Maternally Challenged

Where Have All the Grown-Ups Gone?

George Carlin says public education isn't in the business of training engaged citizens; it's in the business of training obedient workers. He's 90 percent correct, but what else is new? Education has always had its caste system; Yale students "go to school to learn to rule," but they are a carefully selected elite, and that's not a slogan you'll hear at, oh, East Tennessee State. What's more, public schools deal with a huge array of social problems, and they're easy to pick on.

Increasingly, though, I see things at the public schools that make me think all the grownups with common sense have been replaced by Pod People--and at the same time, I keep seeing things that make me think the Pod People are dealing with kids who don't have grownups for parents.

This morning, there was a Washington Post story about a six-year-old boy who got reported to the police for sexual harassment because a smacked a little girl on the bottom at recess. Since when has a six-year-old been capable of sexual harassment? Since when does smacking another child on the bottom make a kid the Spawn of Satan? But according to the story, the school officials were just following orders. Or what they said they thought were orders.

"Days before the incident, at a routine meeting with district officials, principals had been reminded to report threats and assaults to the police," the story said. "'There was some confusion as to what level of threat and assault we were talking about,' said Ken Blackstone, a school system spokesman."

Yeah, I'd say so. Lots of confusion; no common sense. But let's give school officials a break here; they may have realized that calling the cops was over-reacting, but feared that if they did anything less, the little girl's parents would sue. Stranger things have happened. Which explains, maybe, why when my own six-year-old was discovered trying to tie up another kid with a jump rope (both of them had come up with the idea, and they'd been practicing on each other), the school all but called out the SWAT team. Both kids got hauled into the vice-principal's office, both got a long lecture, both sets of parents were called in the middle of the day, and my daughter was barred from using a jump-rope for the next month, even to jump rope with. Obviously, my daughter and her accomplice deserved a reprimand--never a good idea to tie people up, certain very adult situations possibly excepted--but holy cow. I'm sure, though, that the school was Following Procedures. I dared not offer so much as a comment, for fear that the school would take the next step and ban jump ropes altogether.

I don't know; maybe they need an inch-thick manual of procedures for such everyday occurrences, since weird things seem to be happening at home. I let my kids watch TV, if for no other reason than to keep track of the messages they're getting. From time to time, I ban certain shows. I'm getting ready to issue a ban on "Fairly Odd Parents" on the basis that yeah, well, Timmy is an average who no one understands--but Mom and Dad are complete idiots and his "real" parents--the fairy godparents, who live in a goldfish bowl--are Complete Enablers, existing only to grant Timmy's every wish. My kids already have a raging sense of entitlement, which I have to beat into submission on a regular basis, and they display a disturbing tendency to roll their eyes when my husband or I make some observation. You expect that at 15; at 11 and 7, we are considerably ahead of schedule--and feeding them more of this crap is the last thing we need.

"Fairly Odd Parents," however, is "Teletubbies" compared to what some of her classmates seem to be watching. Last week, my first grader told me that she'd heard a boy in her class talking about "peeing in somebody's mouth." This was in the car; I nearly drove the minivan into a ditch. Further questioning revealed that a) the kid involved had not asked her to participate in this activity, and b) it was likely he didn't even know what this activity was all about. Still, you have to wonder: how late do this kid's parents let him stay up? And what channels is he watching? And, more ominously, once he catches on, is he going to think that this looks like something fun to try at recess?

And if he does, will the teachers be so busy dealing with a jump rope Incident that they'll miss it?

We're in a vicious cycle: parents are too overworked or complacent or distracted to keep a lid on things at home, so the schools try to take up the slack by issuing another set of lawyer-vetted rules and guidelines. The result is a great big honkin' manual that teachers and school administrators regard as Holy Writ and which they follow to the letter even when the results are ridiculous. It's as if parents and schools are a dysfunctional set of parents: one's unwilling to impose consistent limits, so the other reacts by becoming a  major nag and pain in the ass, which the first parent reacts to by undermining the other parent's authority, which the other parent reacts to by ramping up enforcement of all the rules, including the dumb ones.

If it sounds like I know this subject too well--well, I do. My husband and I have traversed this path. I tended to be the conflict-avoidant Good Cop; he reacted by taking on the role of the Bad Cop. The results weren't pretty. Over the years we've both worked a lot on this, which for me has meant finding a backbone and which for him has meant taking a lot of deep breaths and repeating the mantra, "They're only kids. They're only kids." It's a tough problem to address, but it can be done. For schools, it means re-introducing the concept of "common sense" to some situations, like ones involving six-year-old boys who smack little girls on the bottom because they were teasing her. For parents, this means more, not less, involvement in kids' lives the older they get. This is contrary to conventional wisdom, I know, but the older my kids get the more I find I need to keep hanging out in their vicinity to get an idea of what's going on with them: who they're having a fight with, what kind of clothes they think are fashionable, what kind of friends they have, how well they're handling disputes and deadlines and crises. It also means being willing to speak up when schools start pushing kids around for being kids, or imposing ridiculous penalties for violating Procedure 34B, subparagraph 14. Of course, any challenge to school authority these days is a perilous undertaking, but that's a whole other rant. In short, it means that all us Baby Boomers--teachers and parents--are going to have to start finding our Inner Grownup, which is not something we seem inclined to do (still another rant). But still: it's gotta be done.

