Knot For You

This is an important question, especially because it frames the cultural pressures surrounding marriage in the right way: Why don't we teach boys that they need to get married, the way we teach this to girls?
Emma Green, "Wealthy Women Can Afford to Reject Marriage, but Poor Women Can't"

I started to mull this question over, asking myself if there had been a time when the people around me sought to teach me that I needed to be married. And as it turns out, I can remember a time when people told me that I should aspire to marriage. But I wasn't a boy at the time. People tried to teach me that I needed to marry when I was an adult - once I had passed into my twenties and hadn't yet started to actively look for someone which whom to "settle down" or "share life with." After it began to dawn on family, and to a lesser extent, friends (and friends of the family) that I wasn't planning on marrying, as everyone had assumed I would, then they began trying to educate my on why I should.

Of course, people understand that once someone has graduated college and moved into the working world on their own, it's a little late for the sort of indoctrination that you can get away with on children. And so the tactics were different - and all over the map. One of my friends challenged my courage, another my capacity for selflessness, an aunt's co-worker framed it as a responsibility I owed to Black women and my father pitched marriage as the answer to having to do my own housework. But it was clear from everyone that I had violated an expectation. (Something I was well aware of. When someone erroneously assumed that I had a girlfriend, I never corrected them - that people found "the idea of nonsexuality more bizarre than deviant sexuality" was quite clear to me.)

In this, we could answer Ms. Green's question as follows: For boys, that they will find marriage to be important, that one day they will need to marry someone, is simply assumed. Everyone expects that, at some point, any given male child will want to find a partner and "settle down," and so there isn't the pressure to specifically set out to teach them this necessity. But that kind of falls flat, because it doesn't answer why we expect boys to gather this via osmosis, yet girls need to have the lesson taught and reinforced over and over.

Using my own experience for this is kind of iffy, because I was child in the 1970s, and even if I could recall all of it clearly, it still be decades removed from the experience of many, but I'm going to take a stab at it. But to do so, I'm going to alter the question a bit. In my understanding, both boys and girls were taught by the society at large that they should one day marry, whether as a rite of passage into adulthood, or just so that people didn't think that there was something wrong with you. What I would say was different about girls was that for them, marriageability also entered into the mix.

When I was a single twenty-something, and everyone had an opinion about the fact that I was unattached and planning to stay that way, it was made quite clear that the ball was in my court. Especially as concerned finding a Black woman to be a partner. All I needed to do was sift through the available offerings, find The Right One, and pop the question. I was the active party, the one who was expected to go out there and chose someone to pursue and/or wed. My understanding of the expectations for women was that they should concern themselves with remaining eligible to be chosen. While my being single was viewed, variously, as something between a quirk and a serious character flaw, it was never viewed as something that fundamentally lowered my suitability as a mate (leaving aside, of course, the simple fact that willingness has something to do with suitability). That particular trait was governed more by the facts that I had a college degree, a job and a car/apartment. But even then, when I was being pressed to complete my Bachelor's degree, find a job, and have a place/car of my own, these were things that were important more for the fact that they marked me as an independent adult - no-one pushed me to finish school because no-one would want to marry me if I didn't.

And so (and I understand that I'm guessing here), I would venture that, at least when I was young, the "need to get married" wasn't taught to girls as an end in itself, but as a proof of worth as individuals and/or women. And although it has that connotation for boys to a degree, what makes men worthwhile as individuals and/or men is based on other things than whether or not a woman would choose to marry one. In that sense, I think that, regardless of what one sees as the economic or personal benefits of marriage, that we're better off dropping how we teach it to girls, rather than broadening it to all children.

A Loan of an Ax

“Exclusive:” Reads the subtitle of Al Jazeera America’s story on Carly Fiorina, below a smirking image of the former executive. “GOP candidate was paid by Merck at a time when anti-abortion groups criticized company’s vaccine production.”

What follows is a piece that seems to be devoted to making the case that Ms. Fiorina cannot be accurately termed a “pro-life” candidate because, during her time on Merck’s board of directors, the company sold vaccines derived from tissue that came from fetuses aborted in Europe nearly 50 years ago. Okay, I can live with that. But...

Since when is it Al Jazeera’s job to report on a candidate’s anti-abortion bona-fides? And I’m not even sure how this is relevant to anything. By this calculus, anyone who has an investment in or works at Merck cannot be called “pro-life,” because some fractional part of whatever income they derive results from these 1960s stem cell lines. Had Ms. Fiorina come out at some point and said that it was illegitimate to use fetal stem cells or tissue for any purpose, I could see it. But the article doesn’t claim that, and “[Debi] Vinnedge, [executive director of anti-abortion group Children of God for Life] said she believes Fiorina might not have been aware that Merck’s vaccines utilized stem-cell lines derived from aborted fetuses,[...].”

Add to this the swipe that the article takes at Ms. Fiorina over her apparently (wildly) exaggerated description of what was in the videos of discussions between Planned Parenthood personnel, and the whole thing begins to take on the appearance of a strange “bootleggers and Baptists” alliance, where the Al Jazeera reporters help Children of God for Life get out their anti-Fiorina message to pro-life conservatives, while at the same time reminding readers that Ms. Fiorina opposes Planned Parenthood. (Interestingly, the three authors of the piece had no other bylines between them when I checked, and the two of them that I was able to find other information on appear to both be firmly in the Liberal camp, based on their earlier projects.)

