Shockingly, it turns out that I may actually be a good saleswoman--!

The poor can't just eat oatmeal

It's finally happened--it's the rare conservative opinion which strikes me as too harsh on the poor.

The Agriculture Secretary was promoting his department’s new hunger (or, in contemporary parlance: “food insecurity”) survey on CSPAN this morning, and promising to expand the federal government’s role in feeding children. We do a good job with school lunches and breakfasts, Secretary Tom Vilsak said, but in the summer months, when kids are out of school, we need more centralized locations to give them their breakfasts and lunches.

Is it really the case that a minimally competent mother (we won’t even contemplate fathers here) in this fabulously wealthy country where food is so cheap cannot give her child a healthy breakfast in the morning? Granted, doing so at low cost entails shopping for food low on the processing chain and, horrors of horrors, actually cooking it. A portion of rolled oats in a large discount container costs pennies and takes five minutes to cook. Too onerous? I know that there is a shortage of decent supermarkets and fresh food in the inner city, a result of low demand and high crime. (Actually, there’s not a decent supermarket in all of New York City.) But a little planning should be able to overcome that shortage by occasional trips to someplace where you can buy in bulk. Here’s a test of whether someone is really suffering from hunger or even just “food insecurity”: Are you willing to cook legumes for a few hours? If not, you’re not starving and have no claim on the public purse.

If such minimal foresight and involvement is beyond the reach of a mother, she obviously shouldn’t have had a child in the first place, and now that it’s too late, maybe should not have custody. Of course the feds, ever eager to expand their reach, are not going to point that out. But the more that the government acts as a surrogate parent, the less parental responsibility we will get.

The author of this article writes from the perspective of a rich person; she asks herself what she would do if she suddenly had no bank account and a smaller income. But a rich person without money does not a poor person make. Instead of pursuing a rich person's lifestyle on a smaller scale, you have to pursue a whole new lifestyle. What is easy for a rich person becomes difficult, sometimes insuperably difficult. A special trip to a bulk store like Costco seems easy to the author--she has free time, money, transportation and social support. Without all of those, a store like that would seem impossibly far away.

What the author calls 'minimal foresight' may require more mental energy than a person living on a subsistence level can spare. You have to have the knowledge and strength of character needed to make plans, as well as the organization and free time needed to execute those plans. And keep in mind that the people we're talking about are not only poor, and in most cases congenitally poor, but also single mothers, often of many children. I can't imagine how stressful that would be. It's easy to say that people should be able to make plans and follow through, and should be able to put aside a small amount of money. They can't. It's harder for them.

It also seems unrealistic to expect the poor to spend as little money as possible in all situations. No other social class does that--how could they? People need to alleviate their feelings of deprivation sometimes--whether it's through buying a third car or through buying cereal rather than oatmeal. And poverty-alleviation programs, like everyone else, need to work with the realities of human nature.

I also love the fact that the author implies that the government should take away a mother's custody of her child--because the alternative is government "acting as a surrogate parent" and overreaching.

Landscape of Thorns

Check out this article on communicating the dangers of nuclear waste to humans 10,000 years in the future: my favorite is the "Landscape of Thorns." However, as the article basically concludes, if human beings in the future aren't smart enough to figure out that being around radioactivity is unhealthy, we probably can't help them, and they probably deserve to die out.

Glorious wisdom of Chairman MAO

What is work? Work is struggle.

We shouldn’t read too many books. We should read Marxist books, but not too many of them either.

I don’t believe that men alone are capable of having two hands. Can’t horses, cows, sheep evolve? Can only monkeys evolve?

Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty did pretty well in his early years, but afterwards he read many books, and didn’t make out so well anymore. He died of hunger in T’ai Ch’eng. It is evident that to read too many books is harmful.

The principle of preserving oneself and destroying the enemy is the basis of all military principles.

It is not true that everything is good. But neither is it true that everything is bad.

We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports.

Some play the piano well and some badly, and there is a great difference in the melodies they produce.

It is difficult to do good all one’s life and never do anything bad.

Vulgar locutions on the rise

Here's one I came across recently:

*The bird couldn't reach its beak through the cage.

where the proper English would be:

The bird couldn't reach through the cage with its beak.

or

The bird's beak couldn't reach through the cage.

Another example is:

*Can you reach me that book?

Instead of:

Can you reach that book, and can you hand it to me?