Anyway, I have to go. I need to look up the manual on my television remote so I can figure out how to program the stupid V chip. "Fairly Odd Parents" comes on at 3.

Living in a Post-Racial World

This speech that Barack Obama gave yesterday on the subject of race--I tell you, it does my soul good. If that puts me in the tank for Obama, so be it; if this guy is spouting a line, then I've fallen for it. But I believe him. I think he sees something that's really there, and that nobody else has seen quite as clearly as he has: "This nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one." And that, despite the deep imperfections we all embody, that "what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change.  That is the true genius of this nation."

I believe this is true, in part, because of how much I have changed, and because of how much the world I live in has changed in the half-century I've been on this planet.

I grew up just south of Atlanta, next door to my grandfather's farm. Visible from the living room of our house was the tarpaper shack that my grandparents rented out to their tenant farmers, a black family named Strozier. I am not exaggerating for literary effect: this was a shack, and it was made of tarpaper, though the inside walls were insulated, if you can call it that, with layers of newsprint. It was four rooms and a porch, built up off the ground in the time-honored country way, and it did not have indoor plumbing. I grew up thinking that this was the way black people lived. I knew white people who were poor, too--we certainly weren't rich ourselves--but I just assumed that to be really poor, you had to be black, and vice versa. This was just a law of the universe, like gravity. And this immutable fact--that whites and blacks coexisted on friendly terms but were in no way equal--was reflected in the doors of the two waiting rooms of the dentist we went to in Fairburn, too. There were no signs on those doors, but the signs had been there so long that you could still see their imprint against the wood. One door said "white" and the other door said "colored." This did not seem at all strange to me. But life teaches you lessons, if you let it.

First lesson: In 1964, when I was seven, I was walking home from school one day with my friend Mike Polston. My daddy was a Goldwater conservative (this was the historic year Georgia went Republican for the first time since Reconstruction). and I was incensed to learn that Mike's daddy planned on voting for Johnson. "If you vote for Johnson, you'll have to go to school with niggers," I said. One of the realities of childhood is that you wind up repeating things you've heard without knowing what they mean, and that's what I had done. Nobody in my home used the word "nigger"--not because it was racist, but because it was uncouth; my parents taught me that the correct term was "colored"--so I don't know where I'd heard this line, but I said it, and the instant I said it I realized that Lovett and Roberta were walking home right behind us. And that was the other idiocy: the possibility I was taunting my playmate with was already a reality in our school (though not because of anybody's progressive policies; there simply had never been enough black children in our district to have ever justified a separate school system, or else I'm sure there would have been one). I've never forgotten the searing shame I felt. Lovett and Roberta never said a thing, never gave any indication they'd heard me. That's the way things worked back then, too.

Second lesson: In 1981, I was a rookie reporter for the Atlanta Constitution, sent to cover an inquest in Walton County, Georgia into the death of Lynn McKinley Jackson, a young black man found hanging from a tree in the woods there. Walton County happens to be the scene of the last recorded public lynching in the United States, in 1947. That's not a widely known fact, but it's encoded in the DNA of every black person who has lived in that county ever since. Many of those black residents crowded into the courtroom that day to hear the jury's verdict on this young man's death, and I still remember the collective gasp from that crowd when the jury returned the verdict: suicide. That instant brought home to me that there were two definitions of "history" and two definitions of "justice" in the United States. There was the conventional wisdom, and then there was the version that black people knew. Sometimes they overlapped, but often they didn't, and where a gulf existed between the two, it was huge. So was the amount of energy it took all of us, all day every day, to pretend--at least most of the time--that the gulf did not exist.

Third lesson: right now. We just moved into a new subdivision. It's only two miles from our old house and in the same county--but on our old street, the neighbors were all white except for two families at the end of the street, who were black. I had not realized until after we moved into our new house that now the situation was reversed: we are the only white family in our cul de sac. I would be lying if I did not admit that this fact has given me pause. It made me uneasy, in a way I could not define, and at the same time I felt ashamed of my uneasiness. The correct liberal view would be to say, "Don't be silly! White or black--makes no difference. Black people are just like you." But no one who has grown up where I grew up, and has had the experiences I've had, would believe this. We are not the same; our histories are profoundly different, and to pretend otherwise is insulting. How different? Let's take money. My husband and I bought this house with a substantial down payment made possible by money left to me by my mother--the results of some investments my father made back in the 1960s and 70s, which were possible for him to make because he surfed the wave of the unprecedented  prosperity that followed World War II in this country. Part of his money came from real estate, which ballooned in valued over this period. During that same period, there were real estate covenants in force in Prince George's County, Maryland, where I now live, which severely curtailed the home-buying options for black families. They were cut out of much of the real estate boom, just like they were cut out of many of the career opportunities open to my father. (The economic research division at Delta Air Lines, where my father worked, did not hire its first black employee until the mid 1970s.) This is not to say that the teachers, police officers and nurses who live in our cul de sac didn't benefit from inheritances, too. For all I know, they did. But statistically speaking, that's not as likely for them as it is for me. The mortgages they got likelier came with higher interest rates than the one we found. And while we can afford (for now, anyway) for me to work part-time, every other family in our cul de sac is a two-wage-earner family. "You work at home?" one of my new neighbors said to me when she learned I was a writer. Her eyes got misty. "You are so blessed." Yes. Yes, I am. And, in historical terms, race has something to do with that. Or, as Barack Obama put it in his speech yesterday:

"Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations."

