Family Life

I hoisted this from comments…because I can. (Although you should read comment 101 by Jenna Moran in the previous thread as well.) Also, because people often covertly stipulate that men could “amass resources from which to provide for children” on the veldt, and I’d really like to see that…ah…fleshed out a little more because piles of rotting food≠sexy times, unless YOU’RE MOLE! Well, I suppose moles are more plausibly relevant than spiders; at least they’re mammals about whom Kafka has written depressing stories. Oh wait, by that logic cockroaches are back in. Sort of. Whatever. Also, I apologize in advance for the profanity which is going to get CT banned from the Panera Bread wifi and which we were wont to employ in the past only when complaining in the most vehement terms about torture. Now that CT has gone downhill and isn’t a serious academic blog anymore what with the lady-posting about all the lady-topics that only affect ladies, such as human reproduction, I’m just busting out with profanity all over the place. If this is causing anyone any actual problems please contact me.

One thing one might wish to consider is what the actual economic/social conditions were like back in the Environment of Early Adaptation? Well, the real answer is that we have no idea, but a not totally implausible answer is that the most similar existing societies are those who live in relatively small bands of hunter-gatherers, such as the !Kung, and (apparently) less ¡exciting! tribes in the Amazon. In such tribes everyone has notably more leisure time than in agricultural societies, though of course their reproduction rate is much, much lower.

Generally, the gathering (mostly done by women) provides 80% of the average adults’ calories and the hunting (mostly done by men) 20%. That’s on average, and the protein is obviously important, so… Now, being the all-that best hunter in the tribe can convince lots of laydeez to have sex with you. Is this because they want your resources? No, because every motherfucking-body shares the food, Holmes. Shares the motherfucking food. They don’t want your resources—-though they probably wouldn’t say no to you getting the oysters off that roast wild turkey for them. They want your hot body. Why are you so good at hunting? You’re in the pink. A fine physical specimen, keen of eye, etc.

Now, if you, hypothetical armchair evolutionary psychologist, are very, very good, I might allow you to construct a loooong chain of argument by analogy, in which being the best hunter=social capital, and monetary capital today=social capital. Note, however, that you will be forced to leave out all the bits about “providing” for the offspring and so forth, and be left with something more along the lines of birds that do stupid dances to garner sexual attention, and the great engines of modern capital will turn out to be the baroque construction of a thousand bower-birds working at cross-purposes. Which, granted, not totally implausible.

“No but food’s important,” I hear armchair evolutionary psychologist cry. Yes. Food. Totes important. We’re all together on this one. So maybe fucking the best hunter does get you (as female hunter-gatherer) a bit of extra food. (Note that everyone’s far from starving or they could just put in a little more time looking for food, which they do not, because they’d rather hang around poking the fire with a sharp stick or creating oral epics.) Then maybe you’d want the best hunter to think your kid was his so your kid would get extra food too. But life is short, and being the best hunter doesn’t last forever, maybe you better fuck that likely young up-and-comer with the blue feather in his hair. And then again, truth be told, strength isn’t everything, and that guy who used to be the best hunter a few years back knows a trick or two, if things were to get rough, might be useful. You know what you should really do here? Fuck every last member of the tribe who isn’t your dad or your brother, and convince each and every one of them that he is your special little schnookie-boo, and separately at various times of the day give each of them a blushing, downcast look which indicates he is the still point of your turning world.

And that explains why women are all total sluts to this very day, and why people who think that the veldt predisposes women to sleep with old men who have lots of money appear to have forgotten about the perishability of food items, and the non-utility/replaceability of almost all other items, and the fact that there was no money then. The End.

P.S. My husband came up with the “ad hominid” formulation and deserves full credit.

