Half Changed World

Last Friday, I was lucky enough to have lunch with Shannon and Nat.  It’s always fun to meet the person behind the page, and Shannon was just as thoughtful and friendly as her writing.  Nat is also as charming as her pictures.  Seriously, everyone in our section of the restaurant was making googly eyes at her, and she very seriously taught us all the names of the parts of her face.  I asked Shannon how it felt to be part of an entourage, and she said "tiring."  We had the obligatory discussion of how even though we met through the internet, neither of us is an ax murderer, and wouldn’t it be nice if all of our blogfriends lived close enough that we could hang out together.

I keep getting emails about different mommy blog communities that I could join — Today’s Mama, ParentsConnect, ClubMom.  I can’t say that I’m particularly interested. For one thing, I’ve already got more blogs bookmarked than I have time to read.  For another, I feel like most of these sites are vehicles for advertising.  [Thanks to Geeky Mom for the link.]  If I were new to the whole blog thing, it might be more appealing.  Or am I missing something?

I’m more intrigued by two other sites I’ve run across that attempt to harness the power of connections for practical ends.

• Prosper.com connects borrowers and lenders, taking a much smaller middleman slice than banks.  In a world where credit cards charge 18% or more for loans, and bank accounts pay only 5%, there’s a lot of room for mutual benefit.  Interestingly, so far I don’t see much evidence that there are interactions between people who know each other (or who are friends of friends).  That’s the idea behind the groups concept on Prosper — a high tech version of the microlending circles that require groups of borrowers to mutually guarantee each other’s loans.  The idea is both that your friends know better than a credit agency whether you are trustworthy — and that you’re less likely to default if you’d screw over your friends than if you’d only be hurting a stranger.
• BorrowMe is a site for matching people with things that they want to borrow and lend — baby gear, ladders, weed whackers, books, whatever. I absolutely love the idea (the gift economy in action, with the added benefit of being easy on the environment), but it only makes sense in practice if there is a high enough density of participants that you can find what you need without paying huge shipping costs or driving all over the place.  I’m a beta test member and so far things are pretty quiet, but they’re having a promotion this week where they’re giving away an ipod and a bunch of shirts to people who recruit new members, list things to lend, and actually lend or borrow stuff.  If you’re interested in checking it out, let me know and I’ll email you an access code.  And no, it’s not because I’m trying to win the ipod, but because I genuinely think it’s cool. 

Today’s book is Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, by Jerome Armstrong (of MyDD) and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (of DailyKos).  It’s their breezy take on why the Democrats can’t win elections, in spite of being demonstrably better at governing.

As Peter Beinart pointed out in the NY Times, Jerome and Kos deliberately don’t discuss "message" — they argue that we need to stop trying to achieve the perfect platform, and start focusing on winning some elections.  (Peter, of course, has a book coming out this summer in which he argues that Democrats should be talking about a liberal foreign policy agenda.)

Parts of their analysis are totally on target — the incestuous relationship between the party committees that control the money and don’t take candidates seriously unless they hire the "right" (insider) consulting firms, the failure of progressive organizations to pay their employees enough to make them a career path for all but the most dedicated (or independently wealthy).  And I liked their argument that campaign dollars don’t have to be a limited resource that need to be hoarded for the most competitive races — by running serious candidates in even less competitive districts, more people are energized to participate and contribute, expanding the pot.

But the heart of the book is, I think, their claim that the biggest problem of the Democratic party is single-interest groups like environmentalists, the labor movement, and pro-choice activists.  They argue that these groups give Republicans easy targets, and hold candidates hostage to ideological purity.  The explicit comparision is to the Religious Right, which has used its power to support Republicans for the long-term benefits, even when their issues weren’t front and center in a given campaign.  They are particularly angry at pro-choice groups which have mobilized against pro-life Democrats. 

The irony of the argument is that Jerome and Kos are generally opposed to the DNC and other party insiders coming down from above and trying to annoint a candidate.  And, my reading of the situation is that NOW and NARAL have only really dug in their heels against candidates when they feel like the Democratic party leadership is trying to annoint a anti-choice candidate before the primary (cf Pennsylvania).  Obviously, they’re not happy when a pro-life Democrat wins the primary, but they generally just quietly look away, and recognize that the Democrat is usually still the better candidate on their issues.  But they’re trying to draw a line in the sand and say that they’re not going to acquiese when someone else tries to play kingmaker and expects them to fall quietly in line.  In other words, they’re not going to be the labor movement, which has loyally provided the muscle for Democratic campaigns for decades and gotten essentially bupkes in return. (Jerome and Kos also don’t seem to notice the irony when they proudly recount how bloggers knocked Tim Roemer out of contention for DNC chair because of his pro-life stance.)

The conventional wisdom seems to be that contested primaries are a bad thing, by draining resources from the general election, and causing the victor to be tarnished.  I’m not entirely convinced of that, for some of the same reasons that Jerome and Kos argue that Dems ought to be fighting in more districts.  I think primaries can draw more attention to campaigns, expand the pool of interested people and reduce public cynicism about elections.  The key is to figure out how to have real primaries and then still be able to talk to each other at the end of the day.

