This article is from a while ago, and I’m not sure whether I agree with it fully or not. I obviously think the lessons hold for women and men, but that the author telling us about her personal experience can’t be generalized too much. Still, I don’t pay much heed to the “as you get older, the market favors men” argument. Being lonely sucks, and getting older and staying lonely sucks worse, regardless of gender. I’d rather not make this a he said/she said game and instead get to the question of whether we have the right attitudes or not. It seems like something we should definitely discuss in the comments, to wit:

What I didn’t realize when I decided, in my 30s, to break up with boyfriends I might otherwise have ended up marrying, is that while settling seems like an enormous act of resignation when you’re looking at it from the vantage point of a single person, once you take the plunge and do it, you’ll probably be relatively content. It sounds obvious now, but I didn’t fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.

I don’t see many articles – including ones that are more realistic – stress the self-evident boring parts of living together. But I think what’s really interesting is how complicated our mindsets regarding relationships are:

I thought that the person I married would have to have a sense of wonderment about the world, would be both spontaneous and grounded, and would acknowledge that life is hard but also be able to navigate its ups and downs with humor. Many of the guys I dated possessed these qualities, but if one of them lacked a certain degree of kindness, another didn’t seem emotionally stable enough, and another’s values clashed with mine. Others were sweet but so boring that I preferred reading during dinner to sitting through another tedious conversation. I also dated someone who appeared to be highly compatible with me—we had much in common, and strong physical chemistry—but while our sensibilities were similar, they proved to be a half-note off, so we never quite felt in harmony, or never viewed the world through quite the same lens.

It’s easy to condemn the author and forget just how articulate and self-reflective she is. Most of us are probably being really picky about relationships and not even knowing it. At the same time, I do wonder if some of us are being picky enough. I know some women and men who’ve gotten into bad situations because of making their criteria too lax to begin with. Still, “settling” itself is pretty hard, all things considered:

And no matter what women decide—settle or don’t settle—there’s a price to be paid, because there’s always going to be regret. Unless you meet the man of your dreams (who, by the way, doesn’t exist, precisely because you dreamed him up), there’s going to be a downside to getting married, but a possibly more profound downside to holding out for someone better.

So I do encourage you to read the article and comment here, because I’m interested in the truth of these reflections and other questions we can raise.

• The “kickoff” (their term) speaker for this thing was Tom Tancredo. You might know him as the guy Karl Rove kicked out of the White House for his anti-immigrant hate.  Of course, here’s a sample of the pleasant things he had to say: The opening-night speaker at first ever National Tea Party Convention ripped into President Obama, Sen. John McCain and “the cult of multiculturalism,” asserting that Obama was elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.” The speaker, former Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., told about 600 delegates in a Nashville, Tenn., ballroom that in the 2008 election, America “put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House … Barack Hussein Obama.” Tancredo did not stop at the Democratic president — ripping McCain, R-Ariz., the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, for shaping up to be a repeat of “Bush 1 and Bush 2.” “Thank God John McCain lost the election,” he said, voicing his belief that McCain would have presided over big budgets and lacked a tough stand against immigration. If you’re wondering about what a civic or literacy test isn’t even a veiled allusion to, go read LGF on the matter.
• No Tea Party Convention is complete without giving a standing ovation (albeit a short one) to someone who repeatedly questions whether the President is a citizen. Nor is it complete without turning issues about gays into an “us vs. them” platform, accompanied by a call to arms among 2nd amendment enthusiasts: “Go forth armed in the holy cause of liberty,” he told the cheering tea partiers.

Charles Johnson brought up this observation from Mary C. Curtis at Politics Daily, and it is worth repeating:

Where Are the Young?

A funny thing about the break-out session “How to Involve the Youth in the Conservative Movement” – not too many young people showed up. Mishelle Perkins, a 44-year-old mother of five children, worries about the paucity of young people at local meetings. The Rutherford County, Tennessee activist came Friday to get some tips. Jordan Marks, executive director of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, suggested that activists use Facebook, volunteer to speak at high schools (“bastions of liberalism”) and simply do fun stuff that hooks high school and college-age kids. Marks described a bowling party he organized – “Knock Down the Pinheads of Communism.” A strike equaled Mao, a spare, Pol Pot. Perkins said she supplements her children’s education with books by Tea Party authors, but right now it’s hard to get them too interested.

