Half Changed World

Today’s book is The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan, by Samuel Freedman.  I picked it up after reading a recommendation for it on a blog (sorry, don’t remember who) as a useful attempt to explain the rightward shift in American politics.

The book focuses on three immigrant families — one Irish-American, one Italian-American and one Polish-American — and their shifts over three generations, from loyal Democrats in the 1930s to Republican party activists in the 1980s and 1990s.  (The families were picked by working backwards from the most recent three.)  The book is impressively researched and the stories are interesting.  Some aspects of the story were very familiar to me, but others were totally unknown — machine politics in 1930s Baltimore, blue collar environmentalism in the late 1960s.  I enjoyed the book, although sometimes felt it got bogged down in more detail than necessary.

Freedman’s argument is that the first generation were loyal Democrats due to a combination of party machines, unions, ethnic loyality (think Al Smith) and gratitude for the jobs programs that helped them survive the Great Depression.  By the second generation, the son-in-law of one of the families had made the leap to management at Montgomery Ward, and moved to solidly Republican suburbs, and he adjusted his politics accordingly.  (Freedman notes that the wife in this family remained a liberal Democrat.) 

Another family turned conservative in the face of the civil rights movement and the growing welfare state, feeling that both were coming at the expense of white working-class families.  The third, also still blue-collar, remained Democratic, with one member becoming a leader in the new environmental movement.  However, by the third generation, this family had also moved into the Republican column, driven by the cultural conflicts around the Vietnam war and the scorn displayed by anti-war intellectuals for the working class men who were fighting it.

I found the discussion of the third generation the least persuasive, in part because it was so hard to see the three members as representative of the zeitgeist.  They were college Republicans in the  early 70s, when the counterculture had become mainstream.  Freedman argues that they presaged the Reagan revolution of 1980, and the Contract with America, but I’m unconvinced.  They were all New York Republicans, fiscally conservative (and true believers in Reaganomics and the Laffer curve) but socially moderate.  (One of them became a conservative hero for protesting the American Bar Association’s support of abortion rights, but also argued in favor of gay rights.)  It seems bizarre to tell a story about the rise of Republicanism in recent years in which the Christian right is totally missing.

I also found myself wondering "what about the Jews?"  In the early 20th century, Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the US didn’t look that different than the Catholic ethnics that Freedman follows.  (German Jews had been in the US longer and were better off and more assimilated.)  The needle trades were full of both Italians and Jews — members of both groups died in the Triangle Fire — and both groups were key in forming unions.  Why did Jews then take such a different political trajectory, such that they’re still one of the most reliable elements of the Democratic voting bloc?  Freedman’s book doesn’t offer an explanation.

Sometime this afternoon, I got my 50,000th hit on this blog.  From my stats page, it looks like the visitor came to me via 11d.  Thanks!

***

No energy for a real post tonight.  Sorry.  After a lovely cool spring, it’s suddenly  summer in DC — hot and humid.  It feels like someone put lead in my shoes.

This week at the bookstore, I noticed The Paperbag Princess on the rotating rack of paperback picturebooks (where there are usually annoying books about characters from television).  Someone had recommended this recently (I thought it was in the comments to this post of Julie’s, but I can’t find it there) so I read it, laughed, then called D over and read it to him.

The punchline of the book is "They didn’t get married."  In the car on the way home, D asked, "what’s ‘married’?"  This surprised me at first, but then I realized that it’s really not something that we’re likely to talk about.  D was the ringbearer at my brother’s wedding last year, but he didn’t ask a lot of questions about what was going on.  And we always sort of mumble past the last few pages of Babar and Zephir where the General gives Isabelle to Zephir to marry as his reward for rescuing him.

We fumbled a minute, then T came up with the answer that marriage is when two people decide to make a new family together.  Sounds about right to me. 

I’ve got a hold in at the library on Stephanie Coontz’s new book; I’ll see if she comes up with any better of a definition.

In discussions about the issues involved in choosing a school for one’s children, Bitch, PhD has raised the example of the black kids who faced both emotional and physical danger as they attended previously all-white schools:

"I’m torn on the question of whether one sacrifices one’s kid’s safety and future: I keep thinking of the Little Rock Nine. Black parents and black children made *enormous* sacrifices to integrate schools; part of the reason integration hasn’t been as successful as it should have been is because white parents didn’t."

She’s right, but I don’t think this is an unambiguous moral choice.  As a parent, you have obligations to your child as well as to the world, and sometimes they conflict.

I was reminded of this quandry today reading this post at From 0 to 5 (via This Woman’s Work).  The writer of this blog (Holly) and her partner are adoptive and foster parents to some extremely troubled kids, and sometimes these kids act out in ways that hurt the other kids in the family.

I’d really like to be a foster parent someday; I think it’s incredibly important work.  But I’m not sure it’s fair to my kids to bring into their home a person who would take so much of our emotional energy and who might well hurt them.  I know, there are no guarantees in life — either of our kids could turn out to have extremely high needs, and the other might feel that he got the short end of the stick.  But there seems to me a difference between such things happening by the luck of the draw and such things happening because you sought them out.