I also know that Obama's words are themselves are a generalization; in my life, I've crossed paths with black people who had plenty of inherited wealth. I can count them on one hand, but yes, they exist--and I have no doubt that their grandparents probably looked down their noses at my grandparents, redneck toilers that my grandparents were. But the exception, as the saying goes, proves the rule.

Obama's speech happened to come two weeks after our big move, and just on the heels of my own realization that, you know, I'm over this stupid uneasiness; I like it here. Our neighbors seem to be nice folks. We may become good friends, we may end up hating each other, we may just remain polite acquaintances, but I'm pretty sure at this point that whatever happens in the next few years, race won't have much to do with it. Basically, they seem to want exactly what we want: a quiet neighborhood where property values are maintained and where kids can play outside safely with other kids in the neighborhood.

Getting over the racial stalemate in this country--acknowledging that great big gulf I discovered years ago, and finding ways to go over, around or through it--"requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper," Obama said in his speech yesterday. I do not hold myself up as any paragon of enlightenment when I say I think I've gotten to that point. I'm just saying: this is where I've come from, and this is where I am. And I do not think I am alone.

It's Amazing to Me I Once Worked There

I wasn't going to say anything about this inane piece in the Washington Post by Charlotte Allen about the teeny-bopper kinda love the ladies have to Barack Obama ("We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?")--I mean, it was so stupid it passed out of my head about as fast as my daily horoscope--but then I see where John Pomfret, the Outlook editor who commissioned it, was quoted as saying the piece was tongue-in-cheek.

To which I can only reply: No, John, it wasn't tongue-in-cheek. It was head-up-ass.

I swear, weeks like this I find myself thinking newspapers can't die fast enough. It's not like people can't be sublimely stupid on the Internet, but at least they don't kill trees doing it.

What Would Normal Look Like/ Part Deux

My career as cultural arts committee chairman of the local PTA is over, and the verdict is in: I am Definitely Odd.

When I took the job last spring, my predecessor assured me it wasn't a huge task once you knew the ropes; basically, it consisted of lining up various performances for school assemblies. I thought: How hard can it be?--and the answer was, harder than it looks, but still eminently do-able. In theory. In reality, that question--how hard can it be?--is one which in my experience has always, always been a prelude to disaster. When it comes to this question, I have learned from my mistakes, and can repeat them exactly. That was my first mistake. My second mistake was thinking: I can do this pretty much by e-mail and phone, and I won't have to go to PTA meetings.

I hate meetings. My idea of a properly run meeting is the kind Ben Bradlee used to hold at the Washington Post. News meetings at the Post were held in a room that could accommodate, at most, about 20 people, and it lasted 20 minutes, max. You were expected to show up with your game on; there was intense competition to have your section's stories in the paper, as prominently displayed as possible. But there were also deadlines, and a paper to put out. To keep things moving and on track, Bradlee had this little device--a joke shop toy, I think it was--that made machine-gun noises. When somebody said something dumb or irrelevant or just started droning on too long, he'd point it at the offender--RAT-A-TAT-TAT-TAT--and, in a manner of speaking, kill him off then and there. It was hilarious--provided, of course, you weren't the victim. For that very reason, Bradlee didn't have to use his little machine gun all that much. A whole lot of work got done in those brief meetings, day after day.

This, I have slowly come to realize, is not the way most people think of meetings. There are a whole lot of people in the world for whom meetings are a kind of social life; there are bureaucracies in which the whole purpose of showing up for work seems to be to Have a Meeting. People have meetings to plan meetings; some people spend so much time complaining about having no time for meetings that they could have had four meetings in the time it took them to complain. Much of the time, meetings are like paperwork: the process of getting work done somehow becomes the work itself. Most people either don't notice this, or they find ways to cope (my husband takes laptops to meetings, and gets work done in the back of the room). But I do notice, and I seem to be totally lacking in coping skills. Being cooped up in a meeting that drags on too long is, for me, about as thrilling as growing dental plaque. Honest to God, I would rather poke a sharp stick in my eye. At least then the pain would be a distraction.

Obviously, not all meetings are the horrors I describe. I go to monthly meetings of an environmental group at my church without complaint, and, obviously, monthly PTA meetings need to happen. But on general principles, I try to avoid meetings, even routine PTA meetings. When it came to running the cultural arts committee, my plan was: a) find out what I, personally, was supposed to do; b) do it; c) report back. This way, I thought, I could avoid the slightest chance of getting stuck in a room with people whose concept of meetings was different from mine--and, given that mine is a decidedly minority view, this seemed fairly likely.

People like me should never, ever volunteer for the PTA.

Because what happened--you could see this coming, I'm sure--was a Tragic Miscommunication. Basically, I was told at the beginning of the year that the PTA didn't have any money for cultural arts, that the budget had been depleted by a big equipment purchase for the school the year before, and that for the time being I needed to work on getting some grant money. So I did, and then....the PTA got some money....and then (yes, I know this sounds weird), somehow, I never found out about it. How, you ask, is it possible that the cultural arts committee chairman never found out about the thousands of dollars she had to spent on cultural arts? Simple: a) nobody told me and b) I didn't go to PTA meetings. My only defense here is that everybody was on notice about my aversion to meetings, and there's nothing wrong with my phone or e-mail. I mean, I let people know what I was doing. And I knew money was coming in--the usual fund-raisers and stuff--but I figured that there were priorities, and that when Cultural Arts got some money, somebody would tell me. This is what's known as a Fatally Flawed Assumption. (Remember the old saying? "Never ASSUME. It makes an ASS of U and ME.")