I know a lot of conservatives are older, and don’t feel any sense of shame, not like they used to (to this end: I am so, so grateful for my readers that are older conservatives and give my thoughts a chance). In the face of change, one feels defiant. Well, I’ve got news for them: there aren’t gonna be any young people who pay attention to you unless you present something worth having or emulating. It’s up to older people to set an example, not just indulge in craziness and feel justified. Some of you will recall that I’ve brought this issue up before, in “Why do we need a party?” I’m going to go further than just raising the question of winning elections now, and say this: if you choose to be an extremist, you are accountable in this life and most certainly the next, if there is one. One cannot ruin the future for everyone else and say it was the fault of liberals, not when it is clear one wants to indulge in conspiracy theories. The things I’m interested in – whether or not we can have fraternity as Americans, whether or not we can have a culture of life that takes precedence over rank materialism, whether or not we can have an economic order that celebrates freedom – they may sound idealistic and stupid to you. All I can say is that I’m not young any more, and that my causes are worth fighting for.

It’s been a while since I’ve read and taken seriously any comment thread on more popular sites. A major reason for this is that the threshold for what constitutes a good comment is so, so low elsewhere. Really and truly, we’re talking about “good” comments 1) being publishable, not just trying to get everyone to form a lynch mob 2) conveying decent information, not promote conspiracy theories 3) not aiming to make the blog author look bad, but demonstrate some graciousness.

If it seems to you like most comments on the Internet can’t meet those ludicrously low standards, you’re exactly right. In fact, commentators on the Internet reveal a heck of a lot about themselves through comments, and very rarely does one get the impression “hey, that’s someone I’d like to talk to, maybe meet in real life.”

Does that mean comments should be closed? Of course not. Comments are a necessity – I know I hate it when I can’t comment on something online – and sometimes even fun. I certainly learn from the comments on this site, but then again, my readers are exceptional. They actually read, and have demonstrated over and over that they have the quality of patience to an exceptional degree (heck, they read this blog). But I can tell you that I get a different sort of troll that’s just as vicious as the types listed above, if not moreso. I’ll typically get someone who thinks they know more than me and goes to exceptional lengths to prove I’m an idiot in a thread, not quite realizing they look like a psycho and that I’ll delete their comment no matter how learned it is (and if I was wrong, take the correction too and amend the post later). I do care about the intent of people who post on my blog: if you let people be hateful toward you, they will take full advantage of that, and it’ll ruin the blog for your other readers. People who are civil and treat others well on the blog – including the blog author – should be given first priority.

Which brings up a serious question: are comments revealing of something deeper? I actually think they are – they absolutely demonstrate our political immaturity, that we’ve learned the worst lesson we possibly could from pundits and talking heads. We think we can shoot off about any topic, that our comments are just as good as any “expert’s.” And we hold that we have some magical right to be heard by everyone, even as that involves saying our speech matters more than someone else’s. We don’t think “hey, that blog is someone else’s property, it’s a privilege that they’ll let you talk and even respond.” We don’t realize that commenting on everything is only a demonstration that we hear one voice, the voice that matters, and are actually closed to a number of others. I do wonder if the very concept of mass media created this problem, where each man is a broadcast tower unto himself. The nice thing about the Internet is that there are people who do play nice, and it’s fun to learn how to have a public persona even if one does make some mistakes (rest assured, I’ve made plenty).

• Megan McArdle, “Toyota’s Weekus Horribilus” – I don’t think the public humiliation of Toyota was some UAW/auto industry plot or something government officials wanted to do. I do think the conflict of interest the federal government has – as it owns large stakes in American auto manufacturing – is an enormous problem. There have been an inordinate number of articles discussing President Obama’s progressivism and post-partisan rhetoric, and how he doesn’t hold a vision that is compatible with republican governance. I’ve been dismissive of those articles, because they’ve dismissive in a certain way of the fact that his views have to operate within the scope of our modes and orders, and they do operate (or, as we see, fail to operate) within that scope. To me, the real issue re: progressivism is how the populace can’t see basic things like national security failures or thinks that extremist rhetoric is just a part of a political game. Our government won’t be better until we’re better, and I know political scientists would be wiser to spend their time on that set of issues instead of joining the pundit chorus. However, I am not so dismissive of the government having a vested interest in its property being more valuable than someone else’s private property. That’s a real sticking point, and an issue that does blame the “few” directly: property rights are the foundation of our order, even if we’re talking about a foreign corporation, and government should know better.
• David Weigel, “Campus Right Unbowed by O’Keefe Scandal” – I used to be admiring of these groups, and I still think they do thankless work in terms of journalism and even activism that goes unnoticed. But I now know that the Right’s emphasis on things like journalism, think-tanks, legal foundations, etc. is all a way of avoiding education and opening minds (heck, some might even say – and not entirely wrongly – that certain schools are a way of avoiding independent thought). It only sees the Left as an enemy, and to some degree, that is necessitated (is what is necessary also what is good?), and it is a grab for power or a grab to stop others from attaining power. Yeah, I’m being that severe: this problem is at crisis proportions. The issue is not whether there are capable, thoughtful professionals and a few nuts. The real issue is the state of the electorate, and who we are as Americans. I see things getting worse, not better, and I think given my not-so-successful labors it’s time to start placing blame.
• North Carolina Schools May Cut Chunk Out of U.S. History Lessons (foxnews, h/t Josh) – sounds like dumb liberals and even dumber neoconfederates have found common cause on the school board. The “new” history lessons will skip over the entirety of the Civil War.
• Soldier Deaths Draw Focus to U.S. in Pakistan (nytimes) & Soldiers find time for hockey in Afghanistan (msnbc) – both h/t Josh; self-explanatory.