I think the improper usage is becoming more common, and I can see why: the meaning is clear, the sentence structure more direct, and there's no conspicuous vulgarity (I doubt most people would recognize the impropriety at all.) Also, note the confusion with 'stretch', which, unlike 'reach' can be used transitively.

One that is equally logical is the use of 'itch' as a verb:

*I itched her itch.

For the vulgar, it's easier to remember one word than two, and 'scratch' already has separate meanings as a noun and a verb:

The cat had scratched me, so I had a scratch on my hand.

So, predictable, but annoying. Since there is no gain in logic or directness, this locution just seems like a way for the uneducated to decrease their vocabularies even more.

Football, dogfighting, and brain damage

I know, I know, sports are boring, but what about this:

"How many people who we assume have Alzheimer’s—a condition of mysterious origin—are actually victims of preventable brain trauma?"

Here's the article.

Good advice–and a bit of BDSM–from Montaigne

Good old Montaigne!

"To have my opinions contradicted doesn’t offend or harm me; instead it wakes me up and challenges me...I don’t mind being rudely attacked by my friends (You’re a fool, you’re dreaming). Among gallant men, a person should express himself boldly, letting his words go where his thought does. I like a strong and virile friendship, which prides itself on the acerbity and vigor of its conversation, as love prides itself on bites and bloody scratches. When someone contradicts me, he attracts my attention, not my anger; I feel drawn toward the person who contradicts me, who instructs me, and I love to gratify and nourish his liberty to warn me of my mistakes by my easy surrender; yes, even at my own expense."

Les contradictions donc des jugemens ne m’offencent, ny m’alterent; elles m’esveillent seulement et m’exercent...estre rudement heurté par mes amis : "Tu es un sot, tu resves." J’ayme, entre les galans hommes, qu’on s’exprime courageusement, que les mots aillent où va la pensée...J’ayme une societé et familiarité forte et virile, une amitié qui se flatte en l’aspreté et vigueur de son commerce, comme l’amour, és morsures et esgratigneures sanglantes...Quand on me contrarie, on esveille mon attention, non pas ma cholere ; je m’avance vers celuy qui me contredit, qui m’instruit...aymant à gratifier et nourrir la liberté de m’advertir par la facilitié de ceder ; ouy, à mes despans.



Montaigne, 3.8, De l’art de conférer

The Sixties

The Sixties, by Jenny Diski, has remarkably little to say about the Sixties as such. Most of the book is a personal meditation on the nature of youth--and one of the best such I’ve read, for instance this passage of realistic psychology:

I was sure, the first time I sucked on an LSD-soaked sugar cube, that it would be the end of me. I knew my depressive tendencies. I had had bad trips even on cannabis. The ether and the Methedrine had turned nasty. I was certain that my chances of becoming irredeemably psychotic on acid were very high. I said a serious goodbye to myself as I put the sugar cube on my tongue.

Nonetheless, I took it. Was it because taking a risk was worth the marvellous insights I believed I would get if the trip went the other way? Or, more likely, because risk was by definition good, or at any rate, necessary? There was no choice but to take whatever risk was on offer.

In the last two chapters, the author uses three of my favorite sixties and seventies theorists--Ivan Illich, R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz--to explore guiltily how “liberation got confused with libertarianism” and the Sixties became the Thatcher era.

The author describes radical teaching practices in the sixties, echoing some of the criticisms her political opponents make today:

We tended devotedly to the lower end of the ability spectrum but paid little attention to the more able. They were us, after all, and we were quite ashamed of our privileges. It got to the point where in some sense we punished the brighter kids for not being underprivileged...The radicals couldn’t always cope with education actually having an effect. If the oppressed stopped behaving like the oppressed, we ddin’t really like it.

Diski’s work as a teacher was influenced by Illich’s ideas, which she now says were both more radical and more right-wing than she had realized. Here’s a sampling of Illich, the author of “Deschooling Society” and the man “too radical for the radical generation”:

The existence of schools produces the demand for schooling. Once we have learned to need school, all our activities tend to take the shape of client relationships to other specialized institutions. Once the self-taught man or woman has been discredited, all nonprofessional activity is rendered suspect...In fact, learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.

Even the seemingly radical critics of the school system are not willing to abandon the idea that they have an obligation to the young, especially to the poor, an obligation to process them, whether by love or by fear...

Illich seemed like a leftist at the time, but in fact, when his sort of libertarianism is opposed to paternalistic statism, Diski and her generation are usually on the side of the state.