One could be forgiven for having forgotten that Ms. Fiorina was still a candidate for the Republican nomination for President of the United States. Coverage of her candidacy has been fairly sparse, at least in the media outlets that I check in on. Which leads me to wonder why anyone would bother with a hatchet job in the first place. Surely there is something more substantive on her campaign to report on than the complaints of a little-known anti-abortion group.

Down The Drain

The situation with the water supply in Flint, Michigan seems to be another instance of a government being "too broke to care about right and wrong." It's not so much that the emergency managers and city council (or even Detroit water officials) were more interested in the bottom line than the health and welfare of the residents of Flint - it's that the emergency managers' main job was to make sure that Flint's finances were kept in order, and that's what they were being judged on. And the money that would have been needed to fix the situation - to reverse the decision to draw water from the Flint River rather than purchase it (at inflated prices, admittedly) from Detroit. Note that Flint's water supply was so bad that General Motors decided that the water was unusable for use on automotive parts, and switched their water back to Detroit.

Most of the coverage of this issue has been directed at the evasions, and outright falsehoods, given by officials in Flint, the State of Michigan and the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Which makes sense - that coverage paints a damning picture of government failure to look after their citizens, or even warn them of the dangers.

"It's like what's going on in Greece," says state Sen. Jim Ananich, who represents Flint and has a newborn he takes to his in-laws' house in nearby Grand Blanc for baths. "How did we get to a place where we've cut everything? There's nothing left but the books balancing. What the city looks like after that doesn't matter. As long as there's less red and more black, we're in good shape."
Who Poisoned Flint, Michigan?

In the end, this issue came down to money. Part of the whole reason why emergency managers are appointed, and given so much power over the operations of the municipalities, is specifically that they aren't accountable to voters, and thus can't be pressured into promising, and delivering, expensive services to residents that there isn't the money to pay for. The story that I woud like to hear is how the finances penciled out, and what the financial pressures were - and the consequences of doing things differently would have been. Because that's the root of the problem. And until that peice of it is understood, this won't go away. The next municipality that has to grapple with issues of funding basic services will face the same sorts of decisions. And if they're deeply in debt and watching every dollar, they too might be too broke to care about right and wrong.

Stuck In The Middle

I was reading a piece on Al-Jazeera entitled "Donald Trump and America's Failed Center," and it occurred to me that the piece never really talks about the American center, in favor of hand-wringing over the fact that the United States hasn't adopted more leftist policies. Complaining that White voters haven't moved "to progressive visions for radical change and a more inclusive politics" is not "centrist." Simply labeling the Democratic party "center right" does not mean that anything to their left is "the center."

But that brings up an interesting question - what is "the Center?" And does it actually exist? There is a persistent idea in politics that between the political wings represented by the Right and the Left, there is a separate group that can be identified. But I'm not so sure about that. When the Air Force was introducing jet aircraft into general service, the found that there is no such thing as the "average" pilot. That is, when you measure a group of people (in this case, Air Force pilots) on a number of different characteristics, you will find that very few, if any, people fall into the median range on a significant number of them. What the meant for the Air Force was that building a aircraft cockpit for the "average" pilot made it a poor fir for nearly everyone, and what was needed instead were controls that could be independently adjusted for a fairly wide range of body types.

If one imagines politics as working the same way, the problem becomes evident. While you might be able to identify centrist positions on many issues, and even find that a significant portion of the population holds a centrist position on any given issue, any given person may only be in the "center" on a very limited number of issues, if any. Therefore, there really isn't a large enough constituency for a broad slate of centrist positions for a single political party of coalesce around and elect candidates, and by doing so drive policy, on.

Bang, Bang

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."
Donald Trump, speaking at Dordt College

While this statement has lit up the news media, and people are busy being shocked, shocked, that he said such a thing, Mr. Trump is merely pointing out something that has been true of American society for as long as there has been a United States, not to mention humanity in general - when people want something from you, they'll forgo hold you accountable for things in order to get it.

We have seen this in celebrity culture over and over - motion picture stars or recording artists time and again getting away with things that would land most of the rest of in jail or put an end to our future career prospects. It's common enough that the uproar over Donald Trump making that point doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Sure, Mr. Trump chose a particularly graphic and extreme example, and we're unaccustomed to people openly making the point that they're popular enough to get away with assault with a deadly weapon, but he wouldn't be the first person, and wouldn't be the last, to be popular enough that people would look the other way.

Of course, Mr. Trump's statement is unlikely to be literally true - and it's just as unlikely that he honestly expects that it would be. But it's the sort of over-the-top and bombastic statement that he's become known for, and it part of the reason why so many of his supporters back him. Again, he's ignoring social convention (or "political correctness," as Trump himself might term it), and simply making the point in a way people understand. And he's pretty much correct in the overall sentiment, which is that his backers don't really care about the things that they're being told about him by his critics, and are choosing to stand by him.

Donald Trump's candidacy is showing more staying power than many people would have thought it ever could, and in doing so is beginning to shake up the American political scene. It will take more than him making a throwaway remark about shooting someone to change that.