Maternally Challenged

Mommy, What's a Liberal?

This was a question my 10-year-old posed to me one day last week as we were driving somewhere in the minivan. Hard as it is to refine political discourse into something a 10 year old would understand, it's even harder to do in rush-hour traffic. Which was why, I guess, the best answer I could come up with was, "Well, it's not a dirty word"--assuming that she'd heard it in some pejorative context. I fumbled through some explanation about how liberals were concerned with the poor and needy, but even as I spoke I realized that implied conservatives are not interested in them, which I knew was wrong--but by the time I'd gotten that far, she'd lost interest. Today I was reminded by the comics.  "Get Fuzzy" poses the question: how many conservatives does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Nobody knows! They won't release that information! And: How many degenerate liberals does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: They don't change anything, they just cry over the broken bulb!

Very funny. But really, I'm still stumped. Here is the best description I can devise so far for explaining to a 10-year-old the differences between two very different but equally defensible world views. (Note: I'm not talking about the current occupant of the White House; the only group George W. Bush belongs to is The Party of George.)

Anyway: a liberal is a person who believes that one of government's top priorities, aside from national defense, is making sure that everybody--including the poor, the aged, and the very young--have the basic necessities of life (a decent place to live and access to health care), and who is willing to pay taxes to make sure they get that. A conservative is a person who believes that society works best when the poor and needy are given the tools they need to help themselves, and that government should reward individual initiative by interfering as little as possible in its citizens' lives.

Is that fair? I'd be interested in what other people come up with because, frankly, I could use some help.

We Are All So Very, Very Special

When somebody hit the "play" button and the sound of the Olympics theme song filled the elementary school auditorium, I turned to my husband and said, "I take it back. You're right."

We were at our oldest daughter's Fifth Grade Awards Ceremony, and my husband had been fuming about the need for attending this particular function; he had a deadline at work and didn't see what the big deal was. I'd been telling him that this was a major event for Rebecca and that it wouldn't kill him to sit through it, so chill out already. But I'd already witnessed a loooong conversation among my fellow fifth grade moms about exactly what type of lanyard to give the kids (an eagle? a sunrise? a star?--and what color should the ribbon be, anyway?), so I had an inkling that maybe things would turn out to be over the top. And Jeesus H. Keyrist, were they ever.

They gave out awards for attendance, of course, and they gave out awards for making the honor roll (of which there were I think about four or five different varieties--the all A's and B's, the all A's, the all A's since third grade, yada yada yada) AND they gave out awards for good citizenship (which was never defined) and for being a safety patrol, and for being in chorus, and for being in band, and for helping move the physical education equipment, and...frankly, I lost track. My kid got a couple of awards, including an award for being in chorus even though she dropped out of chorus in the middle of the year when she discovered that she was not going to get all the solo parts. Still, there it was, a certificate recognizing her "contribution" (which was what? Demonstrating how to act like a diva?) And then the principal got up and told the kids how great they were, just on the remote chance that anybody had missed out on that message, and reminded them of the two Most Important Qualities that a person could cultivate that would predict success in life. These were, in case you were wondering, 1. Charm and 2. Perseverence--which, when you think about it, are exactly the qualities which would make a first-rate con artist, too. And then the kids were awarded their certificates of having made it through fifth grade, while a pantheon of parents hoisted their digital/video cameras to record the moment (including me, yes, I brought a camera too), and despite the request that we all delay our applause until all the names had been read, some families were so charged up by the whole thing that when their child's name was called they carried on as if their kid were Eugene McCarthy and this was the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Finally, when it was all over, the parents were told that if we wanted to (and it seemed to be a strong suggestion that we would want to, being responsible and supportive parents), we could sign out our children for the rest of the day and take them to lunch or something--you know, to reinforce the idea that they were so very, very special. My daughter came up expecting this and was gravely disappointed when I told her no, I had things to do and so did her dad. But that meant she spent part of her afternoon helping put back all the folding chairs, which was actually something useful (and which, maybe, she will someday get an award for).