The majority of the activists in my generation were never as interested in individual liberty as we were in finding ways to implement our own ideas of how the world should be. I’m not sure, on Illich’s still startlingly strict definition, if we were interested in liberty at all...

Illich could well have joined Thatcher and Reagan’s theoretical advisers. I’d resist the claim that the Sixties generation were responsible for the Thatcher years, as I would resist the notion that the Jewish community in Germany were responsible for the advent of the Nazis, but sometimes I can’t help but see how unwittingly we might have been sweeping the path in readiness for the radical Right...

I will refrain from comment on the supposed Thatcherite/Nazi connection. Perhaps if the author were American, she would realize the Right gets a lot more radical than Margaret Thatcher.

Anyway, a less pejorative way of describing Sixties leftists is to say that they were concerned with caring for people rather than simply leaving them free to take care of themselves as best they can. Here’s where Szasz comes in--Diski, a former mental patient, rightly criticizes the author of “The Myth of Mental Illness” for being more concerned with the rights and freedoms of the so-called mentally ill than with their happiness and safety. (Although Szasz would probably point out that the nature of happiness and the value of safety are highly subjective.)

[Szasz believed that] the State had no business interfering with matters of the mind, or even supposing that Mind existed...He refuted the concept of madness in order to refute any claim for civic responsibility towards others...Everyone made their own individual choices: the rich, the poor, the mad, the sane. That was their problem.

Szasz also suggested that when the so-called mentally ill cause real social problems (by stealing, committing violent crimes, or just being a public nuisance) they should be prosecuted like other criminals. Diski takes this suggestion as a sign of Szasz’s lack of compassion for suffering. In fact, Szasz thought that the mentally ill would be protected by being treated like criminals, since those accused or convicted of a crime have many rights and privileges those accused or convicted of mental illness don’t have. (Tangent: an accused criminal has the right to counsel and the right to a fair trial (usually by jury). Most of those convicted of a crime are given a specific, limited sentence, one that cannot be extended indefinitely for the same offense and one that does not depend solely on the discretion of their jailors. From within a prison, prisoners can teach themselves the law, appeal their cases, sue, complain about their treatment. A person accused of mental illness or incarcerated in a mental asylum has none of these advantages.)

Despite this misreading, Diski, in characterizing Szasz and Illich as ‘radical’ ‘far right’ thinkers is pointing to a real and unresolved tension between the idea that people should be free and the idea that society should care for its members (whether they like it or not). The school versus the market, if you will. In the Sixties, the author thought that communitarianism and liberty were naturally joined in leftist political theory--after Thatcher, she knows better, and seems quite willing to abandon liberty along with libertarianism.

Tune in next time for a discussion of Marxist theories of human nature, why Asian people don't understand sidewalks, and, of course, Proust!

From a favorite opera

In this aria, Clytemnestra appeals to her divine ancestors, Zeus and Helios, to protect her daughter Iphigenia:



The lyrics are here.

What do these words have in common?

address, inquiry, mustache, advertising, cigarette, locate, addict, rebound, mama, princess, abdomen, finance, recess, defect, research
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All words that, in British English, were once accented on the second or third syllable, but, thanks to our glorious American influence, are now accented on the first! (Or were made into nouns [addict, research] and then accented on the first!)

George W. Bush's Marxist heritage

Three lessons the Bush administration learned from Trotsky and Stalin:

1) Democracy is good (when the right people win)

Trotsky's amazing transformation from a supporter of Lenin and totalitarianism to a foe of Stalin and friend of democracy just happened to come at the same time he was thrown out of Russia and the Party. True socialist democracy, he believed, is shown to be such by the fact that the workers (read: Trotskyists) win elections. Similarly, the Western world regularly rejects free and fair elections when they don't lead to the right result. If the people the West supports don't win, the election's result can't be 'really' the will of the people, and the people in question can expect to see itself ostracized (like Austria in the 90s) or even denied food aid (like Palestine more recently).

2) The people are with us (they just don't know it yet)

We are giving the people what they want, since we are on the crest of the wave of history. Just a little longer, and they'll realize they want the form of government we choose to give them.

3) Whether a war is aggressive or defensive matters less than its class character

Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin believed that in any war, the side of the proletariat is the right side. Whether the proletariat started the war or not matters little--morality doesn't apply to a conflict between capitalist imperialists and the proletariat. Class is all we should notice. Hence Trotsky's prediction that World War II would end with all the capitalist countries allied against the Soviet Union.

Similarly, the Bush doctrine of 'preemptive war' and the plausible-sounding theory that democracies don't fight each other.

