someone who shares Dreher’s perspective can do to pick up his slack is Turmarion, who says—
The thought that occurs is that it is hard for those (even close kin) who are not actually in the family to know if a father is taking or ignoring a teacher’s call, e.g. In other words, it is much easier to promote (or stigmatize) a pattern, such as marriage, which is publicly declared, than it is to promote (or stigmatize) a complex set of interrelated behaviors which are generally not clear or obvious to outsiders.
Ah, yes. That’s it. Collective guilt is so much more efficient.
It isn’t just the willful confusion of correlation and causation that leads to the willfully silly insistence that if only you all got married, it would all be better; that willfully ignores all the countering wedlocked families, unhappy in their own ways. —It’s the moral cowardice. Dreher refuses to answer the question of how, exactly, he’d stigmatize the unwed in the specific, because he can’t face that very real consequence of what he’s demanding. He can’t be mean, and meanness is what is called for when you want someone good and stigmatized. You need a Coulter for this stuff, or a Hannity. A Dreher just can’t get his hands dirty.
The only other example of stigmatization he offers is from Peggy Noonan:
We have all had a moment when all of a sudden we looked around and thought: The world is changing, I am seeing it change. This is for me the moment when the new America began: I was at a graduation ceremony at a public high school in New Jersey. It was 1971 or 1972. One by one a stream of black-robed students walked across the stage and received their diplomas. And a pretty young girl with red hair, big under her graduation gown, walked up to receive hers. The auditorium stood up and applauded. I looked at my sister: “She’s going to have a baby.”
The girl was eight months pregnant and had had the courage to go through with her pregnancy and take her finals and finish school despite society’s disapproval.
But: Society wasn’t disapproving. It was applauding. Applause is a right and generous response for a young girl with grit and heart. And yet, in the sound of that applause I heard a wall falling, a thousand-year wall, a wall of sanctions that said: We as a society do not approve of teenaged unwed motherhood because it is not good for the child, not good for the mother and not good for us.
But even here, there’s no actual example of stigma. Merely a desire that she not be, what, applauded? Did she do well in school? Did she have a large family there to cheer her on? What happened to her kid? Did she get the prenatal care she needed? Was she going to live with her folks, or friends, or on her own?
I mean Jesus Mary Mother of God, we don’t even know if she was already married. Just, y’know, in high school. And pregnant.
But assuming she did fit the specific argument Dreher’s supposed to be making. How would he have us stigmatize her? Not applaud so loudly? —But that’s hardly a stigma; that’s treating her just like everyone else. Should we all boo and hiss, then? Should the principal stand up and lean over the microphone and say “Go and sin no more” as she marches past? Should we just not let her cross the stage at all, make our point by absence, allusion, indirection?
How do you stigmatize the sinners without stigmatizing the sinner?
—Meanwhile, here’s a bunch of people who want to get married, who in fact did get married, but same-sex marriage is a violation of Crunchy Conservative constitutional rights or something, and so they must be stigmatized. Still. I bet he can’t bring himself to sit down with each one and tell them to their faces, no, you may not be married, it’s better that way for all the rest of us—
"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.
Sunday morning bang and whimper.
Maybe it’s just me? Probably it’s just me. But there’s something oddly—comforting is the wrong word—about the interference pattern you get when you set this story—
From the beginning we were prepared, we knew just what to do, for hadn’t we seen it all a hundred times?—the good people of the town going about their business, the suddenly interrupted TV programs, the faces in the crowd looking up, the little girl pointing in the air, the mouths opening, the dog yapping, the traffic stopped, the shopping bag falling to the sidewalk, and there, in the sky, coming closer… And so, when it finally happened, because it was bound to happen, we all knew it was only a matter of time, we felt, in the midst of our curiosity and terror, a certain calm, the calm of familiarity, we knew what was expected of us, at such a moment.
—next to this speech—
Some of you may be frightened by the future I just described, and rightly so. There is nothing any of us can do to change the path we are on: it is a huge system with tremendous inertia, and trying to change its path is like trying to change the path of a hurricane. What we can do is prepare ourselves, and each other, mostly by changing our expectations, our preferences, and scaling down our needs. It may mean that you will miss out on some last, uncertain bit of enjoyment. On the other hand, by refashioning yourself into someone who might stand a better chance of adapting to the new circumstances, you will be able to give to yourself, and to others, a great deal of hope that would otherwise not exist.
