The War on Women: Orange Alert

There was an article in Forbes a week or so ago about how marrying a "career girl" increases one's chances of divorce. "Whatever you do," Michael Noer hyperbolizes, "don't marry a woman with a career." You can almost smell the fear.

It gets worse. Noer writes:

To be clear, we're not talking about a high school dropout minding a cash register. For our purposes, a "career girl" has a university-level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than $30,000 a year.

Ok, first of all: career girl??? Um, Forbes, welcome to 2006.

But to give credit where credit is due: at least Forbes lays its economic cards on the table: it wants to be clear that it's ok for women to be underemployed at low paying jobs. Hell, that's what made America great!

No, Noer saves his panic-mongering for a cautionary tale about women who might one day threaten his job or want into his club or who might - God forbid - not be at his home making his dinner.

Forbes takes pains to point out that it's only women's work that threatens marriages:

Women's work hours consistently increase divorce, whereas increases in men's work hours often have no statistical effect.

"Often have no statistical effect"????? What does that mean? Something either has a statistical effect or it doesn't.

Besides, I would think that most obvious interpretation of this data is that financially independent women are more able to leave miserable or abusive marriages. If the rate of divorce is higher for women who have the means of supporting themselves and their children, maybe it's because these were marriages that were bad for the women in them. We should be glad that women aren't trapped in rotten unions. We should be working as a society to ensure that this is also the case for women who don't work outside the home or who don't make enough money to leave.

Noer, himself, hints at the fact that it's women's independence that is so damaging to marriages:

[Y]our typical career girl is well educated, ambitious, informed and engaged. All seemingly good things, right? Sure … at least until you get married. Then, to put it bluntly, the more successful she is, the more likely she is to grow dissatisfied with you.

Is it just me, or does Mr. Noer sound just a little insecure? And what a snob! There are lots of women who don't have a university degree who are "ambitious, informed and engaged." Lots of them are probably stay-at-home moms. It's a nice little double-bind Noer makes for women: you're either a shitty wife or you're dumb and boring.

This is where I think the heart of Noer's position is: career women are scary and the rest of them aren't worth anything beyond their household labor.

I won't even get into their housework argument, except to say: Maybe those husbands could pick up a damn broom now and then. Or pick up the kids from school. Jackasses.

But what really scares me is the timing. As we gear up for campaign season and start the two-year slimefest that is the presidential election season, I can't help but to see this as a gear up in the press against working women.

This not only helps rally the base, but it gets the rhetoric against women up to a fever pitch in case Clinton gets the nomination. Now, I am no fan of Clinton. She's the Splenda to McCain's Sweet'n'Low - just more illusion of choice. I hope like all get out that she doesn't get the nomination.

But not like this.

Addendum: War on the Poor also at Orange Alert:

I wonder how my own mother would feel to know that she didn't really have a career because she didn't have a "university-level (or higher) education." I wonder if this goes for men, too. Do men need a BA in order to have a "career"? In order to be "informed and engaged"? I find the classism of this piece as disturbing as its anti-feminism. Maybe if Noer et al weren't so isolated, they would discover that working class people are just as intelligent and interesting as -*gasp* - people who write for (or are written about in) Forbes magazine.

Error-fest 2006!!

Another post on error! For the full error experience, start reading a couple of posts ago.

What function does error serve in narrative?

For Aristotle the recognition (anagnorisis) of error (hamartia) is one of the essential parts of the tragic plot:

Sleeping with your mother is bad.
Knowing that you're sleeping with your mother is tragic.

Often, though, error narratives are really correction narratives.

Error allows us to reimagine the order of things, to return to order on more voluntary or on transcendent terms. The Iliad is a story of error: Agamemnon's error in taking Achilles' girlfriend (he later blames this error on Ate, a personification of madness). More importantly, it is the story of Achilles' error in refusing to fight. This error leads, however indirectly, to the death of his friend, Patroclus. Achilles' refusal was error, but it was a necessary error: it allowed him to return to battle with god-made armor, a heart full of revengeful battlelust, and a sharper sense of purpose than Homer Simpson at a beer garden.

In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas discussed the importance of error for the historical narrative of messianic redemption: O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem: "O happy sin that earned such a great and good redeemer."

The "fortunate fall" of Adam and Eve paves the way for a messiah who will redeem mankind. It also allows for a return to paradise that is made transcendent. The first paradise was what it was. You know, nice and everything, but there wasn't anything to compare it to. The paradise of a redeemed mankind would be made even paradisier by having been expelled from the first one.

This model of error and renewal recurs throughout literary history.

There is a wonderful scene in Villette, in which the plain and retiring Lucy Snow is coerced into wearing a pink dress to a concert. She prepares uneasily, eyeing her companion's brown dress: "How I envied her those folds of grave, dark majesty!"

