Month: August 2010

by Patrick Appel

I missed the following reader e-mail until just now. A reader writes:

I'm not sure how this illuminates the discussion, but here goes.

I am female. My best friend in the whole world is male. We are housemates, and have been for many years. We are both straight, but not interested in each other, and our relationship is platonic but deep (think Will and Grace if Will were straight). When I became unexpectedly pregnant with a man I was seeing at the time, we gave the situation much thought, and opted to make a pact that we would "stay together" (platonically) and raise my son until he graduates from high school, at which point my friend will also be retiring, and we will have the freedom then to go our separate ways if we wish (while remaining a "family" in our hearts) or remain living together, as our circumstances find us. The father of my son is also our close friend, though our romantic relationship ended during the pregnancy.

Whew. OK. We are unconventional, but happy.

As marriage and all the rights and privileges of such have been talked about so much in the news, we started to think– maybe we should get married? What if one of us ended up in the hospital, etc., etc.? I can't get his pension if he dies (his father died young, so we think of these things), and all of the other aspects which have been so thoroughly discussed.

It saddens us to think that we could while a loving gay couple cannot. But it also made us wonder seriously if we should get married.

If there were civil unions, we would totally do that. But to get married? When we don't feel "that way" about each other? It's just… we take marriage too seriously for that. It's "MARRIAGE" and that means something very special. We have something very special, but marriage does not describe it (although in practice it is very similar domestically). We truly have a "domestic partnership". (That's what we tell people, "We have the only domestic partnership that isn't a euphemism.")

That should give you another glimpse into the weight of the word "marriage".

Oh, and it kinda makes us want domestic partnership laws anyway so we can have that, but we won't shortchange our gay friends by settling for any less than full marriage benefits for them. But still. It would be cool to have both. Not all of us fit into neat little boxes.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I returned to Indiana University in Bloomington to take an oral exam to fulfill my single remaining course, “Historical Interpretation of Baroque Music”. The exam went swimmingly, and I had a day to kill before driving back up to Indianapolis to catch my flight home. I’d already eaten at my favorite restaurants, visited my local friends, and decided to catch a strip show at a small club on the outskirts of town.

There must have been a school break, because I was the only customer in the place. The strippers fawned over me, trying to coax a night’s worth of dollars out of a single fellow in the room. It was enjoyable, and expensive. The second gal that decided to keep me company asked what I was doing in town. I said I’d just made up the last credits to get my degree. “In what?” “Voice performance”. Well, she had taken some classes at the Early Music Institute, and thought about switching from violin to baroque violin, but couldn’t afford it. Did I know such-n-such professor? Yup, I did.

I went out for a cigarette and talked to the bouncer. He was completing a Phd in classical philosophy. I asked if his job gave him any insights, and he told me that it was a job, and didn’t really influence his feelings about Aristotle. I met an MBA candidate, a dentist-in-training, and many other very attractive young ladies that night. No funny business — just a very surreal, David Lynchian life experience.

by Chris Bodenner

From the horse's mouth:

Meanwhile, Beck and his followers go to war over crowd estimates, claiming the number was six times the independent figure of 87,000.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Apropos recent posts on the subject, here's a 2009 account of the Supreme Court Justice explaining why he isn't going to hire any clerks from second tier law schools:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was his usual blunt self last month when he responded to a law student’s question on how to become “outrageously successful” despite a lack of connections and elite degrees. At first, Scalia gave the American University law student some general advice, the New York Times reports. “Just work hard and be very good,” Scalia said.

Then he went on to talk about the student’s chances of obtaining a clerkship with a Supreme Court justice, the story recounts. Her school is ranked 45th in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. “By and large,” Scalia said during the April 24 law school appearance, “I’m going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. They admit the best and the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. If they come in the best and the brightest, they’re probably going to leave the best and the brightest, OK?”

The story says the data support Scalia’s comment. In the last six years, about half of the Supreme Court’s 220 law clerks attended Yale or Harvard law schools, respectively ranked first and second by U.S. News. About 50 others came from Chicago, Stanford, Virginia and Columbia. None hailed from American University’s Washington College of Law. Scalia acknowledged there are some exceptions, citing the case of Jeffrey Sutton, now a federal appeals judge on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals based in Cincinnati, according to the Times account. Sutton was first hired by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., and then worked for Scalia.

“I wouldn’t have hired Jeff Sutton,” Scalia said. “For God’s sake, he went Ohio State! And he’s one of the very best law clerks I ever had.”

Justice Scalia attended Georgetown University and Harvard Law School.

by Conor Friedersdorf

In a review of a new book about preppies, Mark Oppenheimer says the subculture will only survive if embraced by outsiders:

Perhaps young black and Jewish academics will take cues from their unrepentantly preppy elders, like Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Willard Spiegelman. Surely gay men will continue to do the tradition proud, and I suspect they are responsible for the current vogue for "heritage" clothing, which leads prep away from Anglophilia and into a rugged American past. As will conservative journalists: George F. Will, Tucker Carlson, Seth Lipsky. (Although female prepdom is beyond the scope of my expertise, I have noticed that hard-core preppiness among women has become hard to find, in part because preppiness is about what is old, and women do not wish to be identified with traditions that recall a more sexist era.)Perhaps there is a renaissance around the corner. After all, as one Harvard alumnus recently wrote, "I'm not sure that anyone in Regency England would have seen the Victorian era coming." But for prep to live on, it must mean something. True Prep is an enjoyable but maddening wake-up call that we are watching a culture unravel, one lambswool thread at a time. If we don't snap to attention, throw on our duckboots, thread the duck's-head insignia belt, leash up the English setter, have a Pimm's Cup, and figure out what this culture is, it will be gone.