On the home front, the year opened with the inexplicable rupture of a whole-house water filter on January 2, a mishap that left four inches of water in the basement, ruining a bunch of Jamie’s books and DVDs; it closes as I return from visiting my father, who is intubated and unconscious after triple-bypass heart surgery.  We didn’t know he would be unconscious for my entire visit — I learned that via a phone call from my sister only after Nick, Jamie and I had gotten halfway through a seven-hour drive.  Our assumption was that at some point he would be conscious but unable to communicate, which is why I did what any dutiful son would do, namely, bring a copy of <i>A Year on Ice</i>, Gerald Eskanazi’s chronicle of the New York Rangers’ 1969-70 season, to read to him at his bedside.  When that plan fell through, we videotaped a bunch of messages for him (including my rendition of the final game of the Rangers’ regular season, April 5, 1970, which was the most exciting thing a nine-year-old kid could possibly hope to see — thanks for taking me, Dad!) and I’ll go back when he’s back home, which should be in a few weeks.

And oh yes, in March Lucy the Dog died after thirteen and a half years of faithfully guarding the house, playing with Nick, tending to Janet whenever she had migraines, and talking to Jamie when no one else would understand him.

But there was one good thing about 2011, and it was a world-historical event.  I refer, of course, to <strike>our family’s decision to topple Qaddafi and plunder Libya</strike> a milestone we had been anticipating for approximately twenty years:

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<a href=”http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/12/in-home_care_workers_finally_get_federal_minimum_wage_and_overtime_protections.html”>This is huge</a>: medical homecare workers will start to be treated as actual workers, with overtime and minimum wage requirements, rather than volunteers. At some point perhaps other groups of workers excluded from that kind of basic protection–waiters, other domestic workers, farm laborers–will also overcome the racist legacy of not counting Certain Classes of People as “real” workers.

In the meantime, for god’s sake tip well and if you’re not paying the person who cleans your house or mows your lawn or delivers your newspaper or nannies your kids two weeks bonus wages at some point during the year (it doesn’t have to be during the Big Spending Season, but everyone is entitled to a vacation, and don’t give me this crap about how they’re “self-employed” and it’s “their responsibility” to budget for their own vacation), you suck.*

*Possibly not if you live in a country in which people who do this kind of work actually get the same benefits and protections as so-called “professionals.”

I can’t believe the Obama administration caved on this.

For the first time ever, the Health and Human Services secretary publicly overruled the Food and Drug Administration, refusing Wednesday to allow emergency contraceptives to be sold over the counter, including to young teenagers. The decision avoided what could have been a bruising political battle over parental control and contraception during a presidential election season.

Thanks a lot, Kathleen Sebelius. God knows we wouldn’t want one of the groups least likely to use contraceptives properly to be able to easily get their hands on some Plan B. Up next: banning over-the-counter sales of paracetemol. Ha.

Belated Update: Reading below I do see that excerpt is misleading if you haven’t read the whole article; they didn’t take Plan B away from existing over-the-counter-sales, they just refused to extend it to full OTC status which would extend to those 17 and younger.

I blogged the other day about the new restrictions the UK is planning to impose on would-be migrants, making it impossible for all but the super-rich to acquire permanent residency and forcing others into Gastarbeiter status (to be kicked out after five years). It gets worse. The government’s Migration Advisory Committee has now recommended that anyone seeking to sponsor a foreign (non-EU) spouse to enter the UK has to be in the top half of the income distribution (I simplify slightly). Read Matt Cavanagh on the topic here and the Free Movement blog here. So think through the implications. A British student goes to grad school in the US (for example), meets an American and marries: such a person would, under these proposals, be unable to return to the UK with their partner to live as a couple. If two countries were to adopt such rules and their nationals met and married, they would have the right to live as a couple in neither country. Iniquitous and unjust.

A few weeks ago, the Tesco a playing field away from my house re-opened with a new look and a Costa café. The new look seems to be simply the re-situating of the booze section to the middle of the shop, so you now have to pass by the beer offers before getting at frozen foods or cleaning products. And the eggs have been put somewhere so unlikely – and of course miles from other staples like milk or bread – that the staff laugh or frown when you ask where, they have to answer so often.

Not much else has changed; the vegetable section is either bulging with unlikely and out of season produce or empty like in a zombie movie or communist Russia. The price war turns out to be just lower prices than in August when they were hiked up ahead of time. And there are a couple more self-checkouts barking orders and requiring on average two staff interventions to make each transaction go through.