Meanwhile, October, November, December were passing, and unbeknownst to me (busily working on grant proposals in my office at home) I am getting a rep as a Major Slacker. And then this week, everything finally comes to light, and somebody else leaps in to line up some acts for the rest of the year (from a list of potential acts I'd drawn up last August), and I offered to resign, and they took me up on it. And I am delighted, actually, because this was a job I am not suited for, and somebody else could do better.

But the fallout here is that in the Momworld that is an elementary school PTA, I now have a rep. Exactly what it is I'm not sure, but I am pretty sure that it's not as a team player, or as the exemplar of what a committee chair should be. With the facts people have at their disposal--and, really, it's not worth it to explain all this in detail, because the bottom line is, what needed to be done got done--I am pretty sure that people's impression of me is going to be that I am just, you know, somehow...not right. Which, believe me, is truer than they realize--I have the hospital records to prove it--but it's not true in exactly the way they are thinking. And of all the not-nice names people could conceivably call me, "slacker" is not one that would really stick.   

Anyway, yesterday I took a bunch of papers over to the school to drop off so the PTA president could hand it over to whoever gets the job now. I was planning to stick it in the PTA mailbox, but when I got out of the car I saw one of the co-presidents getting out of hers, so I said, "Hey, can I just leave this with you?" And we chatted for a moment, and she said how unfortunate it was that I wasn't going to be cultural arts committee chairman anymore, and I was trying to think of a way to say how happy this very fact made me, all the while thinking that this lady was giving me a strange sort of sideways look. And so that's when I looked down and realized that I had my husband's jacket on, and that it was inside out.

Yup. Definitely odd.

And Why Should You Escape?

So today we are sending out the last of the Christmas cards, some of them with a letter enclosed, and it occurred to me that all four or five of my readers out there might be interested in our Yearly Recap, too. Hell, it took  me a WHOLE DAY to write:

At this house, our motto for Christmas letters is “All the news that fits, we print,” but we still pledge to keep it relatively short. For 2007, this will be no problem because, frankly, there are a few stretches of 2007 you wouldn’t want to hear a lot about. 

The bad news first. Tracy underwent some ECT treatments last winter for a severe depressive episode and we’ll spare you the details because, actually, we don’t remember them. ECT is known for doing a number on one’s memory of recent events, so it’s been a year of surprises: outfits we don’t remember buying, e-mail correspondents we don’t remember having met… On the plus side, it also wiped out the memory of several really bad Disney movies, and it helped Tracy recover. ECT is very effective that way—but then, amputation is effective on gangrene, too, and there are good reasons why neither treatment has ever really caught on. Still, while humans can’t sprout grow new limbs, they can and do grow new brain cells. It was a long haul, but we are pleased to report that things are now back to what passes for normal around here. Work-wise, Tracy has several projects going: you’ll see her in the Civil War Times soon, she’s working on something for the NYU Law Journal which will involve traveling to The Hague to interview an eminent judge who sits on the World Court, the paperback edition of her book came out this summer, and there may be another book idea out there somewhere. Life goes on.

In extraterrestrial news, David’s working on a NASA project that would, if funded by the Powers that Be, map the universe’s distribution of Dark Energy. What is Dark Energy? you ask, to which the brightest minds at NASA would answer: We dunno. All scientists know is that it is a mysterious force which accounts for about 25 percent of the energy in the universe, and it is, like, totally awesome, dude: it sends stars careening around galaxies, it can bend space and time, and it keeps that donkey kid in back of you kicking your seat for the entire duration of a trans-Atlantic flight. The official name for the project is ADEPT (Advanced Dark Energy Physics Telescope), but around here we just call it The Map of Where Is, Is. 

On the kid front: Rebecca is now 11, making her officially a ‘Tween, and so we have been introduced to the Great Big Honkin’ Attitude years. Not that Rebecca has ever lacked an Attitude, but up to now she had not brought it to bear on clothing. All that changed when she and Tracy went shopping for back-to-school clothes this year, and Tracy’s idea of fashion (subdued things with interchangeable components) fell victim to Rebecca’s fashion vision (spangles, sparkles, sequins and drapey things cut on the bias, all in hues unknown to nature).  Compared to this kid, Porter Waggoner would have looked like a funeral director. Well, okay, maybe that’s exaggerating a bit, but still: you see the potential for conflict. Rebecca is also deeply into the Cat Warriors books, and can diagram all the cat clans and interconnections thereof for anybody who displays the faintest interest, as well as for lots of people who don’t. (Our advice: don’t.) She has also caught the Horse Virus from her Aunt Nonny, and as any parent knows, “adolescent girl” + “horse” = “second mortgage,” so thanks a lot, sis. Rebecca takes riding lessons once a week at a nearby stable, where, besides learning how to ride, she is also learning to work with an implement known as a “pitchfork.” Our hope is that not only will she learn some horsemanship but that her expertise may someday transfer to using implements known as a “yard rake,” a “mop” and a “broom.”

