Happiness in Marriage

There was a bizarre and annoying "Valentine-themed" op-ed in yesterday's Times, somehow accusing "attachment parenting" of causing divorce. I am not a fan of Valentine-themed anything, and it's amazing to me how pundits will try to blame divorce rates and bad marriages on the darnedest things:

With the widespread acceptance of "attachment parenting" - family beds, long-term breast feeding and all the rest - the physical boundaries between parents and children have worn away. Marital romance has dried up. Real intimacy has gone the way of bottle-feeding and playpens. In fact, the whole ideal of marriage as a union of soul mates, friends and lovers that's as essential to a happy family life as, say, unconditional love for the children, has taken a direct hit. And in its place has come the reality of a utilitarian relationship dedicated to staying afloat financially and child-rearing of a sort we tend to associate with frontier marriages, arranged marriages, marriages of convenience - marriages far removed, in time and place, from our lives, our parents' lives and even our grandparents' lives.

The Wikipedia entry on attachment parenting is a bit of a caricature of it -- describing a parenting style in its maximal forms and with all the other cultural choices that are more-or-less associated with it. I would lean more toward the minimal description: raising your children secure in the knowledge that too much love won't hurt them. Lots of parents who "do attachment parenting" are anxious, rigid, and obsessive about the rules they follow, about what they must do for their kids, about, generally, doing everything right. So, for that matter, are lots of other parents. There are all kinds of 'systems' out there, and they do make parents crazy. Lots of families involved in "attachment parenting" end up with a rigid division of labor in which the mother is basically completely responsible for the kids and must be incredibly available to them, and the father is busy at work all the time. So, too, do lots of families who don't "attachment parent". Parental anxiety and preoccupation with their kids is real, and no doubt it does put a real strain on some marriages, but my own observations (anecdotal of course, but I didn't see any hard citations in Ms. Warner's essay, either) lead me to believe that parents become preoccupied with their kids because their marriages aren't so great to begin with, not vice-versa. If a husband works 80-hour weeks and the wife is busy with kiddie activities all the time, or if both work all the time and spend their little spare time in a "quality" way with the kids, then yeah, I'll bet the marriage is going to suffer. And it'll suffer whether the toddlers are still nursing and sleeping in the parents' bed.

Our kid sleeps in our bed. And he's going to be two soon, and he's still nursing. We can't imagine going on a vacation without him. We parent this way not because we think we have to, but because we like it, and it works for us. We laugh when people ask us "But if he's in your bed, how do you have sex?" People who have to ask this are neither especially imaginative nor realistic about how much parents of very young children feel like fucking at 11 pm at night, regardless of where their kid is sleeping. There are other times and places to screw, and we manage just fine, thanks. As for including our kid in most of the stuff we do (um, not talking about sex anymore people, okay!), we do that because, amazingly, we like to hang out with him. We don't plan our lives around doing things we think would be good or fun for him. We just include him in what we're already doing anyway. Last weekend we took him with us to Cambridge to go look at some chairs we were buying from a Portuguese couple who were returning home ("What," I said to them facetiously, "you don't want to stick around here?" "Amazingly,no" they said.). We bought the chairs. We gave the man some money, and he helped us fit the chairs into our car. The kid has not yet stopped talking about this transaction. "Man." he says, pointing at the chairs. "Money." "Car.""Many." "Daddy" And we nod: "Yes, we bought the chairs from the man. We gave him money, and he helped daddy put the chairs in the car. There are six of them." If we spent our weekend days sitting around with other parents waiting for our kids to be done with their playdates, or music classes, or whatever, perhaps we'd feel resentful and like we don't get enough time to ourselves.

We certainly appreciate the time that we do get to spend alone with one another. But that time is not what makes our marriage a "union of soul mates, friends and lovers". I'm not exactly sure what does. Luck, I suspect. Perhaps I sound awfully maudlin myself, but I never expected such happiness in marriage. I never expected marriage at all. Max and I were lucky to meet one another, and luckier still to recognize a good thing when we had it, to continue to recognize this good thing we have together. Our love for our child is not, as Ms. Warner would have it, "sucking the emotional life out of our marriage." On the contrary, it enlarges it. I am sorry for those who have had a different experience with marriage and children. But I don't think that Ms. Warner's unbelievably silly advice will help them. She suggests that such couples "leave work early and go on a date with your grown-up Valentine." Because, if your marriage is sexless, loveless, and utilitarian, obviously, a fancy dinner out in a restaurant where everyone else is also dutifully involved in romantic consumption is definitely going to save it. The best that can be said about such advice is that it is entirely in keeping with the spirit of Valentine's Day, for which we have nothing but scorn.

