Pound Foolish
is on Amazon! Go take a look!
I can tell you exactly where I was on July 16, 1981: stuck in a ghastly traffic jam on the Long Island Expressway. I was heading out to my boyfriend’s house, when all came to an absolute standstill. Reports came in over the radio of multi-lane closures, due to what sounded like a horrific accident involving a small car and large truck. Those of you who are fans of a certain type of 1970s music know where this story ends. Harry Chapin was the driver of that small car, and he died thirty years ago today.
I spent much of my life hiding my love for the easy listening folk rock of the 1970s. As a genre, it gets little respect. Disco has gone from cultural joke to being considered the iconic music of a gay sub-culture that was unknowingly dancing on the edge of an apocalypse. Bruce Springsteen and the like will always get respect. Punk and new wave, with their angry anarchy, became the music of leftwing intellectuals everywhere as the Free to Be … You and Me era ended in Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Folk rock, on the other hand, is marked by an earnestness and sincerity that plays as hokey in our more ironic age. It’s often about failure, which might also be why it gets little respect since we are, after all, a society that’s uncomfortable with anything but tales of triumphant progress. Much of folk rock describes how things did not work out. And no one got all that better than Chapin, a man who, despite the love of family, friends and fans, understood loneliness and despair. Read on »
This week, AARP released a Social Security calculator, designed to demonstrate to the bevy of 50 and 60 somethings out there on the verge of retirement, that it is better to wait till age 66 to file for benefits, instead of taking a reduced monthly stipend at age 62.
This, of course, assumes there is a large group of people out there, who would otherwise work till age 65 or 67, but are simply lazy and waiting to take their Social Security benefits so they can put a bumper sticker on their car proclaiming “I’m Spending my Children’s Inheritance,” move to Leisure World and enjoy the senior vida loca.
This is a wrong assumption. Read on »
Whatever happened between former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the immigrant housekeeper he is (still) charged with sexually assaulting earlier this year is likely destined to remain a murky bit of business. He’s got a record as a sexual harasser, she’s admitted to faking rape previously. Stir in the fact that there are plenty of powerful people who had reason want Strauss-Kahn sidelined, and you have a case that will keep everyone from feminists to Bilderberg types debating for years over what really happened in that $3,000 a night luxury suite at the Sofitel Hotel in Midtown Manhattan this past spring.
Yet, almost unbelievably, there is a victory for women in this sorry saga. Yes, a victory. Really. Read on »
My older son is in junior high school now, and he comes to me frequently with tales of who did what to whom and asking me to weigh in. I almost always determine, after about a minute of listening to the incident of the day, that there are no innocent parties involved in the fracas. “They’re all wrong,” I pronounce.
It’s a concept foreign to most Americans. We like our good guys and our villains. How can they all be wrong? Isn’t there one person more wrong than the other? How can people attempting to do good be so ridiculously and unintentionally awful? How can there be order in the world if we are all, on some level, villains?
No, this isn’t a post about Anthony Weiner and Andrew Breibart, though it could be. Instead, it’s about the article in the New York Times asking why a substantial number of students attending New York’s most elite independent schools need so much tutoring that some of their families are spending more money on private coaches for their children than on the not-unsubstantial tuition bill itself. Exhibit A is the Riverdale Country School, a school, where one anonymous parent ‘fessed up to spending six figures on her progeny’s outside helpers, on top of the school’s $38,800 annual tab to attend. The schools claim to be deeply unhappy about the situation.
When I read through the article, I quickly came to the conclusion it was a textbook case of everyone involved being wrong. Read on »
I’ll say this for New Jersey blowhard governor Chris Christie: When he performed his Christmas week disappearing act just in time for yet another snowpocalypse, he at least had the brains to leave a Democratic machine politician in charge of things, the sort of guy who knows one of the first rules of northeastern politics is this: do whatever you need to do, make whatever backroom deal you need to make, payoff whomever you need to pay off, but get the goddamn snow off the streets. Fast.
New York City Mayor for Life Mike Bloomberg, cocooned his world of Wall Street privilege, somehow never figured the golden law of snow out. And now word comes down that the city’s snow clean-up disaster might not have been as a result of simple poor planning, but a deliberate campaign of sabotage by the worker bees in the city’s sanitation department.
Well, knock me over with a fucking feather. Read on »
I’m blogging once a day for Babble’s Strollerderby blog. Come visit me!
As we end the work week, I’d like to revisit an interview The New York Times interview ran recently with children’s writer Rebecca Stead.
Stead, the author of the wonderful Newbery Medal winning children’s novel “When You Reach Me,” chatted with the Times about for a feature about what her typical Sunday with her husband and two boys is like. It’s meant to be a look at family togetherness (We buy bagels together! We watch The Simpsons together!) but what struck me was the feeling of overwhelming loneliness that pervaded the piece. In less than 600 words, Stead either mentions or alludes to her husband’s more normal non-presence in her children’s lives twice. “My husband generally works a lot during the week, so Sunday is also our day when he’s around,” she says early in the chat, later adding that “Sunday is probably the only day when we always, always eat together.”