—and, well, no, comforted is not a word I’d use. And anyway I’m pretty much positive it’s just me left thinking of Smoky Barnable, carefully planning a ponderous trip into town for supplies, and George Mouse’s fiefdom, his city block of intertwined apartments with their chickens and goats, and over and behind it all the despair of mad Russell Eigenblick, learning he’s not in the story he thought he was, and anyway it isn’t even his story—but mostly Fred Savage, that problematic, magical kuroko, making as much of a place for himself as he can in the interstices—
Resolved:
that henceforth anyone whose argument hinges in any way upon the consideration of America as a “post-racial” society be classed with and treated as anyone prone to statements prefaced by “I’m not a racist, but.”
On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrapping of a cigarette packet—everywhere.
Via BLDBLG, a piece posted to Italian IndyMedia back in 2004—
I’m an Italian citizen living in Milan, in a building that was built by Immobiliare EdilNord, owned by the actual Prime Minister. I work part-time for the Pagine Utili, owned by the Prime Minister, but possibly I do have good opportunities to be contracted at a Blockbuster, the famous chain in ownership by the Prime Minister. I am since always a fan of Milan, the soccer club of the Prime Minister. I go to work in a car (seen for the first time in a commercial in Panorama, a weekly magazine owned by the Prime Minister) that I bought secondhand from an employee of the Banca Mediolanum, a bank of whom between the biggest shareholders—we see the Prime Minister. The insurance for the car is also owned by the Prime Minister and when I’m driving it happens often that I listen to some radio stations, these as well owned by the Prime Minister. While driving I see walls on which the propaganda for his political group is attached and often I see also his face friendly smiling at me. When I leave my house I first accompany my neighbor who works at the Fibanc Inversiones, owned by the Prime Minister, then I buy for my chef some newspapers and magazines also owned by—the Prime Minister. Sometimes I find traffic on my way, and to tell my colleagues about my eventual late coming I use a cellular phone of the Compagnia Telefonica Mobile that sees the Prime Minister under its shareholders. My house phone is owned by Albacom, Societé per la Telefonia fissa—from the Prime Minister.
Some afternoons I go shopping in the Supermarkets built by the Prime Minister or part of his property, where I buy products, produced, published or sponsored, by the Prime Minister. In the evening I nearly always watch the television, nowadays completely in the hands of the Prime Minister, on which the Movies (often produced by the Prime Minister) are continuously interrupted by Commercials realized by the Prime Minister’s Agenzia Pubblicitaria. And thus through Satellite I try to “get out of Italy” to see if something good is being transmitted there, but also then it happens often to find oneself confronted with Television or Publicity Networks functioning under Mediaset, owned by the Prime Minister. Distrustful and tired I do some surfing on the Internet via the Jumpy Provider, of NewMedia Investment, another property of the Prime Minister and there I find lots of declarations of the Prime Minister, nearly all against his political opponents, but also directed towards me, in which he wants to inform me that he is making laws in my exclusive interest. Every now and then I go to the cinema, to the Prime Minister’s Cinema5 chain, and often I’m aware that the Movie as well as the first coming Publicity are being produced by the Companies in ownership of the Prime Minister. Sundays I like to stay at home, to read books, of which the Publishing Company is in property by the Prime Minister—
Panta rei, everything proceeds—since some time however, I hear a lot of whispering about the Conflict of Interests in relation to our Prime Minister, and so I ask myself: why? Is there something anomalous? I don’t really understand! Could somebody help me?
Tell Tom Tildrum, Tim Toldrum’s dead.
Kali should be pleased: her little diatribe is currently no. 9 with a bullet when you google up “What is modern conservatism?”
“...Okay then. I'll need three tomatoes, a size nine-and-a-half shoehorn, a bit of string, and a small wooden spoon.”
Paul Kelleher
Yes, I’m calling to inform you that my mom died on the 24th of January.
Bank of America Estates representative
I’m sorry. Oh, it looks like she never even missed a payment. That’s too bad. Well, how are you planning to take care of her balance?
Kelleher
I’m not going to. She has no estate to speak of, but you should feel free to just go through the standard probate procedure. I’m certainly not legally obligated to pay for her.
Bank of America
You mean you’re not going to help her out?
Kelleher
I wouldn’t be helping her out—she’s dead. I’d be helping you out.
Bank of America
Oh, that’s really not the way to look at it. I know that if it were my mother, I’d pay it. That’s why we’re in the banking crisis we’re in: banks having to write off defaulted loans.
Over at Alternet, Joshua Holland wants to know why we aren’t rioting yet. Good question.
That plus twenty-six bits will get you a cup of coffee.
Ten years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book on the effects of Clintonian welfare reform on the working poor, working a series of entry-level jobs to demonstrate that it is impossible to support yourself in this country with that work. Over at BoingBoing, Charles Platt worked at Walmart for “a limited period” to prove Ehrenreich wrong. —Turns out she was silly to insist on supporting herself with an entry-level job, because no one who works at that level attempts to be self-sufficient! It’s an unrealistic expectation!