Don't get me wrong: I think my child is very special. I think she's bright and has enormous potential to be any number of things--a lawyer (she could argue with a fencepost), a singer (nice voice), a veterinarian (she loves animals and has a gift for dealing with them), a writer, an actress (anybody who visits for more than two hours will appreciate her flair for melodrama)....all kinds of things. But at this point in her life, they are mostly potential. Seeds which are still germinating. Flowers which have not yet bloomed.

And this awards crap has me totally flummoxed. I just don't get it. What are these kids going to do when they hit the real world and discover that just Showing Up isn't necessarily cause for a celebratory dinner? (Actually, Forbes recently carried a story on this phenomenon, focusing on how employers were learning to deal with the Millenials, i.e. the college graduates now entering the job market, who have been suckled on the Self Esteem Movement since they were babes; it seems kid gloves are required, and lots of reassuring the new employees that they are Valued Members of a Team.)

To me, self-esteem is like beauty: you can fake it for awhile, but eventually the make-up comes off and the truth emerges. Like real beauty, self-esteem comes largely from within--and yet sometimes the people who have the most reason to feel self-esteem do not, just as some people who are obviously  beautiful truly do not believe that they are. The analogy between these two qualities is really pretty good--until you get to this point, which is that, unlike beauty, self-esteem is earned. It is not bestowed; not all the feel-good awards ceremonies in the world can generate it. Self-esteem is not even a God-given right, and if you take issue with this statement I ask you to consider: did Adolf Hitler have great self-esteem? You bet he did.

When I want words of sanity on this topic, I turn to University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, who I have interviewed and whose books I have read (well, two or three of them, anyway) and who makes a whole lotta sense on this topic. Real self-esteem, in Seligman's view, does not come from giving kids awards every time they turn around, or from constantly telling them how beautiful, unique and wonderful they are. Self-esteem comes from dealing with challenges, from mastering difficult tasks and from hard work.

This is a totally common-sense view. Yet it's also an unfashionable one, especially in education circles, where a generation or two of teachers have been taught that "self-esteem" is essential to learning and that "self-esteem" can be applied like Band-Aids over every little personality quirk and flaw (despite lots of recent research which shows no connection between how great a kid feels about himself and how much he actually learns, and if you want a leaping-off point to start looking at this, try this 2003 study by Brown University researchers). This makes me worry about kids today; it makes me worry about my daughter. Lake Wobegon is a fictional place, and in the real world children are not all above average. And even those who are above average in some things are not above average in everything. Moreover, if kids are praised incessantly for simply doing what they should be doing, what are parents supposed to do when they actually do something amazing? What words in our vocabulary are left?

Years ago (I cackle in my dotage), I worked on a newspaper story which concerned the killing of a prisoner inside the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. It was a hard story to do, involving lots of furtive meetings with anonymous sources in parking lots and dealing with authority figures who did not want the story to be told, but I finally got the facts in printable form and wrote it. And then my editor, Wendell "Sonny" Rawls, came over to my desk to read it over, line by line. He asked me lots of questions and when he was done he got up, rolled up the printout and tapped me on the shoulder with it, said, "Good work," and walked off. 

Someday, I hope my daughters will have an experience like that. But I fear that after the Fifth Grade Awards Ceremony, the real thing will be such a letdown.

I'll Take a Heapin' Helpin' of Boredom, with a Topping of Ennui

I had a very interesting day yesterday. In fact, it's been an interesting week.

Let's see, I think my husband got the ball rolling on Sunday night, when he almost set the house on fire. He was making popcorn the old-fashioned way--in a big pot, heating the oil first--and he turned the heat up too high. We have a gas cooktop, so when he took the lid off the pot, a bit of grease popped out, hit the flame and--WHOOSH! There is a good side, though: when we remodeled the family room six years ago, I chose a shade for the walls which I thought was going to be bluish gray, but which turned out to be more powder-room blue. I've never liked it and now, in one corner at least, the walls are the kind of smoky blue I originally envisioned. I do not recommend this decorating method, however. It makes the children scream.

