We interrupt the Blog Roll series to bring you this post. This post outgrew a potential Link Log, but it began with a reaction to a link:
What the trying-to-be-a-comedienne is quoted saying here is free speech, however poorly timed. It's even a healthy, positive statement of her political beliefs, misguided as those are. And it raises a concern for "conservatives" (even for Erika Kirk) who want to carry on Charlie Kirk's mission in life.
What, exactly, are we trying to conserve?
I know what I'm trying to conserve. A short list of things I want to conserve in US public life looks like:
* Freedom of movement, for everybody
* Freedom of speech, for everybody
* Freedom of the press, including the Internet, for everybody
* Freedom of association, for everybody
* Right to work, for everybody
* Right to privacy, for everybody
* Rule of law--natural laws that people intuitively understand and know how to follow
* Strict limits on government support for human-made regulations that are changeable and complicated enough that people are probably violating a few of them and don't know it
* No government budget for ongoing employment in jobs that could be done by private contractors
* Enforcement of individuals' rights to property, including earned wages
A short list of things that used to exist in US public life, that I do NOT want to conserve, looks like this:
* Discriminatory policies, especially against women
* Over-regulation that will always amount to injustice against somebody or other
* Government budgets that aren't gone over closely and thoroughly, by everyone who has the time
* Social pressure against personal choices that don't harm others
* Unwanted pregnancies
* Homelessness caused by inflated "property values"
* Epidemics caused by crowded living conditions, polluted water, etc.
* Epidemics caused by chemical pollution, and tolerance for corporate failure to show responsibility for same
* Mandates on matters of personal choice that don't clearly and directly harm others, including vaccination, school attendance, insurance, use of banks or credit cards, use of property, etc.
* Participation in the mental illness of those who think they have been anointed to make personal decisions for others
Some of Charlie Kirk's published speeches, which have been recirculated so incessantly this week, seem to verge on at least three of those bad things--discrimination against women, social pressure against personal choices, and unwanted pregnancies.
I don't think there's any real excuse for pretending that even the feminist movement of the 1970s limited women to conformity to one of two stereotypes: the "Happy" Housewife who had no job skills and no reason to live after the last baby doctors extracted from her worn-out body went to school, or the grim and probably mannish corporate wage slave who had no family and no reason to live after the value of her work rose above what the company wanted to pay. I was there. I remember. It was about choices other than either of those, both of which impressed most of us as being fairly horrible.
Feminism is simply the belief that women are of equal value with men. There are different "schools of" feminist thought. There were "conservative" feminists who thought full-time mothers ought to be paid, though that line of thought didn't get far due to a consensus that what full-time mothers do is priceless. There were Republican feminists who thought that, as long as the average woman was content to do part-time pink-collar jobs, the average woman's earning lower wages than the average man of similar age and education was not a problem. There are Muslim feminists, like Fatima Mernissi, who think it's liberating for women to have separate schools and hospitals and conceal themselves from most men. In the modern world, believing that women are of at least equal value with men is supported by objective facts, so "feminism" is synonymous with sane perception of one aspect of consensus reality, and does not obligate all feminists to agree on their priorities or even on their specific goals. We don't.
Abortion became identified as a "feminist issue" or a "woman's right" because it was supported by irresponsible men. What women counselling women who are considering abortion report is that abortion is a "choice" usually urged on women by irresponsible men--husbands who don't think they can afford the child, or other people's cheating husbands who don't want their wives to see a "honey" with a child who might look like them. Because Gloria Steinem tried to appease her own guilty conscience by presenting abortion as a "choice" swinging chicks of the 1960s were happy about making--which obviously wasn't altogether true, even for her--I've known people who assumed that any independent woman supported abortion and, if she'd travelled or if she'd gained and lost weight, she'd probably had one.