My favorite preppies of all time: Alex P. Keaton and Brother Mouzone.

by Patrick Appel

McArdle agrees with Bering:

If we're evolved to be polyamorous, why do we also seem to be evolved to be extraordinarily possessive?  This seems like an evolutionary maladaptation.  And I find it hard to believe that this is just a cultural quirk, given that it does appear to be cross cultural, and it doesn't fade much over history the way that, say, attitudes about female dress have.

Lifetime monogamy may not be the evolved human template.  But I'm pretty sure that carefree polyamory isn't either.  And at some level, who cares?  Rape seems to be pretty "natural", but I'd still like to build social institutions that fight this "natural instinct".

Dan Savage doesn't like Megan's dichotomy.

by Conor Friedersdorf

The video above is quite popular, and generating some controversy in the blogosphere. Here's Joe Carter denouncing it at First Things, The Last Psychiatrist defending its message, and Alyssa Rosenberg panning it as art elsewhere at The Atlantic.

I've long been vexed by Eminem, a tremendous talent whose narrow range, stubborn repetition of theme and sub par album tracks caused me to steadily lose interest in his career. Imagine if Dave Eggers had written A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and then included extended laments about the premature death of his mother in 75 percent of all his subsequent writing. Beyond it being tiresome, we'd all have missed out on the impeccably paced You Shall Know Our Velocity, What is the What, etc. 

So I credit Marshal Mathers with stretching himself somewhat here. Domestic violence isn't a new theme for him, exactly, but here we're at least confronting a different aspect of it: as The Last Psychiatrist puts it, "The song isn't about Domestic Violence (capital letters, you are in the presence of a construct) but about a kind of love that substitutes magnitude of emotions for quality of emotions." In the same blog post the author goes on to write:

Why does the song have to be about "Domestic Violence" anyway?  Why can't it just be about two screwed up people, one of whom is a soccer hooligan?  Because there are certain themes that are not allowed to be merely depictions– they have to be about "awareness" and "sending a positive message."  Domestic violence is one of those things, and before you say anything observe that homicide is not one of those things.  Neither is adultery or cannibalism.  We choose our causes based on something other than the cause.

Domestic violence is treated differently because its perpetrators believe themselves to be engaging in normal behavior, as do many of its victims. It's desirable to disabuse them of that notion, whereas no one thinks that homicide is normal or okay, cannibalism isn't even a societal problem, and adultery is hardly a problem comparable to any of those other things.

This isn't to say that domestic violence shouldn't ever be portrayed artistically. But the video above doesn't render the reality of mutually abusive relationships — doesn't help us access the truth about them — so much as it shamelessly romanticizes them. In a way, the problem is that the portrayal is insufficiently violent: a pretend world where punching through a wall doesn't hurt your hand, shattering a mirror doesn't cut you, drunken altercations that come to blows escalate only far enough to make the throws-of-passion sex that much hotter, and punching your girlfriend doesn't result in ever seeing her with a broken, bloodied nose or swollen black eye or concussion or worse.

While we're on this subject, I highly recommend this post by Hilzoy, who the blogosphere is still missing very much.

by Patrick Appel

Marc Lynch thinks it "somewhat surprising how little attention has been paid to the steady drawdown of U.S. forces from Iraq":

Obama deserves the credit he is likely to claim for drawing down troops on schedule and moving towards a vastly reduced U.S. role in Iraq.  No, the war inside Iraq isn't over yet and American forces aren't all gone yet.  And I'm perfectly willing to give credit to the Bush administration for the SOFA it eventually negotiated (which I've previously called Bush's finest moment in Iraq), which created the bipartisan framework to make the drawdown possible.   But it took Obama's determination to actually draw down to actually make it happen — had McCain won, for instance, I'm quite sure that excuses would have been found to keep many more troops there for far longer.  There are plenty of things which I would have liked to have seen done differently, including a continuation of former Ambassador Ryan Crocker's quiet dialogues with the Iranians and more of an effort to deal with Iraq within its broader regional context.   But overall, meeting the campaign commitment to draw down U.S. forces in Iraq is a real accomplishment which should be acknowledged.

Over the weekend, Bernstein asked liberals how they grade Obama on Iraq and asked conservatives how they currently view the war. Ambinder previews Obama's address to the nation tonight:

[W]ill [Obama] take the bait dangling from Republican hooks and give President Bush credit for the surge? He will telephone President Bush earlier in the day, presumably to thank the president for his judgment in a way that does not acknowledge that his own opposition to the surge was (in retrospect) incorrect. Officials make the argument that people read a lot into the surge, and that a number of different factors, some of them independent of the surge, contributed to the taming of the insurgency.  Obama won't get into those arguments there, but it will be interesting to see how he deals with the historical narrative that has President Bush mistakenly choosing to go to war in Iraq and then supporting a strategy that brought about its close more quickly.