Okay, then, yesterday: It's about 9:30 a.m., and I'm sitting in my doctor's office, waiting to talk to someone about my neck (which has sprouted not one, not two, but THREE discs which are in the process of herniating, and let me be the poster child for all you people who think that proper desk ergonomics is a silly waste of time). I'm flipping through a magazine when I become aware of the fact that a man immediately to my right is talking to the receptionist, and that he and she are not communicating well. It seems he had a balance on his bill, the insurance company is giving him a hassle, he's between jobs....it's a mess. I thought, Poor guy--I mean, this is a doctor people don't go to see unless they are in pain, and medical insurance companies, in my opinion, are Satan's representatives on this earth--but I kept my eyes glued to the page because that's what one does when one is shamelessly eavesdropping. Suddenly: WHAM!--a computer screen goes flying past my head. A phone goes flying past my head. I turn--all this happened in a split-second--and see the man with his feet off the floor, lunging across the desk trying to get at the receptionist. It wasn't the violence per se--the doctor came out instantly, the cops were called, the man immediately backed off--but the speed with which a quiet conversation became an assault. I never saw it coming, and I'd been listening. An hour later, long after I'd left the doctor's office and life there had gotten more or less back to normal, I was still shaking and felt myself near tears. That seemed like an exaggerated reaction, even to me. But then I figured out that the sudden flip from conversational to violent reminded me of certain events of a bad, a really really bad, relationship I'd been in quite a few years ago. Funny:  it took my mind a good hour and a half to figure out the connection, but my body had remembered instantly.

Okaaaaaay, then. Back home, take a few deep breaths, talk to a friend, get calm again. The day passes. I work, I clean the house, I do the usual stuff, and at about 6:30 or so I am sitting in a chair right beside the family room window with my six-year-old daughter in my lap. A thunderstorm had been through a few moments earlier, but it had passed, and it looked as if the sun was going to come out again any minute. We are watching a DVD (and tickling each other) when suddenly--CRACK!--and I see a bolt of fire out of the corner of my eye. Suzanne screams in terror and flees to the other side of the room. I scream, too, and realize almost instantly that a bolt of lightning has just struck something outside the house. At first I thought, The transformer box--but no: the lights are still on, the TV is still working. (It turned out the lightning totally fried our fiber optic connection). I had to spend quite a few minutes calming Suzanne down, and calming myself down, and assuring myself that nothing was on fire. But finally both of us get calm again (Suzanne still whimpering), and we go back to our DVD. I am sitting there thinking, wow, that lightning bolt couldn't have been more than five feet away from us; thank God we hadn't gone outside...and then I start to wonder: where is David? He and Rebecca had gone out a couple of hours earlier. I had my usual thought--They've been in a car accident--and immediately chastised myself for catastrophizing again (it's a habit you get into when you get depressed, and it's hard as hell to break even after you've stopped feeling depressed)...but time passes, and no David.

Finally, finally, the door opens, and it's David and Rebecca. And David says, "I've been in the worst accident I've ever been in, and I think the car is totaled. We walked home."

He'd taken a corner a little too fast, and the streets were still wet from the rain, and he hit a fire hydrant. (We're not sure, but we think the hydrant may have been drunk--it just came out of nowhere.) No damage to hydrant, no damage to either David or Rebecca, but one whole side of the car is pretty wiped out.

All this in one day, not counting the Popcorn Incident. I am really ready for some boredom now.