I hope this doesn’t come across as critical of either the parents of the Little Rock Nine or of Holly and her partner.  I think they’ve made good choices, even heroic choices (although Holly cringes at being called a saint and I don’t know how she’d react to be called a hero).  But I don’t think those choices are the only good choices.  I’ve never heard anyone talk about the tradeoff between parental and societal responsibilities, and I’d love to hear it discussed.

After reading the NYTimes series on class, and my post about it, a reader emailed me to suggest that the discussion of inherited position within a "meritocracy" was ducking the question of genes and IQ.  For example, one of the strongest predictors of how well kids do in school is their mother’s level of education.  Is this because well-educated mothers read to their kids a lot and use more extensive vocabularies, or because they continued in school because they were good at it, and they passed those genes onto their kids?

It’s a fair question, and the truth is almost certainly a bit of both.  A paper by Erik Turkheimer et al. a few years ago found that among very poor families, the environmental conditions were more important than genes in predicting IQ, while among middle- and upper-income families, genetic factors were dominant.   The published article is pretty technical, but there’s a nice layperson’s discussion of it and interview with Turkheimer available from Connect for Kids.

This research suggests that there’s a threshold level below which children aren’t able to develop to their full genetic potential.  But above that level, what parents do isn’t as critical (at least with regard to IQ) as we often think.  As Turkheimer says in the interview:

“In the range where a lot of people spend their time…you know, ‘Should I hang the black and white mobile over my kids’ crib?’ kind of thing, it probably does not matter.”

Today’s book is Acts of Faith, by Philip Caputo.  The main characters are aid workers and pilots in the Sudan, and it’s a sweeping story of good intentions, unintended consequences, and hubris.  It’s often unclear who is acting out of greed and who out of principle — and the idealists are often the ones who do the most damage.  There are several pairs of unlikely lovers in the story, but the biggest love interest is Africa as a whole.

I picked up the book after reading Michiko Kakutani’s absolute rave in the New York Times.  I didn’t quite like it as much as she did (although I liked it more than Jonathan Yardley did), but I’m glad I read it.  Caputo does a brilliant job of capturing the draw of aid work: how the  hope of making a real difference in people’s lives blends with a desire to live life on a larger scale than most people have the opportunity.  His characters rage against the ordinary as they slide down the slippery slope towards moral decay.

However, if you’re going to read only one book about the Sudan, you should read Emma’s War, by Deborah Scroggins (soon to be a movie staring Nicole Kidman).  It’s nonfiction, and provides a good overview of the long-lasting civil war as well as an examination of the life of Emma McCune, a British relief worker who married a SPLA warlord.  McCune is clearly the inspiration for one of the main characters in Acts of Faith; I found myself wondering whether Caputo started his book because he was frustrated by Scroggins’ ultimate inability to explain McCune’s choices.

***

Nicholas Kristof has a new op-ed in the Times today, urging once again more attention to the horrors still occurring in the Darfur region of Sudan.  He argues "When Americans see suffering abroad on their television screens, as they did after the tsunami, they respond. I wish we had the Magboula Channel, showing her daily struggle to forge ahead through humiliation and hunger, struggling above all to keep her remaining children alive." 

Last week, I discovered BackpackIt, a nifty web utility that lets you share lists, files, and notes.  The lists include check-off boxes, which means that this might be a solution to the endless problem of how do two (or more) people share a to-do list.  T. and I are giving it a try, and we’ll see how it goes.  I think the free level is plenty for us, but if someone would develop a way to sync the lists with HandyShopper, I’d be willing to pay for it. 

For sharing calendars, we use the low-tech solution of a whiteboard hanging in the kitchen, which we try to update every Sunday night.  It’s not perfect — T. totally forgot about a dentist appointment a few weeks ago, in spite of the fact that it was written in clear letters — but it serves the main purpose of making sure that we don’t both plan on doing kid-free activities at the same time.

For such a basic set of issues, faced by pretty much every family, you’d think there would be a better solution.  But we haven’t found it yet.  Recommendations are welcome.

Someone recently shared with me a link to this essay on BabyCenter about the maternal instinct.  One paragraph jumped out at me with a vengence:

"My other fear was that the instinct would kick in fast and furiously, and I’d become a brain-dead turbo-mommy with a Kleenex tucked in my sleeve rattling on about nothing but constructive play and growth percentiles. I’d stop working and simply gaze all day at my miraculous progeny. I’d lose my friends and start hanging out only with other mothers who snacked Cheerios out of tiny plastic bags, smelled faintly of baby vomit, and carried fat wallets stuffed with photos of startled-looking infants."

The stereotypes in that paragraph made me grind my teeth.  I often have tissues in my purse or my pocket (both clean and used), along with crayons and a matchbox car or two.  I’ve been known to eat cheerios out of little plastic bags, and when my kids were at the spitting up stage, I probably smelled of it.  (One definition of maternal instinct: when your kid throws up, and your first reaction is to stick your hand out to catch the puke rather than to jump out of the way.)  But I dare anyone to call me brain-dead.