But the Costa. That’s changed everything.

This is a suburb of Edinburgh about a mile from the nearer villages and with a mix of public and private housing. It’s by no means isolated, but on a wet and blustery day twenty minutes walk feels too far for a pint of milk or the morning paper. I can’t imagine I’d do it more than once a week if I had a buggy to push or arthritis, no matter how lonely or fed up I was. And when you work from home, a burst of fresh air and a face to face conversation with a real, live human is a godsend.

Now, one of my daily highlights is my overpriced, under-caffeinated and much loved light latte sipped at a plastic table under piped music drowned out by the endless cheeping of supermarket scanners. A mix of the same people is there most days.

One is an elderly woman bent over a stick who waits discreetly at her table while the counter staff bring over her tea and biscuits. Another is any one of the buggy-pushing set enjoying a guilt-free sit down before getting on with the shop. My favourite is the older woman I always have to repeat my order to but who always seems uncommonly pleased to be there.

I suppose the point is that however annoying the perpetual encroachment of large corporates and their vertical integrations and tie-in deals, the day to day of mega-commerce can still boil down to people in a community using the place to find, talk to or just quietly appreciate each other.

The Government is worried about women. Not worried in the sense of;

‘Concerned the female unemployment rate is higher and getting worse’;

‘Troubled that axing child benefit nudges middle class women out of work for good’;

‘Alarmed that women know health and education cuts doom their children to shorter, poorer lives’;

‘Horrified that targeted cutbacks to legal aid mean demonstrably more women will be murdered by the men they love’.

Not at all.

Silly women, the government thinks! Just because of our blue-sky thinking to cut parental leave in the never-ending War on Red Tape, why would women think we have it in for them?

But the UK equivalent of the American soccer mom is deserting the coalition government in droves, and she must be won back. How? The coalition can’t miss this once-in-a-generation chance to destroy the welfare state in order to pay for banks and the imaginary economy they’ve destroyed. The cuts must go on.

Then what shall they do to win women back? How about some cheep ‘n cheerful eye-catching measures that show our hearts are in the right place? Let’s;

• Ban forced marriages, because that’s too simple an issue to cock up
• Pretend we can stop porn on the Internet, because women are too stupid to know it doesn’t work like that, and we can still get ours anyway
• Talk very loudly about how hideous it is to sexualize children, especially working class ones who don’t know any better
• Spend bazillions on our buddies’ flagship ‘free schools’ in west London to show we really care about the kids
• Remind everyone constantly that the Prime Minister’s heart is in the right place; he has NHS frequent flyer miles and he feels our pain

And you know what? Cameron is right to be a little perplexed that women are losing faith in him. Because the government’s faux-regretful gouges at the post-war social contract don’t just hurt women. They hurt everyone who’s not been sensible enough to be born or become wealthy. It’s just that women voters seem to be among the first to cop on to it.

But you can’t play the ‘trust me because I’m a reasonable, personable man with a clever wife I adore’ card more than once. Women aren’t stupid, and neither is the electorate.

The latest Financial Times weekend had “a piece”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/1a5ab5ee-e407-11e0-bc4e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1ZGFzB7OG by Simon Kuper about how studying English literature had spoilt the experience of reading for him. Whereas once, as a child or an adolescent, he could immerse himself in a novel, the academic study of them had taught him to read as a critic. That second-order relationship to the text, just made the whole thing much less fun than it had been. I see what he means. Relatedly, one of the problems about writing for a blog like Crooked Timber with so many readers who know more than I do on just about any topic is the the difficulty in sharing books, films, or music that you’ve enjoyed because I’m scanning the horizon (or the potential comments thread) for the dorsal fin of the Great White Critic for whom the immediate pleasure taken is a symptom of hopeless naivety and a failure to adopt the necessary critical distance. But to hell with that. Sometimes some discovery is so fantastic that I just want to share, and that’s how I feel about reading Anne Tyler. Since reading “a post about her”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2008/08/reading-anne-tyler.html on Norman Geras’s blog (Norman is great for that stuff, just ignore the politics) I’ve made my way through The Accidental Tourist, A Patchwork Planet, The Amateur Marriage, Noah’s Compass, Celestial Navigation, Earthly Possessions, Ladder of Years, The Tin Can Tree, Digging to America, Back When We Were Grownups, and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and I feel blessed that I still have (by my count) seven to go.