News of the Weird, News of the Wired

In an attempt to put off working as long as possible, I was trolling through my inbox this morning and found this article on a new Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky. I read it (it's on Salon.com) with fascination, since the idea that God created the earth in, literally, six 24-hour days a couple of thousand years ago is the kind of thing I was taught as a child in Sunday school. Well, okay, it wasn't, strictly speaking, taught--but it was heavily implied, and people who believed in Darwin's theory of evolution were misguided sinners who clearly not going to Heaven when the Rapture happened, which was likely to be any day. This is your basic Southern Fundamentalist mindset, and if you think I am making this up, or that I grew up in some obscure, incestuous Appalachian redneck cult, just go read the article, because there are people out there who believe this stuff right this very minute. And you thought Mormons were weird.

Anyway, there were a couple of questions I had in reading this article, and one of them was about a reference made by one Creation Museum enthusiast, who said, "As scripture says, 'They are without excuse' who do not believe"--believe, that is, every word of the Bible as the literal truth. This one really interests me because, as a good little Fundamentalist, I was required to spent a lot of time reading the Bible and memorizing great big chunks of it. (In fact, in Sunday school, the standard procedure was that when the teacher called the roll, instead of answering "Here" you had to answer with a Bible verse you'd memorized. This was how I came to know the shortest verse in the Bible: "Tracy Thompson?" "Jesus wept.") Anyway, while I do not claim to be a Bible scholar, I feel pretty sure that, given the circumstances, this particular verse was one that would have been pointed out to me, and I don't remember it. In fact, I strongly suspect that it's not the first time that people who quote "Scripture" are making it up as they go. My second question concerned the "Biblical" explanation for the Grand Canyon: it was created by the rushing away of all the water after the Great Flood--you know, the one survived by Noah and his family and all those animals in the Ark. But, and excuse me if I am being slow here, if water covered the earth, and then somehow dry land reappeared, where did all that water go? Did the oceans just get deeper, or something? Or maybe it dripped off the earth into space...except that there's no gravity in space. Hmm. Then again, gravity is just a theory.

The next story, which I ran across in the online edition of the British newspaper The Guardian takes us to the other end of the scientific spectrum--if, that is, the Creation Museum exist on a scientific spectrum at all, which I suspect it doesn't. Anyway, this concerns a study done by British scientist Vivette Glover (who is the real thing--I know her to be a respected authority on the subject of maternal depression and its effects on children) which shows that stress during pregnancy--specifically, levels of the stress hormone cortisol--found in the maternal bloodstream during pregnancy can harm the developing brain of the fetus as early as 17 weeks' gestation. That much we pretty much already knew; I think this particular study probably pinpointed the timing of the potential damage, or something. (It's hard to tell from the article itself.)  But here's the kicker: Glover's study was released about two days after the British government issued an advisory telling pregnant women they should not drink at all during pregnancy. Previously, the standard advice in the U.K. was that pregnant women could safely indulge in a glass of wine or two per week. Now it's nada. None. So: just in case you haven't followed the logic here, it's this: don't stress out, and don't drink wine. That's like saying don't get hungry and avoid food, but whatever.

I'm pretty sure, though, that if I'd knocked back a few stiff ones during my first pregnancy, my oldest (now a high-maintenance 10-year-old) might have come into the world strung a little less tightly. As it was, putting her to sleep as a baby was like defusing a live hand grenade, and now that she's a preadolescent, her brain runs on a frequency only dogs can hear. The summer I was pregnant with her was, just coincidentally, one of the most stressful in my life, due to a variety of circumstances I won't go into here. So there you go.

Yeah, I know: I'll never be able to actually prove any connection. But maybe I don't need to. I can always  just make up a verse of Scripture that proves me right.

I Would Like To Thank The Academy...

Tonight at dinner:

Me: So who did everybody dress up as for Celebrity Day at school?

My 10-year-old: Oh, Hannah Montana. Raven. Hillary Duff. Lindsay Lohan.

Me: Oh, yeah. Lindsay Lohan.

My 10-year-old (incredulously): You know who she is?

Me: Yes, unfortunately, I do.

My 10-year-old (indignantly): Lindsay Lohan is a great actress!