My experience is that motherhood doesn’t change people’s fundamental personalities.  People who were smart are smart mommies.  People who were cynical are cynical mommies.  People who were overachievers are overachieving mommies. 

But yes, your interests do change when you become a parent.  Things that you never thought much about (cloth v. disposible diapers, the quality of local schools, how little sleep it’s possible to function on) become fascinating.  Things that once seemed essential (first run movies, parties that start at 10 pm) become distant memories.

So, it is sometimes hard to maintain friendships across the parenting divide.  (I know some people complain that it’s hard to maintain friendships when one friend is partnered and the other isn’t; I never had that problem, possibly because when I first got married, I hardly knew anyone else who was married.  If I didn’t want to hang out with my single friends, I would have been awfully lonely.)

Friendships that are based on circumstances — you work together, you go out to bars together — often don’t last when those circumstances change.  Yes, stay-at-home moms often hang out with other stay-at-home moms, because that’s who’s available to take a walk at 3 in the afternoon.  Working moms often want to get together someplace that’s kid-friendly because after being away from their kids all day, they’d like to see them.  But if your friendship is important enough, if it’s not just circumstancial, I firmly believe you can make it work even when one has kids and the other doesn’t.

For me, geography has been the biggest problem in maintaining friendships.  My friends from college live all across the country, and I  just don’t hop on a plane for a long weekend the way I used to before I had kids.  Four of the closest friends I made in DC moved away within a period of just over a year.  And I’ve found it much harder to make new friends since having kids; if it’s challenging to make the time to be with people who are already your friends, it’s triply hard to make the time to develop acquaintances into friends.  And trying to have a real conversation while also taking care of an active toddler or preschooler is nearly impossible, as Helen Simpson so acutely portrays.  (Parents of older children assure me that it gets easier when your role is reduced to spectator at their games or performances.)

After sitting on the fence for a while, I’ve decided that I’m going to vote for David Englin for the Democratic nomination for delegate.  I like his policies and I like the energy that he’s bringing to the campaign, including reaching out beyond the "usual suspects" to try to engage more people in the process.  (His campaign has also done a good job of staying on top of the internet discussion of the race; I wouldn’t be surprised if someone shows up at my doorstep with a campaign sign tomorrow afternoon.)

In thinking things over, I realized that some of my indecision in this race was driven by a  prejudice against people who are confident enough, ambitious enough to run for office at a relatively young age.  This is a common prejudice; Americans are very skeptical of career politicians. Going back to George Washington, there’s a long history of sucessful politicians who campaigned as just regular folks, reluctantly setting aside their "real" careers in order to serve.  So I found Libby Garvey’s story of her journey from PTA mom to school board member to candidate for delegate compelling.  But I was ultimately convinced by Shayna Englin’s argument that safe seats are where you build leaders for tomorrow.

A snide anonymous comment at Virginia2005 referring to Garvey as a "school district lady lol" made me think about the degree to which these different paths to political involvement are gendered.  Debbie Wasserman Schultz aside, it is still almost unheard of for young women to run for political office.  And yes, the PTA and the school board are the classic first steps in that direction for people who never imagined themselves as politicians.  It was shrewd marketing for Sen. Patty Murray to describe herself as "just a mom in tennis shoes," but it worked because it was true.

Today’s book is The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars: Who Decides What Makes A Good Mother, by Miriam Peskowitz.  Peskowitz’s core argument should be familiar to any reader of this blog:  that there ought to be better ways to combine work and family without running yourself into the ground, to move back and forth between full-time and part-time work and non-paid work without derailing your career, that the media-fanned "mommy wars" only distract us from making common cause.  She portrays herself not as an expert, but as an ordinary mother trying to understand what’s going on, and bringing her readers along on her voyage of discovery.

While there are details that I would quibble with Peskowitz about, I really liked the book as a whole. (My quibbles: I think she overstates the case to which the media portrays SAHDs as having an easier time returning to the workforce than SAHMs; I wish she had talked more about the ways in which domestic responsibilities tend to fall more heavily on the partner who works fewer hours, or even just has more flexibility in scheduling.) 

The emotional core of the book is the final chapter, entitled Playground Revolution, in which Peskowitz introduces us to a variety of groups that are working for change.  Some are fighting for legislation that would provide paid parental leave.  Some are organizing for better neighborhood playgrounds.  Some are organizing nurse-ins at Starbucks.  Some are fighting for welfare recipients’ rights to stay home with their children.

The point is that you don’t have to sign on to try to change everything at once, just the piece of it that moves you the most, that seems within your grasp.  But Peskowitz makes a convincing case that even as we each grapple with a different piece of the puzzle, it’s important for us to recognize that our pieces are part of a whole.  Or, as another generation might have said, think globally, act locally.