For those who don’t know, Tyler’s novels, nearly all set in Baltimore, are mostly quiet dramas of family life and relationships. The wider world of politics and economics doesn’t intrude much, so we’re a long way from the grand themes of Jonathan Franzen and the like. Many of the books are somewhat similar, in that a person has their habits and their conception of who they are turned upside down by an encounter with someone utterly unlike themselves. Sometimes they are changed; sometimes they revert. Her male characters are often stiff, calculating and habit bound; women more open and spontaneous, but she manages to achieve a sympathetic engagement with all of them. And all of her families conform to the Tolstoyan cliché. Her writing is also extraordinary. Highly economic and unfussy and yet she has an ear to capture a scene or a moment in a phrase that sticks in the memory – “By now he was looking seriously undermedicated” from A Patchwork Planet, for example.

The novels are about you, and me and our relationships and difficulties with spouses, parents, children, in-laws and colleagues. Since I became enthusiastic about Tyler, I’ve given some of her books as presents and then been asked if I was “making a point” about the recipient’s relationship. Well no I wasn’t, but I take this as good evidence that Tyler sees and captures the universal in all of our peculiar cases. I mentioned Tyler to a bookblogger friend, Kate, recently, and she asked me which are the best. I’m hard pushed to say. The Tin Can Tree was a bit of a struggle and some of the others disclosed themselves slowly but turned out to be among the best. Perhaps Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant would be a good place to start.

This conversation actually happened at our house just now. In truth, I was first lying in bed with the laptop and then addressing John from a somewhat lascivious position difficult to illustrate with stick figures. No, now you’re imagining something worse. Anyway, I think the xkcd couple should be able to afford a better desk and computer by now. Little thing that pulls out for your keyboard? What is it, 1996?
“I thought of the title! And I helped with Photoshop!”–John.

Aside from containing a brilliant exposition of how blogospherical “rebuttal” actually works — basically endless posts by halfwits repeating that X (an eminent scholar) is an ignoramus because X has contradicted the received wisdom of a tribe — this post by Dave Graeber at Naked Capitalism has to be one of the most informative and entertaining pieces I’ve read in a long while. What happens when the findings of anthropologists about earlier societies clash with the a priori assumptions of economists about how things _must_ have happened? Well, you can guess. The really interesting stuff is in the anthropological detail, so read the whole thing, as they say, but I’ll just quote Graeber on economics and scientific method:

bq. Murphy argues that the fact that there are no documented cases of barter economies doesn’t matter, because all that is really required is for there to have been some period of history, however brief, where barter was widespread for money to have emerged. This is about the weakest argument one can possibly make. Remember, economists originally predicted all (100%) non-monetary economies would operate through barter. The actual figure of observable cases is 0%. Economists claim to be scientists. Normally, when a scientist’s premises produce such spectacularly non-predictive results, the scientist begins working on a new set of premises. Saying “but can you prove it didn’t happen sometime long long ago where there are no records?” is a classic example of special pleading. In fact, I can’t prove it didn’t. I also can’t prove that money wasn’t introduced by little green men from Mars in a similar unknown period of history.

Sometime in Spring, two years ago, my brother Henry received a hand-written letter from a woman in Ireland he’d neither met nor heard of. It was a letter of introduction. The person being introduced was Edward, “a decent, entertaining fellow. We have known him all our lives.”

A month or two later, I phoned to say I’d be arriving that evening from L.A. for a couple of weeks in the DC office. Henry pressed the letter into my hands as I arrived on the doorstep. He was rushing to the airport and thought I might have more time to take an interest.

