The Dish

One Georgetown University wit had this response to my polygamy item:

"What you’ve described sounds suspiciously like the role of an unpaid intern. Which, come to think of it, is actually a good idea; we have internships to allow kids to learn the ropes of all sorts of jobs before they actually dive in these days.  Why not create a few more that get some work done around the house?  As a still-deathly-scared-of-commitment 20 year old, I hereby sign myself up to be your martini mixer and slipper fetcher so I can see what all the big fuss is about."

Alas, I suspect my husband won’t be that enthusiastic about this kind offer–unless, come to think of it, this 20-year-old of undisclosed gender looks a lot like Salma Hayek.

—Michelle

The general consensus is that, title change notwithstanding, Rove will retain his big-dog status at the White House. Even so, having been asked to relinquish part of his official portfolio in a move that some folks might perceive as a demotion is unlikely to sit well with Bush’s Brain. If I were a Democratic strategist, I’d be awfully uneasy at the thought of a brassed off Rove with extra time on his hands and a driving need to salvage his rep and cement his legacy with a big win in November. If you thought his winged monkeys played rough in past elections, just wait.

—Michelle 

So I’m watching an "encore presentation" of HBO’s new polygamy-themed hit, "Big Love," last night, when it occurs to me: What a huge number of modern married couples need is an extra wife. No, not for procreative purposes or even to share the burden of household chores (though I don’t know anyone who’d turn down an extra set of laundry-folding hands). But if all the articles, books, and polling about stressed-out women struggling to have-it-all are any indication, many marriages clearly could use someone to fulfill the traditional (perhaps partly apocryphal?) role of the patient, attentive, supportive emotional rock of the family–you know, the kind of wife who greets you at the door each evening with your slippers and a martini, assures you that everything on the homefront is running smoothly, and insists that you tell her all about your hard day at the office.

As it is, in many two-career households in particular, although both spouses strive to be supportive and attentive, often they’re both a little too preoccupied with their own attempts to juggle work and home life to provide adequate comfort. An additional wife–or husband (since limiting this discussion to polygyny would, after all, be inexcusably sexist)–could go a long way toward smoothing out some of those whose-turn-is-it-to-take-the-dog-to-the-vet bumps along the road to domestic bliss. Provided, of course, that the new spouse understood his or her role as domestic cheerleader-in-chief.

Save your disgruntled emails. Obviously I’m not serious about this. But you can’t blame a gal for fantasizing. I do so love a good martini.

—Michelle

Every time I fill in on this blog (well, both times) the price of gas has risen to a new peak and I, as well as hundreds of other journalists, have tried to make something interesting of the fact. Will America finally get serious about conserving? Will Detroit go full-tilt producing hybrids? Will commuters stay home and work over the Web? It’s pretty boring and tiring, actually — almost as much so as the speculation about whether the high prices are manipulated by the oil companies, dictated by speculators, or reflective of actual dwindling reserves. The debate seems easy to settle but it never is, nor is the question of whether the big run-up will prove transitory or semi-permanent.

And just when these articles have all been written, in all their variations, the price slides down again and people go back to doing as they did and driving whatever they drove before as far and as often as they ever drove it, while listening to pretty music .

Perhaps that’s why this time I wouldn’t be disappointed if fate just split the difference in the whole cycle and gas prices stayed where they are now. Then I might be able to adapt to them. Then I might finally relinquish my fantasy of buying a 300 hp sports coupe that only uses premium. My best trick so far is to set a dollar limit every time I open my gas cap. The concept is to always spend the same amount — say fifty bucks– and drive as far as I can on what it buys me but not a mile more. It works for a week or two but then it doesn’t work due to the same sort of sloppy, self-serving accounting that causes me about once or twice a year to ditch my HBO while, with the other hand, I buy more cell-phone minutes.