My husband and I both choke on our food.

Me: Compared to what?

My 10-year-old: Compared to Hillary Duff.

And, you know, she may be right.

The Most Obvious Thing

If it's true that depression distorts your thinking in cartoonish ways, it's just as true that getting better means you're in for some forehead-slapping. As in, "Why the HELL didn't I think of that sooner?" The most obvious things are not apparent when you're depressed--and so later, when you do see them, you feel like the world's biggest doofus, because they were so obvious. See, the thing is, I've been telling myself for about six months now that I need to get back to work but I can't think of a thing to write about--my brain pan was as arid and desolate as the Gobi Desert--no hope whatsoever--and then last night it came to me what I need to be working on, and of course it was the most obvious thing in the world.

It's my friend Meghan Caughey. The very first friend I ever had, in fact. Boon companion of my kindergarten days, whose mother was one of my mother's dearest friends, who (like me) has traveled a long and sometimes desolate path through mental illness--hers a lot worse than mine--and has come out the other side knowing some things about art, and overcoming hardship. How we lost touch for so many years and then found each other again about 10 years ago, and it was as if we had never been separated. How I went out to see her last fall, and we met in the airport in Eugene, Oregon and just stood there and looked at each other for the longest time, and she kept saying, "I see your mother. I see your mother," in wonderment, as she looked in my face, and the tears just rolled down her cheeks and mine.

People who read this, go check out her website. Here is a person who has earned the right to say something, who has something important to say. What a distance we go.

We Have Met the Enemy, And She Is Us

It was cartoonist Walt Kelly, of course, who came up with that phrase, but it's no less true now, in the ongoing feminist debate over the "opt out" myth, as it ever was back in the days of McCarthy and the Commie scares. E.J. Graff has a piece about the scads of stories on this supposed phenomenon in the current issue of The Columbia Journalism Review--the supposed phenomenon in question being the recent "trend" of scads of working women who are "choosing" to leave behind lucrative careers in order to stay home and raise children. It's a great story; the only problem with it is that it's just not true--or, that is, it's true only for a tiny demographic slice of women (white, highly educated at prestigious institutions, in well-paying professional/managerial jobs). --Oops! Also, there's a tiny problem with the word "choose," since a lot of these women may not have "chosen" to stay home so much as just decided to give up jobs which offered no flexibility whatsoever for a person engaged in the work of child-rearing.

So: why is this the story that refuses to die, especially in the pages of the New York Times? Well, because that tiny demographic slice I mentioned earlier is an influential one, and what it does is by no means inconsequential--but also, I think, because reporters these days are more disconnected from the real world than ever before. I speak as a former reporter for the Washington Post and as someone who worked there for seven years, and as a person who has friends who work at the Times, as well as at Time Magazine, USA Today and any number of other hugely influential publications. When I started in the newspaper business, way back in the mid 1970s, I began at the Atlanta Journal. At the time, the Journal newsroom was home to an oddball assortment of hot young up-and-comers as well as a motley assortment of those coasting toward retirement, a few older gents with a drinking problem, some diehard political junkies and one or two folks who used newspapering to pay the rent while they worked at night on the Great American Novel. We didn't have to invent story ideas that got us out of the building so we could observe Life In The Raw; Life In The Raw came to work every morning. One morning, a colleague of mine stopped in his tracks right beside my desk and passed out from a monstrous hangover he had been treating with hair of the dog. He went down like a felled oak. Stunned, we all just looked at him for a moment as he lay face down on the carpet, and tried to figure out what to do. While we were working on this mental problem Frank gradually stirred, came back to life, struggled to his feet and went on his way. "Thank God," my deskmate whispered. "I thought I was gonna have to do mouth-to-mouth." And then we all went back to work.