The letter came via a circuitous route from a tenuous connection; Meg, Edward’s godfather’s wife who was also my mother’s friend Mary’s book club companion. It was prompted by a misunderstanding between a son who was monosyllabic about his social life and a mother who thus assumed he had none. It came from the peculiarly Anglo-Irish practice of proper letter-writing, and directly from that rare person who said ‘I must write them a letter’, and actually did. [click to continue…]

Katie Roiphe recently wrote an article on the new book “Go the F#$k to Sleep.” She makes rather sweeping claims about miserable, sexless yuppies who have mollycoddled their children so extravangantly that the parents can no longer even steal enough time to watch a single episode of Mad Men together. During which they could take notes on parenting tips, one imagines!

Are our enlightened, engaged, sensitive parenting practices driving a certain segment of the population insane? Is the nice, liberal father who has just this Saturday carted his kids to soccer practice, play dates, piano lessons, made sunflower-butter sandwiches, and read Goodnight Moon three times seething with quiet desperation? The surprise ascendance of Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortés’ Go the F**k to Sleep on all sorts of best-seller lists eloquently answers that question….One wonders if this hostility [evident in the book] toward the child, who is naturally and rightfully manipulative, is just a tiny bit misplaced….The book, in all its cleverness and artfulness and ingenuity, raises certain other questions: Are they having sex, these slouchy rageful parents? Not enough, perhaps. When the father turns back to the waking child’s bedroom, we look out at the comfy, sexless, vaguely depressive scene of his wife sprawled asleep on the couch under an ugly old blanket. No wonder the slouchy dad is full of rage.

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Garret FitzGerald, Ireland’s Taoiseach in the 1980s and a beloved family friend, died early this morning. Politically, I think of him as the man who took Thatcher’s condescension on the chin to create the Anglo Irish Agreement, and the man with the courage to call time on the Catholic Church’s unquestioned dominance of social policy and moral thought in Ireland. Personally, while I can appreciate that Garret had what we call a good innings, wasn’t ill for very long, and enjoyed a final few hours of joyous clarity with some of the people he loved the most, I both wished and believed that he would go on and on.

People think of Garret as a dizzy academic, and not the resolutely calculating man he could be when it came to tallying odds and gaming a scenario. This was the man who coolly reckoned at the beginning of his career that while he was constitutionally more suited to the Labour Party, he would achieve less at the head of it, and so joined Fine Gael. His first job was writing the timetable for Aer Lingus, long before there was software for that kind of organisational nitty gritty. He had an extraordinary memory for this sort of thing; on a walk near Cahersiveen a decade ago, he explained to me the old train route there, the stations it called at, the time of each train and effect on the local economy. He giggled when I said we should call him Rainman instead. [click to continue…]

The other week I wrote about a report that a philosopher accepted to an NEH Summer Institute overseas “been given 12 hours to ‘demonstrate’ that she has full-time childcare arrangements for her son for the month of July that ‘are to the [completely unspecified] satisfaction’ of the Institute directors; if she fails to meet this requirement, she has been told her accceptance in the program will be withdrawn.” At the time, it seemed clear that there was no way an NEH-funded operation should be doing this and that, while there was some slim possibility of an explanation that made the whole episode seem reasonable, the Institute director or directors were very much more likely to be completely out of line in making such a demand. Well, guess what?

The National Endowment for the Humanities has apologized to a grant recipient who was told by the director of an NEH-financed seminar in Europe that she had 12 hours to demonstrate that she had adequate child care arrangements in place for her son or she would lose her spot. … An NEH spokeswoman, via e-mail, said Tuesday that the investigation by the endowment determined that the report “was, unfortunately, true. NEH has accepted full responsibility and apologized to the professor involved. We believe we are in the process of resolving the issue to her satisfaction. We have assured her that she is welcome to attend the institute to which she applied and, at her request, we have also extended the deadline to make it possible for her to apply for another seminar if she so chooses.” The spokeswoman added: “Asking an applicant to provide information regarding child care was inappropriate and should have had no bearing on the selection process. Qualified applicants who tell the NEH that they will participate full time in our programs should be taken at their word. We erred and are determined that it will not happen again.”

Good.