There are actually local lurkers who've heard quite detailed versions of this slanderous story, whether they've heard and apparently believed that the fetus I supposedly aborted was the product of interracial sex or of incest. If I weren't a feminist I could be deeply hurt by such stories. As things are I laugh at them, because they are ridiculous. The fact is that I was a baby-faced, preposterously sheltered, teenaged princess during the very few years when I might have been able to conceive a baby if I'd worked at it. Around the time I was old enough to vote, I developed polycystic ovarian syndrome. Some people may care enough to pay for an autopsy when I'm dead to prove this, for all I know. I've never had any reason to worry about what to do with a baby. I've never wanted to bring more celiacs into the world, but, even with the celiac gene, I don't believe in wasting babies. But that's my belief, based in the confidence that if I'd had a baby I didn't feel able to keep I could have made decent arrangements for it (not everyone can) and recovered from the horrors of being pregnant while celiac (not every body can do that, either). I don't judge women who've thought they needed abortion. I, personally, never have had any reason to think about it.
The choice responsible, intelligent women make is not to be pregnant unless, and until, they want babies. This is definitely one reason why such women choose late marriage or no marriage at all. If we might have thought we liked men enough to marry them, and then after the engagement was announced and private pleasure was being shared a man started whining "But I want to 'go all the way'," the engagement was over. Making babies is "better" than merely making pleasure if, and because, and insofar as, it celebrates a commitment to be together rearing a child for twenty years. Otherwise, in the deplorable slang my generation used, third base is home. End of discussion.
Should people wait for marriage to have babies? Absolutely. Should they wait for marriage to experience carnal pleasure? Well...if they happen to be HSP, even if that were ideal, it's not going to be possible, but this web site's contract wouldn't let me go there if I wanted to.
Anyway, now that it's been made clear to the young that "feminist" does not mean "person who thinks she should be paying taxes so that irresponsible men can bully the idjits who rut with them into having abortions," let's consider the more serious question of what young women should plan to do with their lives.
There's an assumption, from times when the human-friendly parts of the world were less crowded, that most young people want babies. The good news, considering the conditions in which so many young people live, is that this seems not to be true. There are simply too many people on this planet at this time. We don't need to become extinct but we need negative population growth.
Both of the major political parties are in denial about a fact that ought to have been obvious on the day a movement for homosexuals' rights came to exist. I don't think homosexuals deserve blame for this, any more than people with cancer deserve blame for the cigarette industry, but the fact that enough people are homosexual to generate a movement is an indicator that people are badly overcrowded. That might be true for only a few households, or schools, or at least cities--but the fact that it's true for most cities these days, and that people living in the habitable rural areas don't want to build more or bigger cities where they are, tells us: too many humans. We don't need to start paying to increase the rate of suicide, for Heaven's sake. All we really need is to support young people's righteous choice to have one child or none. That means the existing population level will not continue to replace itself. There will be fewer, healthier, happier humans in a cleaner, safer world, after we're gone, and I personally am all for that.
"But I want babies, plural. I want a house full," some people still say. Cheers to them--that probably means they've been living in healthier conditions where their hormones are still telling them they can afford a house full. Their hormones are wrong. Hormones are not well informed. But they can indulge their hormones by choosing to produce one child of their own and adopt some more. There's no shortage of homeless babies to choose from. I personally would rather make a mutual choice to keep an adoptable foster child who chose to stay with me, but some people think they have to have a "White Newborn," or maybe some other variety of infant. There are enough homeless children that couples with reasonable incomes can make that decision for themselves.
"But, but," both major parties sputter. Shortsighted Democrats think we can pack in more immigrants as second-class citizens who will pay more to support our Social Security "retirement" than they'll get out of it. Shortsighted Republicans think we can wall out immigrants and just breed more babies who will look like us. Both parties want, for selfish and venal reasons, to deny the fact that we can't afford to do either without inflicting chaos and anarchy and probably cannibalism on the next generation. Many people in both parties can afford to want this, in a biological sense at least, because they won't live to see what either of their disastrous policies will do to their children. I'm not too old to anticipate that I may have to share the consequences of whatever we do to The Nephews' generation, so I cannot afford, even in the biological sense, to support either shortsighted Ds or shortsighted Rs. Neither can anyone who is still in the fertile part of a human lifetime.