Times have changed: if this incident were to happen in any modern newsroom, the offender would be hauled off to rehab, or the Employee Assistance Program, or both, so fast it would make his or her head swim. Nobody comes to work drunk anymore. Newsrooms these days are populated mostly by people who went to elite schools and who have their eye on some illustrious media vantage point--the op-ed page of the New York Times, maybe, or Magazine editor at the Washington Post. They no longer, as in the old days, have a brother-in-law who is a police officer; they're more likely to have a brother-in-law with a Ph.D. who works at a think tank. Reporters at the Washington Post who live in the District, which has lousy schools, are quite likely to have their kid in private schools--and they haul in the kind of money that makes that possible. When I started at the Atlanta Constitution in 1979, my salary was a princely $18,000 a year. By the time I left the Washington Post in 1996, it was more than $70,000, and I was by no means the highest paid reporter on staff. I remember that while I was at the Post, it came to light that Janet Cooke, of made-up-Pulitzer story fame, had been discovered working at a jewelry counter in some state in the Midwest. In retail! people whispered. You'd have thought she'd been discovered turning tricks in Soho. At one point during my tenure there, I got the bright idea that it would do us all good to take stock of our collective socio-economic status, just to a)tell us who we were and b) remind us of our differences from our readers. I wrote a memo to Bob Kaiser, then the assistant managing editor, suggesting an in-house, anonymous survey asking questions like, "Did  you go to private school?" and "What kind of work did your father did when you were growing up?" Kaiser's answer was swift and unequivocal: absolutely not. In retrospect, I guess he was probably right. Somebody would have leaked the results and we'd have never heard the end of it. Still, I think I know a lot about how it would have turned out.

So the fact that the "opt-out" story refuses to die is really just an example of journalistic navel-gazing, and that old rule of the newsroom: when in doubt, write about yourself (or people like yourself). These days, the truly adventurous reporter goes abroad (something I never had the guts to do); everybody else stays home, sussing out "trends" from the safety of their newsroom computer screen. Or, if they are like me, they realize they can't maintain even the semblance of a home life and combine it with the kind of work week demanded of a reporter these days, and they decide to stay home. Except I didn't "opt" out. I was pushed.

Every Nerve Exposed

Perhaps it's part of recovery from depression; perhaps it's a sign I haven't really recovered--I dunno. But these days I find it tough to read the news. Scooter Libby gets convicted, and I am outraged at the exposure of the reporting practices of my former colleagues in the news business (the underlying message behind the whole trial being the game in which high-ranking administration officials leak things they shouldn't be talking about to reporters carefully selected for their willingness to "spin" stories a particular way, and the reporters' willingness to be used in this way in exchange for scoops--when, that is, they report the leaks at all, and I don't know which is worse). It's an outrage fed by my own experience of reporting in Washington, which tells me that 99.9 percent of all reporters, Seymour Hersch and Charlie Peters being notable exceptions, firmly believe this is the only way to get the news. At the same time, I am utterly depressed at the spectacle of high-ranking Bush administration officials so clearly less concerned about the truth of whether Iraq was in possession of WMDs than they were about whether they could get the public to believe Iraq had WMDs.

So I put down my newspaper and go online and read a funny piece in Salon by Garrison Keillor about parents who practically hire interior design firms to help their third-graders with their book report dioramas--and then run across a letter in response that speaks of kids "whacked out on Ritalin"--which, since my own daughter suffers from ADD, brings up painful memories of the neighbor who last Christmas made a snarky comment about my daughter's supposed unreliability, serving as a potent reminder of the kind of prejudice that my daughter is, unfortunately, already far too aware of. So much for comic relief.

So then I check my e-mail and run across an article about the long-term effects of psychological torture, in Common Dreams , which features a picture of a section of the barbed wire fence at Guantanamo--a place which will, in my opinion, go down in history as a far worse blot on America's legacy than our forced internment of Japanese citizens during World War II.