The Republicans seem to be better at this than Democrats these days, but I don’t think it’s because they have a magic strategy that the Dems are missing.  I think it’s something about being the majority party.  When you’re in charge and control the goodies, people fall into line even if they’re furious.  When you don’t have goodies to give out, the backbiting begins.

Other interesting reviews of the book:

• Mark Schmitt in the Washington Monthly
• Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise (particularly addressing the abortion issue)

Over at 11d, Laura wrote an interesting post about "What Do Men Want?", specifically about whether men overall prefer stay-at-home wives, as Jane Galt suggested.  Laura thinks that most men underestimate the ways in which stay-at-home wives contribute to the family’s well-being, and so would prefer that their wives work.

My guess, with absolutely no data to back it up, is that most men would prefer that their wives worked part-time — enough to bring in some money to allow for extras (nicer cars, better vacations) — but not so much as to result in an expectation that they’ll be responsible for making serious addditional contributions to the domestic front.  This isn’t because they’re evil.  I know I sound like a broken record, but Rhona Mahony’s point is that once you’ve stepped off the career track, it’s hard to get back on at a level that (economically) justifies your spouse making significant sacrifices (covering an equal share of sick days, relocating) to further your career.

Certainly, all else equal, when the boys are both in school, I’d like it if T figured out a way to bring in more money.  It would give me the freedom to consider lower-paying but more interesting and/or meaningful jobs without feeling like I was sacrificing my family, and it would give us more options generally (see yesterday’s post about schools for an example).  And I’d like to be more involved in the boys’ schools, which is hard to justify while I’m working full-time and T’s staying home.  But it’s probably not worth making him miserable doing database work (even if he could still get hired to do so, which is unclear).  So we shall see. 

The discussion on Laura’s post got a little sidetracked into a back and forth on whether it’s upper-class indulgence to discuss any of this.  I liked Tim Burke’s answer:

"We live our lives, not someone else’s lives; in each of our lives, there are issues, problems, dissatisfactions. Effacing your own life, your own issues, your own reactions, ignoring the ethnographic texture of your immediate social worlds, in favor of endless pious genuflection at the holy shrine of some constituency of "deserving poor" is an upper-middle-class indulgence in its own right, and usually phonier by far than talking about how to do right by your children or your spouse."

Via RebelDad, I found Jeremy at Daddy Dialectic’s post about why he’s happy to claim the title of Mr. Mom:

"When I’m taking care of Liko, I don’t feel like I’m “fathering” him. In my mind – and this is just the thought I was raised with, not the one I want to have – a father goes to work and comes home in the evening. "Fathering" is playing ball, patting on the back, putting food on the table. An honorable role."

"A mother, meanwhile, is home changing diapers and cleaning baby food off the floor and kissing skinned knees. That’s also honorable and often honored. That’s what I do. So I feel like by staying home with him, I’m “mothering” Liko. I’m a mom, or at least, that’s my role. In many respects, a man out in the middle of the afternoon with his toddler, who is known to neighbors and neighborhood shop clerks and waitresses as a “Mr. Mom,” is a man in drag, and queer in the most political sense of the term. Why shouldn’t I be proud to be a Mr. Mom?"

I commented that I worry that this definition implies that working mothers aren’t real mothers, and there’s been some interesting back and forth on Jeremy’s blog. 

But maybe Jeremy’s right in some ways.  I write here a fair amount about what I call "reverse traditional families" — families with working mothers and at-home fathers.  One of the strains on women in these families is that we rarely give ourselves mothering credit for being breadwinners.  We often beat ourselves up for the things that we don’t do, without giving ourselves corresponding brownie points for the things we do.  Maybe we should stop worrying about whether we’re good enough mothers, and decide that we’re damned good fathers.

I can’t remember if I posted here about the "daddies and donuts" event at D’s preschool last month.  This was a chance to have a snack and do a craft with the kids, at the relatively working-parent friendly hour of 9 am (vs. the 11 am time for "family snack" and most other events to which parents are invited).  When I got the flyer, I asked T if he thought in this context, "daddy" meant "male parent" (e.g. him) or "the parent who never gets to do things at preschool" (e.g. me).  [The flyer did say that if a father couldn’t come, a mother or "other Very Important Person" could attend.]  Ultimately, since I was taking off a day the week before to go on a field trip with the class (to the Planetarium), I decided not to fight T for the chance to go.  As it turns out, the "craft" was that the kids decorated paper ties. 

***

On another note, RebelDad is having an online chat with Leslie Morgan Steiner at WashingtonPost.com tomorrow (Thursday) at 1 pm.  If you can’t be online at the time, you can submit questions in advance and read the transcript later.  I got Steiner’s book out of the library — look for a review in the next week or two.

I’ve been getting a bunch of hits today from people searching for "Annette Lareau" or "Unequal Childhoods" because David Brooks wrote about the book today in his NYTimes column.  Time to break out the "I blogged about that last year" bumper stickers. 