Lucy is intensely conscious of her dress and worried that she will be an object of ridicule in this "bright tint." She and her party walk into the concert hall, and she recounts their progress to their seats:

We moved on—I was not at all conscious whither—but at some turn we suddenly encountered another party approaching from the opposite direction. I just now see that group, as it flashed—upon me for one moment. A handsome middle-aged lady in dark velvet; a gentleman who might be her son—the best face, the finest figure, I thought, I had ever seen; a third person in a pink dress and black lace mantle.

I noted them all—the third person as well as the other two—and for the fraction of a moment believed them all strangers, thus receiving an impartial impression of their appearance. But the impression was hardly felt and not fixed, before the consciousness that I faced a great mirror, filling a compartment between two pillars, dispelled it: the party was our own party. Thus for the first, and perhaps only time in my life, I enjoyed the “giftie” of seeing myself as others see me. No need to dwell on the result. It brought a jar of discord, a pang of regret; it was not flattering, yet, after all, I ought to be thankful; it might have been worse.

It's a tiny moment of misreading and correction in a novel filled with misreading. Bronte's narrative solicits misreadings from her readers and Lucy is continually misreading her situations. This moment of recognition is not on the Aristotelean model, but rather marks the beginning of observation and recognition that reshapes the course of the novel.

We should all have such "gifties" - complete with discord and pangs of regret. It could, after all, be worse.

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us.
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!

- Robert Burns, "To a Louse"

Another County Heard From!

To give equal time to the opposition, here's Edmund Spenser's take on Error. He's not as keen on it as I am:


Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide,
But th'other halfe did womans shape retaine,
Most lothsom, filthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine.

And as she lay vpon the durtie ground,
Her huge long taile her den all ouerspred,
Yet was in knots and many boughtes vpwound,
Pointed with mortall sting. Of her there bred
A thousand yong ones, which she dayly fed,
Sucking vpon her poisonous dugs, each one
Of sundry shapes, yet all ill fauored:
Soone as that vncouth light vpon them shone,
Into her mouth they crept, and suddain all were gone.

Their dam vpstart, out of her den effraide,
And rushed forth, hurling her hideous taile
About her cursed head, whose folds displaid
Were stretcht now forth at length without entraile.
She lookt about, and seeing one in mayle
Armed to point, sought backe to turne againe;
For light she hated as the deadly bale,
Ay wont in desert darknesse to remaine,
Where plaine none might her see, nor she see any plaine.

To each his own, Mr. Spenser.

My Ass is Grass

...for all flesh is as (Gunter) Grass.

Fallible, that is. I've been thinking about error a lot the last week or so. I've been thinking about the new school year and how I can get my students to overcome their fear of making errors. And I've been thinking about the different types of errors.

In a recent post on Gunter Grass, I made a not insignificant factual error. In my zeal to make a point, I misrepresented the facts of Martin Heidegger's career. I would not like such an error to be made about me (even though I am not exactly a public figure). This was a lazy mistake (not the kind I want to empower my students to make)- there's no defense to make.

The reader who made the correction asked a really interesting and provocative question:

"If you're wrong about that, isn't it possible everything else you write is also wrong?"

The question is an important one, especially in the context of the post, which was about Gunter Grass's four months in the Waffen SS and sixty years of silence about it.

This silence seems to be predicated on the notion that if we knew he was wrong about one thing, he wouldn't have any credibility about anything else.

But people aren't like that, and neither is the truth. No one has all of it, and it's when people start thinking that they do that things get scary. That's when we start asking the "quarantine questions" I discussed in the previous post, the questions that presume that our own integrity and authority are beyond questioning.

Refusing to acknowledge that we can be wrong - or that we can be both right and wrong - cuts us off from what is truly humanizing: empathy, curiosity, change.

Of course people can be wrong about one thing and right about others. Heidegger wrote much that was compelling and often beautiful. But he couldn't have been wronger in his political views or the conduct of his administrative career.

Think how much different the Kerry campaign would have been if Kerry had been able to say: "Wow - that whole voting for the war and the Patriot Act? I totally fucked up, didn't I? But if you elect me, I am going to spend the next four years working like hell to make up for it."

Instead, he let himself get locked into his initial position in order to avoid being called a flip-flopper. He spent the whole campaign trying to explain how his support for the war was different from the President's support for the war.

Clinton is now going through the same process, trying to show how her two votes for the Patriot Act and her vote to authorize force is different from the Republicans. Like Kerry, the Clinton line is: "using force on Iraq was a good idea. I didn't make a mistake. I don't withdraw my support just because I know that the intelligence was wrong. It's just the management of the war that I oppose."

Anyone else lost in this logic?

I think we need to either find a Democrat who can admit to making a mistake or find one (I'm looking at you, Feingold) who opposed the war from the start.