More, please.
So what we’ve done here is do an apples to apples comparison of current unemployment numbers to the stimulus spending number using the Thune Stacking Formula as a basis of comparison. Here we have dollars stacked on top of each other versus current number of unemployed Americans stacked on top of each other.
If they’re going to try to tear it all down with the same old bullshit arguments, counter with more and better and bedazzling bullshit. Point and laugh; point, and laugh, most balefully.
Without food speedily on a platter,
Without a cow’s milk whereon a calf thrives,
Without a man’s habitation after the staying of darkness,
Be that the luck of the Thune of Dakota.
Doughty theep.
Does the fact I’m driving around with my windows down in February give me a free pass to sneer and point and hoot and laugh at global warming denialists?
Everything old is new again.
Earthworm-ennabled pundit Doug TenNapel seems to think he’s got something with this whole “conservatives are the new punks” meme. At least he’s admitting that “lefty politics are no longer the fringe.” —D. Aristophanes sets him up with a Mondale joke; Dsquared pushes him down the stairs.
HENRY lemon CREAM.
Put it all together and at this rate, the government—that is, taxpayers—will own much of the housing, auto, and financial sectors of the economy, those sectors that are failing fastest.
Consider too that the government already finances much of the aerospace industry, which is still doing reasonably well but depends on a foreign policy that itself has been a dismal failure. And a large portion of the pharmaceutical industry and health care sector (through the Medicare and Medicaid, the Medicare drug benefit, and support of basic research). These are in bad shape as well, and it seems likely the Obama administration will try to reorganize much of them.
What’s left? Most of high-tech, entertainment, hospitality, retail, and commodities. So far, at least, we taxpayers are not propping them up. And when the economy turns up—perhaps as soon as next year, most likely later—these sectors have a good chance of rebounding.
But the others—the ones the government is coming to own or manage—are less likely to rebound as quickly, if ever. If anyone has a good argument for why the shareholders of these losers should not be cleaned out first, and their creditors and executives and directors second—before taxpayers get stuck with the astonishingly-large bill—I would like to hear it.
It’s called Lemon Socialism. Taxpayers support the lemons. Capitalism is reserved for the winners.
So one might say that we are seeing not the tender creep of socialist possibilities into the national discourse, but their further erasure. Every time that we agree that the word “socialism” might refer to something other than, at a minimum, worker ownership if not indeed the end of surplus value extraction; every time that we misrecognize state corporatism as something other than a moment in capital’s “equilibrium in motion,” we “turn the wheel of discursive normativity a click” away from socialism. We forget what that word promises. Perhaps the most optimistic memory, as Jasper reminded us, is that the corporatist regimes have arisen historically in the fact of popular socialist challenges—but that in no way guarantees the motion will summon forth such a movement via some blind mechanism of counterweights.
“My bonus is ‘shameful’ — but I worked hard to get it,” said John Konstantinidis, a wholesale insurance broker, lunching Friday at Harry’s at Hanover Square.
“I’m a HENRY,” Mr. Konstantinidis added. “High Earner but Not Rich Yet.”
Nonetheless, it was rather remarkable on Friday how many white shirts denied getting a bonus altogether when they were asked. Indeed, if the data obtained by reporters in the district was any measure, there is no telling where that $18 billion really went.
What can be told, however, is that President Obama is substantially less popular on Wall Street this week than he was last week. Words like “outrageous,” “shameful” and “the height of irresponsibility” — especially when applied to a man’s paycheck — tend not to make you many friends.
“I think President Obama painted everyone with a broad stroke,” said Brian McCaffrey, 55, a Wall Street lawyer who was on his way to see a client. “The way we pay our taxes is bonuses. The only way that we’ll get any of our bailout money back is from taxes on bonuses. I think bonuses should be looked at on a case by case basis, or you turn into a socialist.”
That, indeed, was a recurring equation: Broad strokes + bonuses = socialist.
—”It’s Theirs and They’re Not Apologizing”
And I want to take that acronym, HENRY, and set it on fire and wrap it around his neck, but it’s still too goddamn bland; it just doesn’t sneer yet, not like YUPPIE or BOBO or CREAM. High Earner but Not Rich Yet. Fuck you, you silver-spooned Masters of the Universe.
Say you’re a banker and you flushed $30 million down the toilet, which is the actual scenario we’re looking at. When can we expect you to pay a part of that back?