And it's all so painful. Is it me, just seeing the bad stuff? Is it the standard definition of news, which posits that it's only news if something goes wrong? Is it the journalists, and the stories they aren't reporting--the foster care program somewhere that works, some new advance in making solar power affordable for the masses, the discovery of some bird thought to be extinct?

I don't know. All I know is that tonight I am looking forward to popping a beer and watching "American Idol."

The Problem Ain't Cinderella

Peggy Orenstein has written a piece in the December 24, 2006 issue of New York Times Magazine (sorry--I'd give you the exact URL for the article but you have to pay to see it now--cost is minimal, though, and all you have to do is enter "Cinderella" as a search word to find it) entitled "What's Wrong with Cinderella?" Orenstein is lamenting the staggering number and variety of "princess" items being marketed to young girls these days. The craze began about six years ago when Disney (who else?) came up with the idea of packaging all of their most famous female characters--Ariel the Mermaid, Cinderella, Snow White, Belle from Beauty and the Beast, even Pocohontas--as a "princess" product. Little girls ate it up, to the tune of $3 billion (that's billion with a "b") this year, up from $300 million in 2001. Mattel has brought out a slew of "princess" Barbies (which is confusing; I thought Barbie always WAS a princess), and even Dora the Explorer has debuted with a FairyTale Dora doll. All of which makes an old-line feminist mom like Orenstein apprehensive. Is all this Prince Charming crap going to sabotage her efforts to instill feminist values in her daughter? Will her daughter take this retrograde role model seriously?

I think Orenstein is missing the forest for the trees. Yeah, there's a shitload of princess stuff around, but it just happens to be pink and sparkly. Let's not forget the success of Bratz dolls (I call them Slutz, but I've also heard them referred to as My First Trollop dolls, which I kinda like), who are not "princess-y" at all but who have been pulling in big bucks from little girls, via their mommies, for about three years now. And let's not forget Build-A-Bear Workshop, which is one of the slickest ways I've seen lately to suck money out of your wallet: a store that caters to little girls and their desire for their very own teddy bear (or cat, or pink poodle, or whatever) with its very own heart inserted during the production process, with special noises that you can pick out, with a registered name all its own....and, naturally, lots and lots and lots of clothes and accessories to buy to go with. Just walking past that store will cost you $50; if you actually go in, you risk having to get a second mortgage. My kids over the years have conned me into going in there on three occasions--the last time, ostensibly, to spend their own allowance money, but of course I ended up ante-ing up too, being the craven idiot that I am--and guess what: the creations they walked out of there with, the stuffed animals they could not contemplate living without for one more hour, that's how bad they needed them, are now gathering dust on various shelves in their rooms.

It doesn't matter a hill of beans whether people are out there selling princess stuff to our little girls. They could be selling Wall Street Tycoon Barbie, or Greenpeace Activist Dora (hmmm...that might not be so bad) or Diane von Furstenberg bean bags--WHAT they're selling doesn't matter half as much as the fact that they are selling it, and in such staggering amounts. Kids these days are expert consumers at a mind-blowing age; my daughters' consumer savvy has already far eclipsed mine, if by "savvy" you mean awareness of brand names and logos (as distinct from value). The other day I was brushing my hair when my 10-year-old joined me in the bathroom to do the same. She looked at my jeans and said, "Nice logo, Mom. Very cool." I looked down and saw a swan. I had to read the tag in the back before I understood that this was Gloria Vanderbilt's logo. I'd bought the jeans off the sales rack at Kohl's for about $15, and I guarantee you I had no idea they were Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, nor would I have cared. But Rebecca knew.