The Washington Post has a new work-and-family blog, by Leslie Morgan Steiner, of course  It’s frustrating that they’ve got this huge built-in audience and are covering so much of the tired old mommy wars ground.  (On a technical note, like the NYTimes, the Post blogs allow comments, but don’t let you link to your own blog.  Kudos to the Business Week bloggers for acting like a real part of the blog community.)

The April Working Mother magazine has an article by Arianna Huffington that lauds the advantages of blogging as a career that lets you work from home.  Yeah right, if you’re already a celebrity, or started blogging before 2003 (cf. Dooce).  I emailed off a letter to the editor, telling them that they missed the point.  If you’re looking for a way to quit your day job, blogging probably offers only slightly better odds than a lottery ticket.  But if you’re looking for ideas, laughter, and comraderie, and you can only do it when the kids have gone to bed, I don’t think there’s a better place to look.

I’m so excited.  Not about the Oscars, about the Koufax awards.  They’re finally open for voting.  (Not that I’m complaining about the delay — they’re a major effort to put on, and a total work of love.)

I’ve been nominated in two categories: Most Deserving of Wider Recognition and Best Series for my posts on work-family issues.  I think this is a preliminary round of voting, and then there will be another round after they’ve narrowed the nominees down. I know that some of my other favorite blogs — Bitch, PhD, Geeky Mom, Feministe, Pandagon, Majikthise — have been nominated as well.  I think Pharyngula gets my vote for best single post.  I know that there are lots of other great blogs out there.  Please vote for your favorites.

About those Oscars.  I might TiVo them.  Not seeing the movies takes a lot of the fun out of it. Of the movies up for major awards, Brokeback Mountain is the only one I’ve seen.  I’ve seen two of the three nominees in the animated picture category.  (We took the boys to see Wallace and Grommit, but saw Corpse Bridge on our own.  Yes, we’re geeks.)  I’ve also seen King Kong, March of the Penguins, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the last two on video).

Following Anne’s suggestion, I signed up with BlogBurst, which is a new service that is trying to syndicate blog content to appear in newspapers’ websites.  It’s still very much in beta, but I’m interested to see how it plays out.

They strongly encourage bloggers to add an image to appear with the blog listing, which is limited to a 75 x 75 pixel square.  Since I’m not a particularly visual person, I’m soliciting ideas for what sort of image to use.  I’d rather NOT go with a photo of myself.  The only idea I’ve come up with so far is a photo of a cell phone and crayons.  Any suggestions?

I don’t intend to change what I’m writing here in order to try to make it more appealing.   I will stop posting poems that I don’t have copyright to, which I’ve done a few times.

My computer is on the fritz (just when I had almost finished doing our taxes on it!) so my blogging is likely to be light for a while.  I’ll check in from T’s computer, but probably won’t have much in the way of serious posts until I have it back in gear or give up and replace it.  (It’s scary, but the low-end machines are so cheap, that at any reasonable valuation of our time, it almost always makes sense to buy a new one.)

I did want to express my sadness at the unexpected death of Octavia Butler.   Fledgling wasn’t my favorite of her books, but she was a great writer.  I ran across this link to one of her short stories, Amnesty, today, and I recommend it to anyone who isn’t familiar with her work.  In miniature, it displays all the themes that Butler kept on returning to.

Interestingly, it seems that the news of her death spread across the blogosphere well before it was reported in the press.  Steven Barnes seems to have reported it first.  Edward Champion shares a nice memory of how Kindred rocked his world, and a roundup of posts from others.

Will the person who found this site by googling "betty friedan and the goodie bag" please tell me what you were looking for?

Some of you may notice that I now have an ad running on the site for Perfect Madness.  I was somewhat amused the other day to discover that my post about her magazine articles is currently the number 2 google hit if you search for "Judith Warner," below the Newsweek article, but above the publisher’s official site.

Thanks to the kind person who nominated me under "Learn Something New Every Day" in the Share the Love blog awards at One Woman’s World.  (For once, I didn’t self-nominate, or put anyone up to it.)  If you feel like voting for me, here’s the link.  I see Mimilou, Landismom, and Danigirl got nominated too.

I don’t think anyone goes into parenting thinking of having a child who will need organ transplants.  But that’s what happened to Moreena, whose daughter Annika has had two liver transplants, and is going to need a third, if she gets healthy enough that the doctors think she could survive the operation.  And if having a desperately sick child isn’t bad enough, Moreena’s family is about to hit their insurance limit for the year.

Andrea has organized a web page to share information about ways to help Moreena’s family.  I’ll be contributing, and will have a button up as soon as the donation account is set up.  I encourage you to consider contributing as well, and to spread the word.

I’ve written before about the craziness of our health care system, and I’ll write about it again.  And I also encourage you to contribute to organizations working on health care more systematically, especially in countries where small donations go a long way.  But this one hits home to me.  Annika is very close to D’s age. Reading about what Annika goes through makes me realize what a blessing it is to have a child who can consider a needle stick for a standard blood test a major indignity.  I can’t imagine what it feels like to have a severely ill child.  But I know they don’t need the financial stress on top of that.