You know what, Henry? That guy walking ahead of us, down the street? Too out of it to spaynge like the ghettopunks and anyway if he ever stopped walking the cops would roust him in an instant under sit/lie? Travel-stained, in the euphemism of fantasy novels, hasn’t seen the inside of a shelter in months in spite of the cold? No coat on his back but that sleeping bag clutched around his shoulders to draggle down the sidewalk? Not to pull a cliché trump, Henry, but he ain’t rich yet, neither. —And you know what else? He’s too big to fail, Henry.
We’re all too big to fail.
Race fail 2009.
This past Monday, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, on the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, I discovered that the casting of the four leading characters for the upcoming live-action movie, The Last Airbender (based on the TV show, Avatar: The Last Airbender) had gone entirely to white actors. I want—no, need—to say something about this.
Following Jackson Rathbone’s footstep in addressing fans’ criticism over The Last Airbender casting, pop singer Jesse McCartney comes to MTV to share his response towards fans’ protest of the “all Caucasian” [sic] casting. The 21-year-old who is tapped for Prince Zuko part tries to assure hard core fans of the animated TV series that he will do his best to do justice for his character.
“I heard a lot about this online,” the singer who fills the voice of Theodore in Alvin and the Chipmunks explains. “There’s a lot of hard-core fans out there [who] probably know more about it… I’m still learning. This is M. Night’s vision and this is what he wants. To all the fans, I can tell you I’m putting my best foot forward.” He further adds, “I’ve been in kung-fu training for the last month and half-learning all the moves. I’m looking forward to it.”
The casting controversy came out after reports surfaced that karate-trained Texan Noah Ringer, Twilight actor Jackson Rathbone, Deck the Halls actress Nicola Peltz and singer Jesse McCartney have been offered the roles of Aang, Sokka, Katara and Zuko respectively. The casting of the four Caucasian actors brought out negative reaction from fans with accusations of racism.
Earlier, Rathbone has responded to the complaints, stating that it is his chance to show his range of acting. Speaking to MTV, he added on what he will need to do for Sokka’s transformation, “I think it’s one of those things where I pull my hair up, shave the sides, and I definitely need a tan. It’s one of those things where, hopefully, the audience will suspend disbelief a little bit.”
—“Jesse McCartney Answers The Last Airbender Casting Criticism,” ACESHOWBIZ.com
“And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ and walking out. And friends they may thinks it’s a movement.”
Since getting angry doesn’t help my daughter, though, I took a breath and tried to do damage control.
I told her that love makes a family, not size or gender or anything else. She wanted to know, then, why other families aren’t the same.
“There are some like ours, honey. Like Austin’s family—”
“Austin has a dad. He just lives somewhere else.”
I froze. I don’t want to say that the same is true of her. It’s not. She doesn’t have a dad, she has a biological father who doesn’t even take our phone calls anymore, who either doesn’t tell his girlfriends that she exists, or lies and tells them that I cheated on him and he doubts he’s really her father. (The Missouri and Pennsylvania courts would be surprised to hear that, considering they ran three paternity tests and garnish his wages every week, none of which he even contested.) I don’t want to lie and say he loves her and misses her and thinks of her all the time, that the only reason he doesn’t see her is because he lives so far away and doesn’t have enough money to travel. It would end this argument in a heartbeat, it would make her feel better, but it would still be a lie. And it’d be a lie I’d have to answer for ten years down the line, when she becomes a teenager and he starts building his replacement family without her.
I froze for too long. She started to cry.
“Sweetheart, there are other families like ours.”
“Then where are they?” she demanded. “Where are they?”
I dropped the ball on this one, you guys. I dropped it so hard it rolled away down the street and off a cliff.
Help 
darlas_mom pick it back up and more. She’s looking for photos “of you with your actual families. Straights with kids, gays and lesbians with kids, single parents (both moms and dads), blended families, families of different ethnicities or multiple ethnicities.” She wants ’em all. —Get yourselves into her book.
Cordwainer Bush.
Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair—
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
One less mouth to feed is one less mouth to feed.
Cal Thomas takes not so much the long as the hail-mary view of the necessary economic stimulus:
In an interview over the weekend with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the proposed “hundreds of millions of dollars” earmarked in the “stimulus” package for contraceptive services will help the economy. But wait. Won’t fewer people mean fewer taxpayers?
We have already reduced the number of taxpayers by an estimated 50 million since abortion became legal in 1973. If we had 50 million more people paying taxes, would we be in our current budget malaise? People mean taxes and since taxes are what Democrats are about, they are harming the economy by advocating fewer people through abortion and contraception.
In addition to being willfully stupid on the ostensible subject (a birth deferred is not a birth deleted; really, this is elementary), on the specific subject of the “hundreds of millions of dollars” earmarked in the “stimulus” package, Thomas—as you could probably tell from his overly judicious use of quotation marks—is lying through his shiny white teeth.