Suzanne started first grade this year and has already won two professions of love from little boys in her class, which puts her one up on mommy at the same age. But then, Suzanne has these adorable freckles, which gives her an unfair advantage. She is a bundle of spontaneous bursts of enthusiasm (told for the fourth time to get out of the bathtub one night, she replied, “Okay, Mommy, but first I have to DO THE WET NAKED DANCE YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! BABY!!”—and there went another 10 minutes) and non-stop creative energy. At home, this means piles of paper, markers, paint, clay and other art projects in various stages of completion all over the place. At school, this recently resulted in a phone call from the vice principal informing Tracy that Suzanne and an unnamed male co-conspirator had been thwarted in their plan to tie each other up during recess. Suzanne has been banned from even touching a jump rope until after the first of the year; fortunately, the school supply list does not include "whips" or "chains." Otherwise, she keeps us busy with Inscrutable Questions (“Who invented broccoli?” and “How dark is pink?”are a sample) and creative manglings of common expressions (notably, “Fruit of the Loo,” which Tracy is thinking of marketing in the U.K. as a new brand of toilet paper).

No exotic vacations this year; we spent ours this summer a whole 100 miles from the house, at a mountain cabin in the Shenandoah Valley, where we went to a county fair (lots of fun, and who knew pigs could be so squeaky clean?), spent the day at a water park, did a bit of hiking (which prompted another Inscrutable Question, this from Rebecca: “Why is the Appalachian Trail so steep?”), and learned that a tiny little mountain chalet is way too small for three high-maintenance females and one outnumbered husband/father about two millimeters from the end of his rope. The kids had a blast; Tracy and David survived.

So that’s the year. And now that we think about it, it hasn’t been dull at all. Really: how many people get to map the universe? Or get paid for putting words on paper, for pete’s sake? So, as usual, once we look at the big picture we realize the good vastly outweighs the bad, and that goes triple since the recent pathology report came back marked "benign." (See previous posts.) Compared to 99 percent of the world, we are filthy rich; by any measure, we are incredibly blessed. We hope this finds all of you similarly situated. Merry Christmas.

Sisterhood is....Toxic. Sometimes.

There was an interesting article in the New York Times yesterday about how friendship between women can go so very, very wrong. It was written by a woman who had pledged to a sorority in college, and then drank too much at a party one night and had a sexual misadventure (one which might even be called rape) For this she was branded a "slut" and drummed out of her sorority. Years later, when she was in a store with her two daughters, she ran into one of the women who had played a lead role in this unpleasant drama, who greeted her like the old friend she most definitely wasn't. While her former tormentor nattered on, the writer of the story stood there in shock, re-living the whole ordeal. Later, she asked: "How do we help our girls navigate the duplicitous female maze? How do we ensure that they behave authentically, respect humanity over fleeting alliances, and squash the nasty tribal instincts that can inflict lifelong distress? I don’t know. I’m afraid I never will."

It struck home with me--partly because I have two daughters, too, and partly because this kind of thing never seems to stop. If it's not some clique in middle school, it's the PTA clique at your daughter's middle school, or the nasty comment from the neighbor, or.....the list goes on. Anyway, I was moved to write an e-mail to the writer of this article, and here it is:

I have two daughters, too, and I've also been taught the hard way to be wary of other women--or, at least, other women in big groups. I learned this not so much by being the immediate victim, but by watching as my sister (two years older) became the victim. With her it began in the last part of elementary school and lasted throughout high school. You could say it lasted throughout life. I'm now 52; she's 54.

 

My daughters are ages 7 (almost) and 11. My oldest has ADD and is slightly chubby--two strikes right there. She's socially a bit clumsy, but she does have a few friends. She's now in middle school, and the other day I dropped her off at school late and watched her walk away from me. Another girl was walking towards me and I caught the look of disdain on the other girl's face as she glanced over my daughter's wet hair (she'd just gotten out of the shower) and the scruffy clothes she had on that day. I did two things. One: we went out that weekend and spent $300 on clothes (probably more than she really needed, but what the hell.) And two: we had a long talk (several actually) in which I told her that popularity was NOT to be sought. Period. That girls who desperately wanted popularity were either not going to get it, or were going to get it and were not going to be worth knowing. I told her, "All you need are two or three really good friends. In fact, all you really NEED is one good friend." And, of course, to have a friend, you have to be a friend. That's my solution to teaching her how to navigate the duplicitous female maze: don't go in the maze to begin with. Because the secret is, you don't have to.

 

Women (and girls) in groups can be vicious. One on one, and in smaller groups, they can be lifelines, and a whole different kind of emotional support than any man can offer. We're hard-wired that way, too--it's the flip side of the bitchiness. I have trouble trusting other women, too, but that's how it's always worked for me: a small, very select group of women I can be close to. One other thing: I've made an unshakable rule that I will not be friends with any woman who I can't be ruthlessly straight with. Now, nobody is ruthlessly honest all the time--but what I mean is, no pussyfooting around. No, "Oh, I LOVE it!" when you hate it. No big grins and pretending everything is hunky dory. No "be sweet" crap. No aggression in the guise of sisterhood. I strive to say what I mean and mean what I say. Sometimes it's gotten me into trouble; but mostly, I think, it's helped me meet like-minded women. They ARE out there. When I meet one, both of us tend to laugh in relief. They're not hard to recognize, after awhile.