A soon as prices drop, I stop playing my mental gas games and do as alcoholics do when they pick up the bottle again after a period of sobriety: guzzle to beat hell. It might be my last opportunity, I reason, before gas goes to fifteen bucks a liter. Boy, do I make hay. It’s the opposite of conservation. It’s the opposite of learning one’s lesson. It’s desperate and slightly euphoric and, I’m convinced now, it makes not a dimple in the vast reserves that economists always point out are still around no matter what the prices on the pump read.

And as yo-yo dieters know, binging and starving corrupts one’s whole metabolism. That’s where I am now with gasoline. Nothing anyone tells me seems believable, no disciplined program of consumption seems rational and nothing I read on the subject seems relevant. For all I know, when oil truly runs short the price of gas will plunge and plunge until there are only twenty gallons left which no one will want, so they’ll pour them on the ground.

Tomorrow I have a trip planned. Eight hundred miles of interstate. It might be cheaper to fly but I might never get this chance again.

–Walter

Poor Scott McClellan. Even after all this administration has put him through, the departing press secretary got all choked up yesterday as Bush was announcing his early retirement. I know much of the media corps (specifically, those who had to deal with him regularly) had their issues with McClellan, but I always felt sorry for the guy. Clearly his tenure was more contentious than that of predecessor Ari Fleischer, in part because McClellan occupied the podium during more troubled times than Ari. But I also think McClellan had a harder time in the job because, deep down, he was more uncomfortable being dishonest. McClellan always looked strained and slightly gassy when dishing out whatever bologna the administration had fed him. By contrast, Ari, as my colleague Jon Chait detailed long ago, has always had a somewhat more relaxed attitude toward truth-telling.   

—Michelle

At the Livingston, Montana coffee shop where I’ve been forced to work this week due to an Internet meltdown at my farm, they play a lot of Bob Dylan on the stereo, especially a lot of sixties Dylan. This means that while I’m poking around the Web, reading stories about Donald Rumseld and how the White House is ‘shaking’ itself up by unloading its top media liason and forcing Karl Rove to give up his ‘policy’ duties and concentrate on ‘politics’ (a distinction whose very existence pretty much sums up what’s wrong in Washington), I get to hear ‘Masters of War’ and ‘Hard Rain’ in the background. The songs haven’t dated. They’ve matured. What seems dated are current events, which seem so much like events from forty years ago that I wasn’t surprised to read this morning that Neil Young is releasing a new album that sounds as though it will be filled with protest songs similar to the ones he used to sing during the last big civil war that we inflamed by trying to stop.

I’m a fan of Neil Young, and yet I’m not so sure I want to hear this album. Nor would I be eager to jump up and buy a new Dylan album with the same concept. I sense self-imitation in the air. I sense too much satisfaction all around. “You loved it when they took on Johnson, but you’ll be ecstatic when they slam Bush!” It’s not that Young’s not perfectly entitled to a political second act, it’s that his musical protests this time will come with a stamp of cultural approval and a solid-gold provenance that will make them too respectable, I fear. Lashing out against power just isn’t the same when an artist can be assured, up front, that he’ll be loved and applauded for doing so just as he was when he did it before, when it was a risk.

“I ain’t going to work on Maggie’s farm no more.” The song was playing as I wrote this. It’s got one of those lyrics that seem applicable to about a million situations then and now and in the future. Rebellion. Frustration. Humiliation. Come-uppance. The fundamental human right to be a squirelly, ungovernable wise-ass (as long as one can handle the whippings it brings.) A song of vignettes, of savage little sketches. A song which doesn’t need a sequel.

–Walter

Since Walter has brought up the newest addition to the Tom & Katie freak show, I gotta ask: Does it strike anyone besides me as eerily coincidental that the TomKat daughter arrived on the same day that the stork also delivered a baby girl to Brooke Shields, Cruise’s nemesis in the Scientologist vs. psychiatry debate? Conspiracy theories welcome.