Stead’s not alone. Survey data demonstrates that Americans who still have jobs in 2010 are working much harder, often for less money than in the past, with productivity output per worker surging. But that comes with a painful human cost. Many of my friends who are employed in full-time jobs have, in the past year, vanished from both my life and the lives of their families. I miss them, but their families miss them more. Just yesterday, two separate mom pals told me that their husbands were never home before 8:30 at the earliest. “The children are not handling it well,” confided one (who works full-time and then some herself), while the other admitted that her husband rarely got off work before their kids were asleep. Neither felt they could complain or do much to alter the situation. They were, they both admitted, simply grateful their spouses had a steady paycheck.
So what about you? Are you or your spouse seeing less of your family, kids and friends than you did prior to the recession? If yes, how are you and your loved ones handling it?
As many of my friends know, I have a definite thing for the Armageddon types. I suspect I am one of those people who needs to know how much worse things can be before I appreciate what I have in the here and now (Yeah, my health insurance bites! But hey, in five years, things will be so bad we will all be living in tent cities and the plague will come and we will be weeping with nostalgia for the days when we argued over the phone for hours with Betty Jean in Bangalore about our benefits…).
So credit where credit it due. The wonderful George Ure makes predictions based on wave theory and a method in which he tracks word usage on the Internet. I’m not sure I really understand this, but it makes for entertaining, if depressing, reading. Well, a few weeks ago George predicted about 50 bodies would be recovered from the Air France plane that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. Guess how many bodies have been recovered?
As for his predictions for the rest of the year … Mercifully, his track record is not so great, at least according to this list helpfully provided by the folks at Coast to Coast AM. On the other hand, timing one’s predictions can be a tricky thing, so if we experience hyper-inflation, inner city unrest or hear from a NASA whistleblower before the end of 2009, you can credit George for letting you know the news first.
First, let me say I am terribly sorry to read about Sandra Tsing-Loh’s divorce which, according to her essay in the most recent issue of The Atlantic, apparently occurred after she could not meet a deadline imposed by her therapist for re-committing to her (still) husband after she enjoyed a brief affair. But I think in her desire to draw a greater social lesson from her experience (namely, that a long-term monogamous commitment to one partner is both unnatural and unnecessary), Tsing-Loh misses many important facts about how and why marriage works.
Marriage developed as a social and economic institution, designed to protect the family. This might explain why Americans remain more committed to the institution than Western Europeans, a fact Tsing-Loh spends a lot of time pondering. It’s not that we are more religious or more romantic or more credulous, as she finally concludes. It’s that our social support structures are, to put it kindly, a bit lacking. Marriage is, for better or worse, a social safety net in this country. A Western European single mom can count on such basics as government provided child care and health insurance. We can’t. The economic consequences are profound. To take one example, single mothers in the U.S. file for bankruptcy at significantly higher rates than their married counterparts.
Yes, long-term monogamous marriage comes with some serious downsides, like curtailment of freedom and a squelched individuality. Few would deny that it can, at times, feel quite boring and oppressive. (I wrote about this in my rather well known essay, The New Nanny Diaries are Online). Yet marriage survives, likely because it has much in common with Winston Churchill’s observation on democracy: It might well be one of the worst forms of male/female/family relations ever, except for all the other ones we’ve tried out.
There has always been a strand of self-righteousness in Tsing-Loh’s essays. In her view, what is true for her is true for all of us. The world, c’est moi. Take her otherwise excellent writing on the benefits of public education. She’s right in many ways and yet in her self-congratulation for resisting the lure of a $25,000 a year school she couldn’t afford she goes over the top. Anyone who has ever sent a child to a public school knows that even the best are far from trouble-free. The vast majority cannot compete educationally with the private sector. I always feel guilty when I first read Tsing-Loh’s evangelic education bromides since, after all, the vast majority of mothers of children at my sons school commit the Tsing-Loh sin of speaking English as a first language. But then I remember – my children do go to a public school! Yes, it commits the sin of being in the suburbs but it is economically diverse! We fight over budgets! And our mothers — many of them volunteer too. (Not me, by the way, but I’m willing to acknowledge that Tsing-Loh has me beat as a person on this issue.)
That streak of self-righteousness and self regard is present in this essay too. Take Tsing-Loh’s depictions of her friends’ marriages all of whom, it turns out, are as miserable as hers. They simply lack her moxie, her willingness to call it quits. This, frankly, defies belief. More likely, her unhappy friends confided in her and the others – well, they probably exercised tact and common sense. After all, if a friend came to you and said their marriage was over, would you respond by saying, “My husband is the greatest ever?” I don’t think so.
All this isn’t to attack Tsing-Loh for her decision. It’s possible –in fact quite likely – her marriage was a dysfunctional mess that needed to end. No one flippantly ends a two decades long marriage. I am just not convinced its demise holds any lessons for the rest of us except, perhaps, to avoid family therapists who impose arbitrary cut-off dates on you and yours.