 

So are the shrieking harpies. If I'd been you and met whatsherface in the store, I would have (after I recovered from my shock) said, "You know, Sherylee (or Bambi or whatever her name was), there's something I've been wanted to say all these years to you, and that's FUCK YOU, you miserable little hypocritical troll from hell." Then, I guess, I'd have to give my daughters a little talk about how nobody should use the F word except on extremely rare occasions, but that sometimes the rules have to be bent in order to stand up for yourself.

 

I hope you can see your way to having some women friends someday...if for no other reason to talk about how, ultimately, it's a society which values men over women which produces female  self-hatred, which in turn produces this kind of shitty behavior. Meanwhile, good luck with getting over this. I've seen my sister's experience, and I know it's hard. But you have daughters, and they need to learn how to pick people to trust, whatever gender they are.

 

All the best,

 

Tracy Thompson

I sent it off yesterday. Who knows? Maybe she'll reply. Maybe we'll get to be friends.

 

 

 

Why We Still Need the Mainstream Media

As a former card-carrying member of the Mainstream Media, or the Liberalmediaelite--whatever you want to call it--I've been as dismayed as anybody about its performance in recent years, most notably its near-total lack of skepticism about the buildup to the war in Iraq. But.

A story in the Washington Post today by Dana Priest and Anne Hull is a flawless example of why the mainstream media still plays a vital role, even in the age of the Internet, citizen journalism and blogs. The story is about a returning veteran of that war and his wife, who live in West Virginia, and their travails in trying to get even minimally adequate health care for his severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder. (An aside: just in case there's anybody out there who thinks this is a "new" illness suffered mainly by a generation of wimps, I could tell you someday about my daughter's former nanny, now in her mid-80s, who lost her first husband in World War II--not because of combat, but because he lost his mind upon his return and died in somewhat murky circumstances while a patient at an Army hospital. He'd served in the Pacific with the U.S. Navy's Seabees, and drove a bulldozer. Among his duties were digging mass graves. Need I say more?)

Anyway. I will not editorialize here about the disgrace that is our so-called system of health care for military personnel, because lots of people who know more about it will do that. Let's just talk about what it took to present this extremely well-done piece of journalism to the American public--and, most important, to the inside-the-Beltway public. (Are you reading, Mr. President?) That I know something about, having worked at the newspaper in question for seven years, albeit about 11 years ago.

There are two bylines on thisi story, plus that of a photographer, the incredible Michel du Cille. Let's just say that, speaking extremely conservatively, each one of these persons makes, oh, $80,000 a year. Eighty Gs times three is $240,000. Divide that by 52 and you get a weekly salary cost of $4,615 a week.

A story like this is incredibly labor intensive. The reporters would have spent a lot of time just hanging out with the couple in their West Virginia home, observing their lives, learning the cadences of their speech, getting a small peek into the landscape of their marriage. This isn't being nosy; it's making sure that the people you are writing about are, in fact, the real deal--i.e. really disabled by the war and weighed down by its consequences, and not dragging around the baggage of a prior drinking problem, for instance. Not dealing with creditors and worrying about getting their utilities turned off because they are spendthrifts, or have a gambling problem, as opposed to just plain not having enough money to live on because our government is so disgracefully stingy with its veterans. This level of intrusiveness is necessary not just in order to avoid getting misled yourself, but in order to present a true picture of the situation to your readers.

Reporting a story like this also involves talking to neighbors and employers and former employers, perhaps, as well as a few relatives and friends, because you never know who will be the person who will give you that vital slice of insight that helps you see some person or some fact in the story in a new way. It means checking out the Wal-Mart where the wife worked. It means sorting out the meaning of various psychiatric medications, so you can write knowledgeably about what Zoloft is for and why a person might be taking, say, Klonopin. Or Seroquel. And it means becoming familiar enough with some very arcane VA regulations that you can write with authority about what the veteran qualifies for and what he doesn't qualify for, and why.

The photographer has a job to do, too, and the additional problem of being a fly on the wall in a very small house with tons--well, okay, half a ton--of camera equipment while attempting to take photographs that honestly depict the people in question. Which don't look staged, or boring, or simply noninformative, but which are arresting and candid and technically flawless. I wish I could say more about how this is done, but the truth is photography is like magic to me. All I know is a good photographer can vault a so-so story onto the front page; a not-so-good photographer can stink up even the best writing.

Anyway. If I said you could do all that reporting in a month, I'd be lying, but just for argument's sake, let's say it takes a month. And then there's the writing and editing process. Just to be extremely conservative again, we'll say that takes two weeks. (Anybody who has ever worked in a newsroom, and at the Washington Post newsroom in particular, will be guffawing right now.) But let's just say that altogether, you could put this pile of information together in six weeks. Six times $4,615 is $27,690. And we're not even talking about the people in the Post's research department, who probably put in quite a few hours on this, or the cost of the equipment it took to produce all those words and pictures. For simplicity's sake, let's just round things off and say that this was a story that, at the barest minimum of minimums, would take $30,000 to create.