Idiot anti-urbanists

Arrgh, I was turned onto this neocon mealy-brain Joel Kotkin by James Howard Kunstler. The insufferable George Will quotes him in one of his recent WaPO bits. Money quote:

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Joel Kotkin, author of the forthcoming book "The City: A Global History," distinguishes between America's "aspirational" cities and "Euro-American" cities. The former -- e.g., Atlanta; Boise, Idaho; Charlotte; Fort Myers and Orlando, Fla.; Las Vegas and Reno, Nev.; Phoenix; and Salt Lake City -- are thriving. The latter -- e.g., Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco -- are experiencing social fragmentation as government's clients fight over dwindling scarce resources, and many of these cities are losing population, often to the aspirational cities.

Yaaaaack.

Scarce resources? Let's talk water and oil. Which of these cities consume proportionally massively higher quantities of both per capita? The "Old Europe" cities, if you will, or the throwaway pseudocities of the Sunbelt? (And for water: None of the "old" cities except for San Francisco has a serious water supply problem to begin with, while nearly all of the "new" cities do.)

And does anybody moving to, say, Phoenix, ever cite more compelling reasons than "I can afford a 3-car garage there" or "it's a good place to raise kids"? The latter being specious and, in my opinion, wrong.

Anyway, read Kunstler. He often needs a copy editor (as do his books; is his editor asleep at the switch?) for minor factual and spelling errors, but his arguments are right on and very provocative.

NOW for some torture...

Also via Brad DeLong, a letter in which someone points out that John Yoo, infamous auhor of torture members, actually told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker that the 2004 election was a referendum on the U.S. policy of torture. Letter points out, then, that Yoo actually said the equivalent of "A vote for Bush in 2004 was a vote for torture."

Do people who voted for Bush in 2004 understand that? And which is worse: that they voted for him knowing they were supporting torture, or that they voted for him believing otherwise? Perhaps there's no longer any difference.

"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again : and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself."

Ah, the essence of doublethink...

Amusing and Not Particularly Political: No Torture Involved, I promise

Brad DeLong has two funny posts this morning A Conversation About Infectious Disease at the Dermatologist's and A Conversation About Homework.

Prostitution

Digby discusses the Jeff Gannon story here. Gannon, you may recall, is the 'reporter' who called the Democrats "divorced from reality" during a question at a recent Bush press conference, after which he was discovered to be using an alias. Oh, and also a male prostitute. No, really.

Now, I continue not to have problems with gay men, prostitution, S&M, etc. Nor do I think anything will actually come of this story, other than some further sniping at liberal bloggers for being allegedly homophobic for even suggesting it might be relevant that someone with White House press credentials is at the same time a working prostitute. I have absolutely no hopes that anything discovered about this administration will bring them down. This story is just one more illustration of the extent to which these people believe, and so far, correctly, that they are untouchable. Torture, yeah, we do it. You got a problem with that? Oh, gay prostitutes writing anti-gay screeds for Republican-financed 'news sites'? Whatever. Oh, we paid members of the media to say nice stuff about us. So? WMDs never found -- what, you think Muslims don't deserve freedom and democracy?

They lie, and they are caught in their lies, and everything blows over, and they just don't care. They erode public confidence in the media so that most people have no idea what's true anymore anyway, and they say and do whatever they feel like.

No big story is going to save us, people. Even one involving gay sex for sale.

Torture Tales

Australian citizen tortured in U.S. custody

Sunday Special: Fascist Church-based Military Recruiting

Max was not surprised by this photo essay (you must click through to the pictures...). I would be less disturbed by it if the guy who attended the event hadn't sounded so shocked by it himself, because that means that, even if it's not an entirely new phenomenon, it's now spreading to populations it hadn't previously touched.

(This link came via Bellatrys at Nothing New Under The Sun.)