(This theory is in fact deeply doubtful. Its most well-known exponent defines 'democracy' as a system in which two-thirds of adult men can vote. But this definition is invented solely to support the author's thesis--if any more than two-thirds of adult men were required to be enfranchised, ancient Athens wouldn't qualify as a democracy. Any less than two-thirds and the Confederacy would. 'Democracies never fight each other' only if we arbitrarily categorize some societies (like the Confederacy and Sparta) as oligarchies, and some not-very-different ones as democracies.)

The more I learn about Marxism, the more I realize that the troublesome thing about a government is not its specific policies but rather the structure and nature of governmental power. In other words, high taxes on the rich versus high taxes on the poor matters much less than totalitarianism versus liberalism.

Out-of-wedlock births in the lower classes

A recent book I read provides an interesting portrait of what sociologists lately call 'the under class'–this is thought to be more PC than 'the lower class'. The book is Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. It's an attempt to explain to middle-class readers (well, the authors only talk about the middle class, so I assume they mean middle and upper class) why poor women often have children out of wedlock, and at a very young age (a mean age of 21, including many women who gave birth at younger ages, even thirteen and fourteen).

The poor are different from us; they have less money. The personal touches in this book give us glimpses of a strange new world--one where a sixteen-year-old boy will tell his girlfriend, 'I want to have a baby by you'--and she takes it as a compliment! There are a few fascinating statistics–"the poor, the less-educated, those living in poor neighborhoods, and those raised in single-parent households tend to have far fewer friendships than their more advantaged counterparts." And, of white women who have never had a premarital birth, 89% will get married before they turn 40. We're all doooomed....

But, the authors say, poor women have many of the same beliefs about marriage as the rest of us. Most people today of whatever class believe that marriage is difficult and divorce is to be avoided, and that for that reason, people should wait to get married until they are older and until they know and trust their prospective partners very well. There is a perception that getting married means settling down--the end of travel, fun, career change and flexibility. With these beliefs, it makes sense that members of the lower classes don't marry early. So the question is not, 'Why don't they get married?', but rather, 'Why do they have babies?'

SImply put, because the perceived costs of having children are lower, and the perceived benefits higher. As for the benefits, what would you do if you had little or no higher education or career ambitions to look forward to? Having children might seem like the only really meaningful thing in your life–the only thing giving you hope for the future. When asked to imagine what their lives would be like without children, the women in the study typically said things like, 'I'd be dead.' 'I'd be in jail.' 'I'd be depressed.' 'I'd still be partying.' 'I'd be on drugs.' These seem to be the other options.

As for the costs, the out-of-pocket costs of having children are the same whether the mother is 30 or 13. But the opportunity costs of children are very different for different classes. Specifically, they're much lower for the lower classes.

The public often assumes that early childbearing is the main reason why so many girls from poor inner-city areas fail to complete high school, go on to college, gain valuable work skills, or earn decent wages, but there is virtually no evidence to support this idea. Any childbearing at all, and especially early childbearing, has huge opportunity costs for middle-class women. But disadvantaged girls who bear children have about the same long-term earnings trajectories as similarly disadvantaged youth who wait until their mid or late twenties to have a child...Early childbearing is highly selective of girls whose other characteristics–family background, cognitive ability, school performance, mental health status, and so on–have already diminished their life chances so much that an early birth does little to reduce them much further.

The authors focus on the agency of the women in their study, and it seems as though these women chose to become pregnant, rather than being coerced into it by their boyfriends or by a lack of access to birth control or abortion. This leads the authors to ignore some signs of lack of agency–a really amazing passivity, not just in some cases, but in most. For instance, only 17% of these women's pregnancies were planned. Some were 'accidents', but, bizarrely, the plurality were described as 'in between' an accident and a planned pregnancy. Typically, the woman will say that she didn't want to get pregnant, but that she wasn't using any birth control. It is almost impossible for me to understand how a person could leave such an important decision up to chance–but hey, it's the traditional way. The women studied say things like, 'The baby happened', 'God gave me this baby' and so forth.

I wonder if this lack of agency is related to their socioeconomic statuses. Making a decision is a skill like any other, and needs to be practiced. We read that children who have grown up under circumstances display 'learned helplessness'–they have learned that nothing they can do can make a positive difference in what happens to them, and that actively doing anything often brings punishment. So they take no action. They may express preferences, but they do not intervene in their own fate. Maybe for the lowest classes, something similar happens.