I don't know about you, but I don't know too many people out there in blog-land who have that kind of money just lying around to put into one story. In fact, there are alarmingly few newspapers left these days who would do it. There are, though, a few publishers left in this country who see newspapers as more than just another profit center, who are not dealing with intense shareholder pressure to maximize returns, and who are willing to shell out the big bucks to produce quality journalism. You can count them on the fingers of one hand these days, but Donald Graham is one of them. And no, I'm not letting the Post off the hook here, because it has a great deal to answer for in its coverage of the lead-up to the war in Iraq. It's a deeply flawed institution. But, as this story shows, it's also still a great one.

The democratization of the media is a great thing and I'm glad I've lived to see it; in the long run, I think it will be a much-needed corrective for the arrogance of the traditional mainstream media and its disconnect from ordinary people. But just as all the local dance studios in the world cannot replace the American Ballet Theater, neither can the resources of the Internet, at least as it is presently configured, replace the role played by giant old-media institutions like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Somehow or the other, they've got to survive, or we are going to be in a kind of trouble that makes our problems now look small.

What Really Matters in Rathergate

Say you need to lose weight. So when you go out to lunch with a friend, you order a Diet Coke. The waitress brings you your drink and with the first sip you're not totally sure that it's Diet Coke, with zero calories; you think it may be regular sugar-laden Coke, with 100 calories. So you ask your companion, who tastes it and says, "Nope, that's not Diet Coke." This gets your back up. By God, you ordered Diet Coke, and the waitress wrote it down. Your intentions were honorable. Therefore, what you're drinking is Diet Coke, with zero calories, you say, and you chug it down. The End.

As anyone who has ever been on a diet can attest, honorable intentions don't count; what counts is what actually goes into your body. And we can also attest that in the great scheme of things, 100 calories here or there does not break a diet. Self-deception, however, surely will. And from here--in a gigantic leap--we get to  Dan Rather vs. CBS.

Okay, stick with me here. Start out with a basic, underlying premise. All the evidence shows that you are, in fact overweight. Similarly, the evidence we have--in a story first broken in early September 2004 by the Boston Globe--shows that George W. Bush did weasel out of his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War.

At the restaurant, you intend to order Diet Coke. Similarly, Dan Rather and CBS, I'm sure, started out with the intention to report honestly and advance the Globe story.

In the larger scheme of things, 100 calories more or less doesn't really matter. And, in the larger scheme of things, the story that CBS aired in September 2004 didn't really advance the Globe's story all that much. At best, it would have filled in a few details--a fact that all the hype has managed to obscure.

Anyway, you get your order--but is it really Diet Coke? Your companions taste it and say no. But you point to the order the waitress wrote down: it says right here, "Diet Coke." That's your story, and you're sticking to it. Likewise, Dan Rather says now that those "never-before-seen memos" that CBS based its story are real, goddamn it, and that everything they say did, in fact, actually happen. But your companion points out that just because it says "Diet Coke" in the waitress's handwriting, it doesn't prove you actually had Diet Coke. Likewise, informed observers who have looked at those much-hyped memos have concluded that they don't prove anything either, and in fact are probably forgeries. Does anybody think at this point: what difference does all of this make? Heck, no! What happens next is an eye-gouging, hair-pulling barroom brawl over issues of personal integrity and the authenticity of a piece of documentation. What fun!

What we have here, on all fronts, is a massive case of myopia. Just as most of us like to believe that we're eating a healthy diet and that we're not really overweight, statistics and mirrors be damned, Dan Rather continues to insist that those memos are authentic. My media brethren, meanwhile, are obsessed with those pieces of paper--what they mean, whether it can be proved, the motive behind Rather's lawsuit, the odds on whether CBS will settle, the titillating facts that might come out if it doesn't, and so on.

The larger point here, which the mainstream media and the blogging world alike seem to have forgotten, is that we have a wartime Commander in Chief who has no trouble sending tens of thousands of young Americans into harm's way into Iraq under dubious pretenses--but who, when it was his own turn to serve his country, couldn't be bothered.

The media's delusion here is that the Dan Rather controversy is an earth-shattering deal. It's not. It has little significance except as a cautionary tale of sloppy journalism and the immense, some might say outsized, value that one of the exemplars of mainstream journalism places on his personal reputation--including, so help me God, his reputation as "the most experienced reporter in the United States in covering hurricanes" (p. 23 of the complaint). (It's clearly a painful thing, losing one's exalted place in the old-media hierarchy). No, the real story here, brought to light by a few diligent journalists who did follow the rules of good journalism, is the character of our President. That's something history will be judging for a very long time--and if we all can't figure that out, we're in more trouble than I thought.

New Game, Old Rules Part II

There's a fascinating interview in Salon today with Robert Draper, author of the new book on George W. Bush, entitled (ominously, to me) Dead Certain. There will be lots of opinions about the picture of our President painted by the book, but what struck me most was Draper's explanation of how he, of all people--a mere freelance reporter from Texas--managed to penetrate the force field that seems to surround this White House. How did he manage to get all those interviews with Bush, when nobody inside the Beltway has pulled this off?

"It was Journalism 301," said Draper. "I would interview one guy and it would go well. And he'd say, yeah, sure, you can come back. And I'd say, by the way, you mentioned so-and-so in the interview. Do you know how to get in touch with him? And then I'd drop the name of the person I [then] interviewed. And so I moved closer and closer inside the circle....I don't have any particular gifts as a reporter. I don't have an interviewing technique that spellbinds people. Which is a long-winded way of saying I really don't know how. I just kind of plodded along. I think it meant a lot to this president -- it's the sort of thing that does mean a lot to him -- that I never asked it to be handed to me on a silver platter."