"Conservatives" are gaining political momentum from life's having handed them, us, two fine-looking poster children this summer. Respect for the lives of Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska demands that people not waste that momentum. And it will be wasted if Rs are allowed to twist "conservative" rhetoric away from freedom of speech, which is still sustainable, into a message about making more babies at a time when that's not sustainable.
"So what are young women to do with their lives if they marry late and have only one baby?" Well, I married late and had no babies at all, and I remember my young adult years as highly satisfactory. I was one of those girls who consider only fluffy "humanities" majors in college (in addition to English and psychology I considered "library science," education, music, religion, and radio broadcasting) and then didn't even finish a degree. If I hadn't had that wretched vaccine I would probably have finished a degree but it would not have been for a job that's still paying top salaries today. Y'know what, I don't think I would have minded that. Very likely I would have had my own business in Washington and married a nice well-off diplomat, around age thirty or thirty-five, just the same. And two or three years studying the subjects college girls enjoy didn't do me any harm. It did qualify me to be a Washingtonienne and find a nice well-off diplomat. The main difference not having been in the Michigan Group of survivors of "chronic" mononucleosis might have made is that I might have remained fertile and thus attracted a younger diplomat, also fertile, and had babies. I can't say that dilettante-ing around in fashionable circles, travelling, reading and writing, helping rear and educate my sisters, and then being happily married until cancer did us part, was anything I wouldn't recommend to young women today. Quite the contrary, thank you very much.
But I think women should, absolutely, expect to have "careers." Marriage and children are optional. Life hands those to some of us, not to others. What we all have to plan on doing is earning a living.
It's not really fair to say, as Charlie Kirk infamously said, that when young men (on average, as a survey group) rated family life ahead of professional success and young women (ditto) rated professional success ahead of life, that means that young women are "choosing childlessness and loneliness." For one thing, what people want most is what they don't already have. Large numbers of young men are already earning good money, if only on construction jobs, while young women are more likely to be earning "entry-level wages" and paying off college loans. And also, despite all the effort that's been put into bringing girls up to be fools for love, females are biologically programmed to be more cautious about when, where, and with what they reproduce.
Men imagine they can, as Kirk happened to be able to do, take one look at a pretty girl with a good resume and decide they want to marry her. That's not a righteous act; in fact, although the Bible describes marriages where young men chose their own wives, following their eyeballs, it goes into considerable detail about the problems in those marriages. At best they became entangled with dysfunctional in-laws, like Jacob. At worst they were seduced by their enemies, or at best tools of their enemies, like Samson. Young men need no encouragement to imagine that they can count on having Charlie Kirk's extraordinary good luck. Michael Jordan and Bill Gates and everyone else who had extraordinary success at an early age had extraordinary good luck, as well as extraordinary talent. Their stories can be inspiring but they can't be depended on to predict outcomes for anyone else.
Women know that, if babies are going to be happy and healthy and a source of joy, they have to be born into a well feathered nest. Not all women seem to be able to control themselves well enough to sublimate their energy into preparing a comfortable home for any babies they may have, by birth or adoption, but that behavior is obviously to be encouraged.
The more conservative a woman is by temperament, the more her instincts will tell her to wait, be sure of a husband's adult character, provide a wholesome environment for children, and plan on a good long life after any children she rears are grown up and gone. "Professional foster mother," or adoptive mother, of one child after another is a valid career option but it's not for everyone. Most women do better in skilled professions and that's what they should prepare to do with most of their lives, even if they take time off to have a baby.
As for marrying early...let's say, first of all, that there are a very small percentage of humankind for whom that works, and cheers for them. But we have to consider the majority.