—Michelle

If unborn children really had rights, the infant daughter of the actress Katie Holmes and the temporarily-humanoid immortal starseed that styles itself ‘Tom Cruise’ would have been delivered by a lawyer. Breaking the absolute silence of the delivery room, the lawyer, on the infant’s behalf, would have sued for spiritual guardianship and demanded that all profits earned from sale of the child’s story and image– including ‘virtual’ profits in the form of publicity for its parents — be deposited in a trust account to fund its lifelong psychotherapy needs. It would also be stipulated that such therapy could not be interfered with or curtailed by ‘Cruise’ or his religious representatives.

Of all the world’s great traditions of exploitation — master over slave, husband over wife, rich man over poor man– parenthood is the most absolute and the least subject to scrutiny or pressure. Not only do the stronger parties involved have the right to construct the weaker one’s reality and then imprison their subject inside of it, they have the right to create the subject at a moment not of its choosing and not necessarily to its advantage. For Holmes and ‘Cruise’ to have marched a helpless new spirit into the global media s***-storm that they, their publicists and their clerical overseers have been whipping up for many months now should not only be an actionable infraction but a grave reminder to all of us not to toy around with unformed soul material.

Suri, lovely child, you are free. You just don’t know it yet. You don’t even have to, ultimately, keep that name they gave you. You can be an ‘Amy’ like your friends. None of what happened is your responsibility. Your mother, she chose to relinquish her personal liberty. Your father, he chose to forsake his humanness. But you, at eighteen, as an American citizen and– in the words of the Desiderata– ‘a child of the universe’ will have the right to hop any bus you want and take it as far as you want and never return.

I’m a stranger, child, but I’m a parent, too, and on behalf of many millions of parents who cherish the awesome power that we wield over those who come to earth with none , I make you this promise:

You shall be released.

–Walter

I’m pleased to report that I’ve begun receiving semi-regular emails from the Jim Webb for Senate campaign. For those not paying attention, Webb is the Vietnam War hero who went on to become Secretary of the Navy (he briefly served under the Gipper before resigning over planned military budget cuts) and then a successful novelist (his “Fields of Fire” is considered quite good), and who is now running as a Democrat to unseat Republican Sen. George Allen in Virginia. (For a taste of Webb’s military years check out Robert Timberg’s celebrated “The Nightingale’s Song.”)

At this point, Allen enjoys a fat lead–20-plus points according to the last poll I saw. But the race is still young and Webb could prove a formidable opponent. For starters, the guy is a military legend with a record on which it will be tough for the GOP to work its increasingly popular trash-the-veteran strategy.

Just as importantly, Webb has a strong, clearly articulated foreign policy vision that just so happens to clash with the current administration‚Äôs. Namely, Webb fits into Walter Russell Mead‚Äôs Jacksonian school, while the Bushies are currently of a Wilsonian bent. (In summarizing the four schools of thought laid out in Mead‚Äôs ‚ÄúSpecial Providence,‚Äù allow me to swipe a graph from tnr colleague Peter Beinart, for whom this issue has become an obsession: ‚ÄúWilsonians believe America must make the world safe for liberty. Hamiltonians believe America must make the world safe for commerce. Jeffersonians fear that both of these crusades threaten liberty at home. And Jacksonians believe in destroying America’s enemies and defending America ‘s sovereignty, no matter what the rest of the world thinks.‚Äù)

Anyway, as a proud Jacksonian, Webb won’t be vulnerable to the usual criticism that Democrats don‚Äôt have a foreign policy position other than ‚ÄúBush bad.‚Äù You may not agree with Webb‚Äôs vision, but the man clearly has one and is unafraid to talk about it. (Check out his site for recent articles and speeches.) So while it may be that the colorful, outspoken Webb is ultimately unelectable–this is the guy, after all, who penned a 1979 piece for The Washingtonian entitled, ‚ÄúWomen Can‚Äôt Fight"–at the very least, Rove, Mehlman, and the rest of the GOP smear hounds will have to find a fresh line of assault.

—Michelle

The more I think about it, the more astonished I am that even this President, not exactly known for his verbal grace under pressure, would come out with a bone-headed remark like "I’m the decider." If Karen were around, you can bet this wouldn’t have happened.

—Michelle