Just read that paragraph one more time, and think about certain key words and phrases--i.e. "Plodding." "Journalism 101." "I never asked it to be handed to me on a silver platter."

From this you can infer a great deal about standard reporting practices for much (way too much) of the inside-the-Beltway media.

New Game, Old Rules

Okay, I'm departing from mom role here to rejoin the journalism tribe, and spout some media criticism.

There's a terrific piece posted this week by Jay Rosen, a well-known media critic and professor of journalism at New York University, on why the press has been so completely cowed by the Bush Administration. His thoughts are the latest in a conversational thread started by my other favorite media critic, Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com, who posted a piece this week about the Washington media's reverence for Karl Rove--an example, Greenwald says, of the inside-the-Beltway media's biggest failing, which Rosen has identified as the desire to be "savvy." Being "savvy" means being close to the insiders, which means putting yourself in a position where you need the Karl Roves of this world so much you can't possibly write anything that would piss them off--a fact which Karl Rove knew and has exploited brilliantly.

Two days ago, Rosen elaborated on his original point, saying that the desire to be "savvy" doesn't begin to explain all of the media's failures (and by that, I mean the failure to aggressively question the Bush Administration's claims on everything from global warming to Guantanamo to WMD). The other part of the reason, he says, is the sheer audacity of what the Bush people have been doing in the name of "conservatism"--a radical rewriting of the Constitution, or at least a strong attempt to do this, in order to define the executive branch not as equal with the other two, but as more powerful. The other part of the explanation, Rosen thinks, was "a dearth of imagination. Most of the people in the capital press—the correspondents, and their bosses— could not imagine what it was going to take to maintain any sort of watchdog role under Bush. They never dreamed that their routines could be so ill-matched to the moment."

Well, yes and no. Yes, it was a dearth of imagination, all right--but not the imagination to come up with all new journalistic rules. It was the failure to imagine that maybe what needed to happen was to dust off the old rules.

Here's an example. I got in my car last week and turned on the XM radio to hear Bob Edwards on NPR interviewing Gene Weingarten, who was my editor in the Washington Post Style section some years back. I really like Gene. He is a funny, funny guy, and a wicked good editor. Edwards was questioning him about why reporters do some of the things they do, and Gene was being his usual outrageous, provocative self--that is to say, a self-described flaming liberal--while Bob Edwards played straight man. But one part of what Gene said really got me. It was the part where he said that every four years politicians roll out the old "let's pass a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning," and that journalists cover this dutifully while rolling their eyes "because everybody [in the press] knows what's going on."

Gene was being funny in this interview, but when he spoke those words he spoke the literal truth; I know this from my own experience. Flag-burning is in the top 10 non-issues of all time, right beneath Paris Hilton, everybody knows this, and yet journalists write this story straight every time it comes up. They feel it is their obligation. It's a classic example of standard old-rule fair-and-balanced reporting.

"Fairness" is an article of faith among all the reporters I know, and yet too often reporters interpret it as being fair to one's sources, not fair to the facts (and for that way of putting I must credit The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect, by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel).  Yet, taken literally, merely being fair to one's sources absolves the reporter of one of his or her most important responsibilities, which is to get at the truth of the matter, to the best of his or her ability--to follow the facts wherever they might lead, even if the final conclusion pisses off an important source. Inside the Beltway, though, fairness to one's sources is usually the applicable rule--either that, or reporters are aware of the kind of shellacking they will take from certain quarters if they fail to give the nay-sayers equal time, even on a topic where there is significant scientific consensus, like global warming. What happens then is usually a mechanical kind of reporting--i.e., "I give one side three paragraphs and the other side three" sort of thing. I used to do this myself: I'd literally count the paragraphs in a story to see how many were one side of an issue, how many were the other. And sometimes, on your basic "should we raise the property tax or not" kind of story, when things are pretty yes-or-no, that kind of approach works okay. But now that I've left my newsroom days behind, I see that the only stories I ever wrote that I'm proud of today pushed past that. Those stories were fair to the facts. They were also really hard to write, because they offended people.

What would happen, I wondered, if a reporter simply refused to cover a press conference in which some Presidential candidate announced his or her support of a flag-burning ban? Or if a reporter wrote a story about the eye-rolling, a story which said, "Hey, readers, this is one of the oldest political stunts in the book and a howling non-issue generally used to deflect attention from something more important"? Anybody who approached the issue in this way would be looked upon by many of his or her colleagues as having displayed (gasp!) a "liberal bias."  Under what passes for old-rule journalism today, it would be a faux pas equivalent to ripping one off at the country club. Yet, in reality, it would be a return to an even more old-fashioned concept: that journalism's first obligation is to the truth.

But these are interesting times we live in (remember the old Chinese curse?) and one of these days, somebody is going to do it. Maybe flag burning won't be the topic--I haven't heard anybody mention that lately anyway--but something else. One of these days a reporter will be courageous enough to write a story saying that Presidential "debates" are not really debates but a bunch of candidates presenting packaged sound bites, and that until candidates actually get to slug it out with each other they are theatrical spectacles not worth covering. Or maybe he or she will attend a White House press conference and press the Preside