I consider the majority of my acquaintances when we were very young adults...I won't go into all of my friends' stories, but I'll say a bit about myself and the boys I liked in college. I was young enough to have indiscriminate hormone reactions to a lot of different ones; I'll limit this consideration to three boys who were pretty close school friends, who seemed worth watching to see whether they became men I might want to marry.
There was the commitment-phobic. "Fun, and good-looking, when he's around," was a line I remember from a novel that's become cringe-inducing and deserves a decent burial, because it described the first boy I liked in college so well. We were friends who shared secrets, which included a physical attraction. Perfect--for school friends. Now, projecting into the future: He thought he wanted to major in education. It was the early eighties, so not everyone recognized...I have never met anyone who sounded more like the "gay young man" stereotype than he did. It was just an exaggerated, affected version of a Southern Preppy accent and manner, so at the time people could say "Well, he is Southern and he is preppy," but a few years later everyone would recognize a line, and he was across the line. If that boy had settled down, finished a degree, and been hired as a teacher, he would probably have been fired, banned from teaching, and permanently embittered, on suspicion alone--though here I stand to testify that he liked women. Lots of different women, only he was honorable enough to admit it and not be overly intimate with one woman in particular. Wherever he is and whatever he's doing now, I hope he's still enjoying it as much as we all used to enjoy his presence among us in college, I'm sure he's happier than he would have been if he'd tried to marry one woman and settle down in one job. Especially teaching. Even as a dishwasher-and-garage-band-singer he would have done better than that.
Then there was the nice, sober, steady chap so many people thought was so much better for me than the commitment-phobic was. And he was another excellent school friend...until I'd dropped out of university and the busybodies in the church had decided I was no longer good enough for him. I don't know to what extent they were to blame for his being the one who "had to" marry a student on his first teaching job. All I know is that he became the topic of discussion about why the rule against teachers dating their students is not that all students are necessarily children, or even younger than teachers, but that teachers aren't supposed to be much closer to one student in a class than to the others. And he didn't get another teaching job, either. And, fifteen years later, when massage had become one of my odd jobs, my voice mail included a painfully familiar voice. He'd not been referred by any doctor--he was in pretty good condition, actually, just stressed--he was looking for someone who could understand the problems in his marriage--and by the way my recorded voice reminded him of someone he used to know! I'm not proud of this, but I played the message for my husband, shrieking with malicious glee, and then erased it. If I never see him again it'll probably be the best thing.
Then there was the cute boy at university. His student labor job was groundskeeping and he made sure the snow was cleared off the pavement I used, first. We grabbed quick lunches together enough times that, one day when we had time, we had a leisurely, chatty lunch, during which he asked whether I was from Scotland or Ireland. "Your accent, I mean, you speak so clearly." I'm from Virginia, I said. "But you seemed so nice!" Let's just say that it takes more than that kind of attitude to interest anyone in moving to Nova Scotia, which I probably wouldn't have done in any case.
And then...me. Readers don't need to know what a nineteen-year-old mess I used to be, though, rest assured, I was nineteen years old once just like everybody else. Probably messier than the boys were, if they're still alive, and read this, and my admitting to being a mess too makes them feel better. All that needs to be said is that after having the vaccine in order to stay at university, I became ill, dropped out of university anyway, and was asexual and unhealthy and jaundiced and absolutely no fun for anyone to be around for years. I next kept a job longer than three weeks, two full years after the jab. The ability to feel interested in men or sex returned, by fits and starts, starting about two more years after that.
(In the Awesome Eighties the vaccine college kids were required to have was against measles, mumps, and rubella. It was a live-virus vaccine, subject to contamination. Due to political differences five groups of victims of contamination were counted. I think this was a mistake. I suspect the Michigan, Ontario, Quebec, and New York Groups had the same disease, and different doctors gave it different names. The Georgia Group had a different and more serious thing.)
