Horizon

I don't think any of these people quite explain why dilemmas not only about family but about care for any weak or disabled members of a community somehow tend to become responsibilities of women rather than of people in general. Ben, I know you know better than that but do the writers you're quoting know?

/M

I don't understand the question as it's posed. Are you genuinely asking why this is the case, or are you criticizing the writers for assuming that it's the case? Because if the latter, they might respond that these dilemmas shouldn't really be the responsibility of women alone, but in practice they often are, and they can only write about the world as it is, not as it ideally ought to be. Would it be carping to point out that most articles about teenage pregnancy emphasize the problem in terms of the mother rather than the father?

Well, I can't quite speak to Kitchel, as I haven't read anything of his beyond that Flanagan response. You're more famiar with Echidne's topics than I — though I should mention that I really enjoyed a post of hers recently when she left the ususal program and discussed real patriarchy among a Hasidic community.

What you're describing is the genre of topic that Rebel Dad and Laura write about, in that the reason that a huge number of individuals and families make the decision that the woman takes care of Grandma is the same reason she takes care of the kids. And only people already certain what that reason is are the extremists on the edges.

That said, neither Laura nor RD spend much time on issues of eldercare, because they write about their own experience, and how various articles and theorists match that experience or don't. Laura doesn't talk much about the issues of being a SAHD, and Rebel Dad spends no time at all on the challenges of parenting an autistic four-year-old. I don't think I'd bother reading either one if they only discussed problems that were purely theoretical to them.

There's another factor at work, though: time. Rebel Dad has written that the reason there aren't many single-parent bloggers is that single parents don't have the time to noodle around on the internet writing for strangers. The same is no doubt true for a parent who's taking care of additional family members. I suspect that this may be the reason that so many family writers come from great wealth: they're the ones who have time to write and navigate the publishing world and parent.

I'm usually pleased to jump on "bash the leftwing elite for being out of touch with ordinary people" bandwagons, but Flanagan's aticle in Time is silly.

Most of the 60 million people who voted against George W. Bush have lifestyles more like mine than the Democratic Party would like to admit.

What is this "Democratic Party" which is capable of admitting or denying things? Who are all these Democrats "who decided to stigmatize the white male"? Perhaps there are such Democrats in Berkeley and on the Upper West Side, but if they were typical of the party as a whole, the Democrats would barely exist as a national party.

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made of certain high-profile Democrats, and their emphasis on cultural over economic and security issues, but Flanagan is flailing at strawmen.

Ben, to answer your question, I'm just appalled at Flanagan's indifference to the unfairness of the pressures she's endorsing. And I gather she has a servant too, which doesn't disqualify her from writing about motherhood, but which does disqualify her from universalizing her personal experience.

Actually I believe fairly strongly that the simplest useful system of ethics consists in the duty to clean up after oneself, and I've got no respect for people who don't.

I'm usually pleased to jump on "bash the leftwing elite for being out of touch with ordinary people" bandwagons...

And why is that, Gene? And do you know people personally who fit the purported description of the "left-wing elite"? I know I haven't met anyone like them but perhaps I simply don't travel in the right circles. Are they all in Washington maybe?

And I gather she has a servant too, which doesn't disqualify her from writing about motherhood, but which does disqualify her from universalizing her personal experience.

I realized after my post that I wasn't explain quite clearly enough that not only did Flanagan have a nanny and a housekeeper, but she had them while she was a "stay-at-home-mother". As you say, this may offend the Protestant work ethic plenty, but is nothing to be condemned per se[*]. It's her representation of herself as Everymom that's the problem.

[*] Barbara Ehrenreich would disagree, however, as she has written that mutually consensual employment relationships between working mothers and immigrant childcare providers are intrinsically evil. Obviously, I think this position is hogwash.

And do you know people personally who fit the purported description of the "left-wing elite"?

Mmm.. I do! Me! Me! Call on me! Unh!

Seriously, while I do personally know folks who might fit exactly that caricature (as I do as well on the Right), I have trouble believing that they have any more impact on their representatives than I do. Noiser than average, sure — policy-setters, not likely.

So these weird straw "left elite" creatures are also in Austin? What are they like? Why aren't they in San Francisco?

Thing is, the people I know who hold strong egalitarian political opinions 1) aren't rich, 2) don't parade any fancy connections or credentials they may have, 3) have too much life experience to think of the poor (or anyone else) as uniformly good or bad, and 4) often don't take an active part in Internet debate because they're too busy doing useful work (unlike yrs truly).