No, the problem isn't that little girls buy princess stuff. If Disney didn't market princess stuff, my kids (and lots of other little girls) would find lace curtains to dress up in, or one of my old bridesmaid dresses, or something, and they would make themselves princesses, or brides, or something of the sort. Little boys will dash around wearing Superman capes, too. As a generation of two of feminist ought to have learned by now, some behaviors like this are genetically hardwired: little girls tend to play with dolls, no matter how many trucks you give them; little boys tend to play with trucks, even when you give them dolls. What kind of fantasy role model kids imitate at 6 or 8 or 10 is of concern to me, but it's ultimately of less concern than the fact that my daughters are both being bombarded with the message that in order to be happy, and popular, and socially accepted, they must buy, buy, BUY! baby. It's a message I strenuously try to counter every single day but it's like bailing out a boat with a tippy cup when the waves are washing over the sides. I get help in that regard from a fantastic organization called the Center for a New American Dream, which is always coming up with ideas to live more simply, buy less and fight the proliferation of junk in our lives. But it's an ongoing fight. The amount of pure-D crap marketed to kids these days will blow you away.

Princess, schmincess. This is not a feminist issue, Peggy. If you look past the sparkles and the tulle, you'll see that it's really an environmental and moral issue. Those Cinderellas you're so worried about are made of plastic--that's a petroleum product--they are manufactured most likely in Third World countries by people who make shit wages, probably via production methods that contribute to global warming, and they are marching into the stores by the millions. When the money has flowed out of our wallets and into the coffers of Disney Inc., and their top executives are enjoying the good life along pristine stretches of Malibu beach that the rest of us are banned from, and our little girls outgrow their princess phase--which they will--where do you think all those tons of plastic will wind up? Melted into a park bench? Now, that's a fantasy world for ya.

The Old Fogey is Me

December 1, 2006

Matthew D. Serra, CEO
Foot Locker, Inc.
112 West 34th St.
New York, NY 10120

Mr. Serra,

I was a customer in your Lady Foot Locker store in Westfield Shopping Mall in Annapolis, Maryland two nights ago. While I was waiting for the manager to get some shoes for me to try on, I couldn’t help but hear the store’s soundtrack. This is what I heard, in part:

I told her to drive over in your new whip
Bring some friends you cool with
Imma bring da cool whip
Then I want you to strip
See you is my new chick
So we get our grind on
She be grabbin, callin me Biggie like Shine home …

Fullfilling our every temptation slow jamming having deep sex
You ready for the world girl
Come on over make me touch you all over your body baby don't say no to me
An every moment you controllin' me I'm lovin the way you be holding me when I be
listening to Jodeci
And when I come over and bend your ass You be bumpin Teddy Pendergrass
I'da hit it from the back to the melody to roll it slow
Now I gotta go up in it fast, but imma finish last
(Slow Jamz Lyrics, by Twista)

There’s more, but I think you get the idea. I am no prude, nor am I ignorant of music history; I know Ray Charles used to get banned from the radio for his “dirty” lyrics. But there is a difference between risqué and explicit, sexy and vulgar, suggestive and pornographic.  This couldn’t have been more explicit than if it had been a sound track giving detailed instructions on how to change a tire, and frankly I found it about as sexy as automotive repair. I said to the manager, “I couldn’t bring my 10-year-old in here. This is unreal.” She said the soundtrack was a mix chosen by higher-ups, and that she had no control over it.

Well, somebody is in control of it, and since you’re the guy at the top that would be you. Perhaps teenage boys love this kind of music, and perhaps they are an important part of your clientele—but they can pipe this garbage into their heads with their Ipods on their own time. I cannot imagine that anybody else wants to listen to it. 

The track prior to the one I quoted—and this is the reason I started paying close attention to the soundtrack in the first place--was all about somebody being in prison, and moaning “they won’t let me out.” I have no idea if you are white or black, Mr. Serra, but if this is your way of catering to a black clientele, it’s insulting. I happen to be an authentic Southern Redneck, but if somebody told me Rednecks spent all their time screwing or getting locked up, I’d be pretty offended. The fact that this music is popular with many young black people is testimony only to their tragic lack of self respect. But that’s their problem; I don’t see why you should enable it or cater to it.

Isn’t there a better way of  making money? Like, maybe, just selling quality merchandise?

Sincerely,

Tracy Thompson