Anyway, that's four people who clearly should not have married early, and thank goodness if three of us had the good fortune to marry late, skip the "first divorce," and have marriages worthy of the name. One poor booby married early and has evidently regretted it.
This story needs to be told, because young people need not to be encouraged to be the poor booby. It's much easier to have one child or none if you wait until you're full-grown and debt-free (at least 25 years old) and, preferably, until you own a house with separate bedrooms for each child you may want to rear. It's also easier to be sure you're marrying a man or woman whose character can withstand the hardships of life. Little Ms. Promising and Mr. Possibility very often don't have even their good looks left by the time they're 25.
And if "conservatives" apply pressure to young people to have those disastrous first marriages, and have surplus babies, just so we can "retire" on the earnings of miserable, oppressed, exploited young people who look like us...then those "conservatives" will indeed deserve to see their children become transgendered Marxists, which are further from salvation than the average Neo-Pagan "Witch." With shaved heads, cocaine noses, and satanic pentagrams dangling from their nose rings. Not because those things are new or fun or attractive, but because they represent rejection of "conservative" parents. By the time the next generation recover from that stage, if they do, those "conservatives" will be dead. And it'll serve'm right.
I get to say this because I'm 60. If you're under age 60, don't even quote me, lest anybody think you said it. I, personally, think able-bodied seniors should not "retire." I think we should give thanks if we're able to quit the 40-to-60-hour-a-week corporate-wage-slave jobs and spend our time doing work we enjoy. Con suerte we might even be able to do work that's not paid in money, being full-time grandparents or new unknown artists. But we should work, because when people don't have work to do they start to decompose. And we should continue to pay into the disability pension fund we need, and should keep. Automatic "retirement" at any age is unsustainable and unhealthy. We should abandon it as a failed idea. If we do, it should be easy to provide decent pensions for those who aren't able to do any kind of work--at whatever age they may be--until they either recover, or die, or get bored enough to find ways to work around their disabilities. Only seniors should talk or think about this. If you're a mere child of 50, forget I mentioned it. Read something else.
By accepting this tweak to the "conservative" ideal of family life, with extended families and entailed property and real communities where people know each other's names and all, I think even those who've always identified as "conservatives" can agree with those of us who actually like "liberal, as distinct from left-wing" better...and focus on the message, which is freedom of speech, and freedom of association, and all that.
(Hmm...that'll do for an end line, but one more thought needs to be expressed...)
You may have been thinking all along, if you've read all along to this point, "What about freedom of religion?" I don't think that's a public issue. Nobody but you and God, as you understand God, can tell you what to believe or how to serve and worship. Nobody else ever really knows. Freedom of religion is truly unalienable. Freedom to talk about what you believe, in groups of people who believe something similar, is what we all need to be eternally vigilant to protect. We can afford to include those who don't like the name "God" as deserving freedom of speech and freedom of association.
) were teacherly reflections
on the quirks of English language and literature, most specifically on the
international (and multilingual) surrealist poetry of the twentieth century,
with insights from other genres of art and literature around the world.
Surrealism implied goofiness, sometimes inspired by high spirits (and/or booze
and drugs), sometimes by nightmares, grief, bad trips, and concern about the
fate of humankind. Road Scholar is
mostly real, but some episodes, like the send-off party with the image of Jayne
Mansfield’s head wired to complain of a “splitting headache” before splitting
apart, qualify as surreal…and that’s the way in which Road Scholar is funny. It’s humor for educated adults, or at least
college students; it’s meant to promote serious thought as well as laughter.
You’ll laugh. You’ll feel bemused by people, sorry for people; you’ll wonder
what people are doing now.
, and visits to the graves of
earlier writers buried in New York state.
reported
Charles Guiteau being nicknamed “Gitout.”)
in San Francisco.
More immigrants; more thoughts on the experience of legal immigration.