Incidentally I also don't personally know either any guys who belong to bowling leagues *or* anyone who slavishly admires guys who belong to bowling leagues. Nevertheless, admiring bowling-league members as the Salt Of The Earth seems to be popular among commentators. Weird.

Y'know, it seems like fervent pro-capitalists have simply replaced the 1930s picture of The Worker as a heavy-industry laborer in a hard hat with the present-day picture of The NASCAR Dad as a church-going assistant sales manager driving to the bowling match in a home-equity-financed Ford pickup, without a shred of intervening self-recognition or irony.

Supposing we were to start a fad for thinking of people as individuals?

[*] Barbara Ehrenreich would disagree, however, as she has written that mutually consensual employment relationships between working mothers and immigrant childcare providers are intrinsically evil. Obviously, I think this position is hogwash.

When you consider the number of mothers who leave their own children behind in, e.g., the Philippines in order to earn money for their own children by caring for others' children in the U.S. -- well, you don't have to hold a radical belief in the equal worth of human beings to agree that the nanny situation has great potential for sadness, irony, and distortion of family relationships.

I also don't personally know either any guys who belong to bowling leagues.

I do, several. What's your point?

[T]he nanny situation has great potential for sadness, irony, and distortion of family relationships

Yes, yes, and yes.

I believe that Ehrenreich went a bit further than that, however I don't have her essay at hand.

Speaking of distortion, a megachurchgoing friend of mine describes a conversation in his small group. A number of parents with stay-at-home nannies were strategizing how to swap the nannies around on a yearly basis, so that their children didn't get "too attached."

--I also don't personally know either any guys who belong to bowling leagues.

-I do, several. What's your point?

That it's possible to have a fairly diverse knowledge of the American voting public without knowing any members of bowling leagues, and that it's kind of silly to fetishize bowlers as more "real Americans" than others. As Tom said some years ago, everyone's life experience is as real as everyone else's.

But if nobody here was actually fetishizing bowlers then perhaps we can drop the subject.

I take back my comments on Ehrenreich and the nanny debate: apparently that article was actually by Flanagan!

A discussion between her, Ehrenreich, and Sara Mosle can be found at this old Slate article.

A question: does the crowd over here find it morally wrong for rich people to advocate substantial and reliable public services -- which many Americans now think of as socialism -- out of a sense of noblesse oblige?

Well, I certainly don't.

You could say that there's an issue of disporportionate cost involved -- that extra taxes to support such services (or any other government spending) are more easily afforded by the wealthy. Or that the wealthy are less likely to know what services are really needed than others. But to the extent that politics is a conversation about the kind of society we'd like to live in, I don't see that anyone's wealth should invalidate their opinion.

Here's another question: is there a moral difference between people like Warren Buffet who advocate retaining the estate tax and people like the Walton family who pushed for its repeal? Do either of them have more or less right to their opinion that someone who will not be affected by that tax?

This is from an article David Callahan wrote in The New Republic shortly after Bush's reelection:

John Kerry let slip a few gaffes in his run for president, and the one that may have hurt him most is barely remembered. In July, at a Bush-bashing fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall, Kerry told a group of Hollywood entertainers that they "conveyed the heart and soul of the country." The tribute was meant as warm thanks to celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg and Paul Newman who had just raised $7.5 million in a star-studded evening. But Kerry's words turned out to be a priceless gift to the Republicans, right up there with his windsurfing outing on Martha's Vineyard.

A few days later, at a campaign stop in the Midwest, President Bush unveiled a new applause line. The heart and soul of America was not in Hollywood, Bush said: "I believe the heart and soul of America is found in places right here, in Marquette, Michigan." Over the next three months, the town or city that housed America's heart and soul changed constantly as Bush reminded audiences that John Kerry lived on Planet Liberal. "Most of us don't look to Hollywood as the source of values," Bush said in October, sticking to message. Along with Kerry's windsurfing, his $8,000 racing bike, his eccentric billionaire wife and--well, the list was pretty long--Kerry's coziness with Hollywood confirmed the most devastating claim of the Bush campaign: The Senator from Massachusetts was one of them, not one of us.

Now much as were might like to wish otherwise, symbols do matter in American politics, and-- to use a tired baseball metaphor-- Kerry lobbed a pitch right over the plate with his "heart and soul" comment and the Bushies knocked it right of the the park with their "the heart and soul of America is found in places right here, in [name of town]" rejoinder. Utterly devastating, and I fear that most of the good, well-to-do liberals who attended that fundraiser still don't get it.

Aristocrats have always thought their peasants to be the "heart and soul" of their country.

You've got to admit, though, that Kerry's "heart and soul" comment was at least equivalent of Bush's "I call you 'my base'" crack.