On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me a bit to find out that I am wrong about most things.

Yikes

I'm all for reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, but this is not the way.

Nuclear power is not clean. It might not produce greenhouse gases, but the thermal pollution is considerable and we have no good long-term strategy for waste storage.

The current strategy seems to be to dump it on less populous, poorer states. So Massachusetts or Texas get to use the energy, and Nevada and Kansas get to store the toxic waste (although, to be fair, the waste from the Pilgrim plant in MA is currently being held on-site while they figure out a permanent site. Nevada is a proposed site, but until they get the details worked out, they are just storing the waste in a spent fuel pool. This "temporary" storage facility holds 30x as much nuclear waste as Chernobyl. So if you've been wondering why Boston keeps flirting with Cheyenne...).

We do need to come up with a plan to solve our energy needs (or dramatically reduce these needs) without dependence on foreign oil and without pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but this is just scary. Once again, the soi-disant Left needs to grow a pair and speak out.

Nuclear power is an "alternative energy source" the way Pearl Jam is "alternative rock."

Skies Betweenpie Mountains

I think it looks something like this.



Dwight has other ideas.

Poem

Today I came across this poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is so sad and beautiful and evocative - I don't have anything to say:

My own heart let me more have pity on; let

Me live to my own sad self hereafter kind,

Charitable; not live this tormented mind

With this tormented mind tormenting yet.

I cast for comfort I can no more get

By groping round my comfortless, than blind

Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find

Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise

You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile

Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile

's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather -- as skies

Betweenpie mountains -- lights a lovely mile.

Major Anxiety

September is almost here, and I am frantically trying to prepare for fall semester. I was fretting about this with some friends recently. We were bemoaning the impending lack of freedom, the soon-to-be crowded campus, but most of all the return of the undergraduates.

The return of students means the return of complaints about grades (I can't -*sob*- believe - *sniffle* - that you gave me - *gasp* - a B+).

The return of students means the return of a seemingly endless barrage of emails asking questions such as:*

"When is the test?" (That date on the syllabus might just be an estimate, after all)

"Where is Davis Hall?" (Map? What is this "map" of which you speak?)

"Is there a higher power in the universe?" (and will this be on the final?)

In the midst of all this half-serious bitching, one woman said something that stopped the laughter faster than a pedophile joke:

"I bet we are going to get Freshmen who want to major in Symbology."

I know I've blogged about this before, but is there any limit to Dan Brown's evil power?

One of the things my students find hardest to grasp is a comfort with, or even a delight in complexity, uncertainty, openendedness. They are very concerned about being right. It is this concern that leads them to write very boring essays, which are little more than summaries and that pointedly ignore any rough edges (where, of course, all the real interest lies).

It also attracts them to theoretical explanations that are tidy and totalizing, that explain away all uncertainty, plurality, tension (where, of course, the real interest lies. The facile assumption of The Da Vinci Code is that if the alternate account of history were true, it would "solve for" all those works of art, instead of merely acting as a new starting point. My students' excuse is that they are very young. What is Dan Brown's excuse?).

They want decoder rings. They want to find Professor Causabon's Key to all Mythologies, apply it to a text and have done.

Oddly enough, many of my best and most creative students are from the hard sciences. I think this is because they are very comfortable with the idea of making mistakes. Mistakes are built into the scientific method, and scientists understand that making them is an essential part of the process of discovery.

There are better things than being right. Learning, for one, is better than being right.

*Actual questions from students.

Dolce Far Niente

In his Reveries du Promeneur Solitaire, Rousseau describes floating in his little boat off the Swiss island of St. Pierre. He describes letting go of all desire and ambition in this "dolce far niente": a sweet doing nothing.

Rousseau recounts that for brief moments he felt simply the "sentiment de l'existence," or the feeling of being. For the anxious and acutely self-conscious Rousseau, these were transcendent but fleeting moments.

Then he went back to writing about childhood education while leaving his own kids at the orphanage door.

The most simple feeling - that of just being - was the most elusive for Rousseau. Daily concerns, intellectual matters, old resentments; all these intruded upon the moment, disrupting the unmediated connection to nowness.

I saw a bird today who could have shown Rousseau a thing or two. I was walking through the park on my way to work, and there were a bunch of little birds pecking at the grass, presumably for bugs or worms or crumbs or whatever.

I don't know from birds. They were small and brown. Sparrows?

One of them was splashing around in a mud puddle, a-shakin' and a-shimmyin' and looking for all the world like he was having just about as much sentiment de l'existence as one tiny bird could take. After a few seconds he hopped out of the puddle and headed off to join the other birds with their furious pecking.

Then he slowly swivelled his head back, eyeing the puddle. Then back to the birds busily pecking on the grass. I swear, you could almost see a cartoon thought bubble: "Man, screw that."

He jumped back in the puddle and resumed splashing.

It was the cutest damn thing I've ever seen. Including puppies, kittens, and 3 out of 4 of my nieces and nephews. It was cuter than the button than some people say old Feemus is cuter than.

If that makes any sense.

Anyway, this post doesn't have anything much to do with Rousseau. I'm just not quite secure enough to write about cute birdies without some (pseudo-)intellectual bullshit thrown in.

The Floundering

It's a little late to be blogging about the Gunter Grass affair, I know, but here goes (tune in tomorrow for an analysis of the McGovern campaign - I think old George has a real shot):

It's the lies that hurt, Mr. Grass (ask fellow Nazi Youth-er turned Pope, Jumpin' Joe Ratzinger, to explain sins of omission to you). We have enough subtlety in our historical imaginations to understand that a 17 year old kid who gets conscripted isn't exactly a war criminal.

At least I hope we do.

I've got a family member doing his second tour in Iraq. He doesn't want to be there, but he doesn't have a lot of choice. He wasn't conscripted, but he was a poor kid without a whole lot of options who signed up as a way to make a life for himself. Not to kill people. I sure as hell don't blame him for the war.

I don't blame Gunter Grass, either.

How many 17 year olds have the insight and the courage to face almost certain death standing up for what's right? Not many. Precious few adults do, either. And anyone who says they do without having been put to the test is fooling themselves.

One often hears people asking why there weren't more protests in Germany. Why more people didn't intervene to stop their Jewish neighbors from being taken to the camps. This is a dangerous line of questioning: by making it a question about German behavior, we ignore the fact that it's really a question about human behavior. It allows us to imaginatively quarantine the problem and to escape self-examination.

First of all, it ignores the fact that the Resistance movement started in Germany and continued throughout the war. But it also ignores a deeper question: what do any of us do in the face of abused power? What did Americans do to prevent the abduction of our ethnically Japanese neighbors? As it turns out, they weren't being sent to death camps (they were just being illegally detained and despoiled of their property. That's all), but no one knew that for sure.

Our military knew about the death camps, but didn't bomb the railroad tracks that carried Jews to slaughter, slavery, and torture. It wasn't in the "war effort."

We know that our ethnically Arab neighbors are being spied on and illegally detained and possible tortured. How many of us are putting our lives on the line to secure their safety?

Not me. I sign a few petitions and then have a self-satisfied nap. It's hard work being an activist.

Quarantining the questions allows us to escape responsiblity. Quarantining the questions allows us to become morally complacent.

So, Mr. Grass, knowing that you were a conscripted soldier for 4 months when you were 17 might have kept you from getting a Nobel - then again, it might not - but it wouldn't have kept you from having a literary career.

Paul de Man wrote moony articles about the Nazis in Belgian newspapers. This discovery has in no way diminished his reputation.

Martin Heidegger, a man who was already powerful and influential enough to do some good, chose not to do good. Instead, he used the expulsion of Jews from their university posts to advance his own career.* Despite the pleadings of friends and former colleagues like Karl Jaspers, Heidegger never repudiated his Nazi sympathies; he was a dues-paying member of the Nazi party until the end of the war. And who is one of the most famous philosophers of the 20th century?

Here's a hint: it ain't Karl Jaspers.

Yeats, Pound, Eliot - all had Fascist leanings of one sort or another.

So, this revelation wouldn't have hampered your career at all, Mr. Grass. What it could have done - and here's the rub, as the man says - it could have strengthened your political voice over the last few decades.

You had an opportunity to bear witness.

As the self-appointed and often smug conscience of German politics, imagine how your voice could have been amplified if people knew your story. You could have shown how dangerous and immoral systems can swallow up the lives and agency of decent people. How not every decent person has the clarity and fortitude and morally prescient whimsy of Oskar Mazerath. Who had the distinct advantage of being fictional.

Your indictment, too, quarantined moral responsibility. It remained: what was wrong with all those passive Germans? Your honesty could have elevated the discourse from one of blame to one of ethical discovery - you could have led us to a harder truth than we wanted, but one that we needed.

When you criticized the Christian Democrats for their petit bourgeois ideology, imagine how you could have vitalized your message by demonstrating where such ideas can lead.

When you criticized Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan's unsettling trip to Bitburg, imagine how much more resonant your censure would have been with your living example of how bad actions by leaders can spread, contaminating whole cultures. How bad leadership inculpates the innocent.

You had an opportunity to show what was at stake.

But you didn't. You kept quiet, and now when people ask about it, you impatiently tell them to read your book. This looks like nothing so much as a publicity stunt, a cynical way to move the merch.

*thanks to an alert reader, enowning, I have emended this post to correct a factual error.