• “The Situation,” for those of you familiar with Jersey Shore, has a cologne coming out. Because you want to smell like your abs are ripped, duh.
• Also: run “snooki” through Google Trends, and see the fun: here’s snooki being searched more than Zach Braff (whose “Garden State” now looks like a work of late Romanticism compared to Jersey Shore), more than health care reform, and yes, being competitive with the name “barack obama.”
• Before Jersey Shore, there was The Hills, which is practically Shakespeare given the quality of characters on reality TV nowadays. To understand what The Hills is like, one need only read this article: “Lauren Conrad is About as Dumb as You Think She Is”
• Alright, I feel like I’ve lost IQ points linking to that stuff. There’s a metaphor for the competitiveness of American life in here somewhere: “Forever linked by one play.” (h/t Josh) The article concerns an injury that caused a player with NFL potential to not make it into the league.
• Megan McArdle, “Damn Those Tricksy Republicans With Their Hate and Their Crop Subsidies” – misplaced anger over farm subsidies ignores the deeper reasons why agriculture subsidies won’t be cut anytime soon.

We put the puzzle together piece
by piece, loving how one curved
notch fits so sweetly with another.
A yellow smudge becomes
the brush of a broom, and two blue arms
fill in the last of the sky.
We patch together porch swings and autumn
trees, matching gold to gold. We hold
the eyes of deer in our palms, a pair
of brown shoes. We do this as the child
circles her room, impatient
with her blossoming, tired
of the neat house, the made bed,
the good food. We let her brood
as we shuffle through the pieces,
setting each one into place with a satisfied
tap, our backs turned for a few hours
to a world that is crumbling, a sky
that is falling, the pieces
we are required to return to.

Comment:

The world we construct is sensual (“together,” “loving,” “curved notch,” “sweetly”), and that is as far as we can see. Hence, the sun might as well be a broom – our enlightenment only went as far as playing “house” in nursery school – and the sky is the breadth of our arms (contrast with Dickinson’s “I dwell in possibility”).

There’s nothing sinful or awful about this, but inasmuch as we are making without thinking, a comment on life is being put together, and that comment is limited. “Porch swings” and “autumn trees” suggest aging, but is aging truly golden? Something about the formulation is curious: the poem itself moves from the sun to the sky to the trees and then to deer on the ground, most explicitly on the ground. We’re looking at shoes, wondering about doe eyes. Deer move places: we haven’t moved anywhere. That’s the break so many parents don’t remember; one wonders why they didn’t remember it.

The child, of course, is motion constrained (“circles her room”/”impatient with her blossoming”). Weren’t all parents like this at some point? Tired of “the neat house”/”the made bed”/”the good food”? It could be the case there are a lot of people that actually never went through adolescent rebellion in the sense we think of it. Intellectuals tend to write “coming of age” stories: there are a lot of people who don’t know how to describe delinquency except as error purely. If I want to say the speaker is one of those who didn’t go through a rebellious stage, that’s a complicated claim. “Blossoming” is echoed earlier in the poem, the yellow smudge and blue arms could be said to imply a flower. Nowhere has the color “green” explicitly emerged, and that’s the color I’d associate with some normal conception of growth. It’s been yellow, blue, gold, brown. Yellow and blue imply a hidden green; golden trees/porches and brown eyes/shoes imply decay, seeing and the natural world outside the house.

Our speaker’s picture hints at problems. “The made bed” is central to her list of goods, and central to her logic. But nowhere above was “bed” implied in any way, while “neat house” was given ample allusion. “The good food” almost sounds like a plea with the child: this is what we can offer that is appropriate. However deer not only move where they will, but feed themselves.

So our speaker turns her back and indicts herself. “We shuffle”/”We are required” are quite a distance from “we put”/”we patch”/”we hold”/”we do”/”we let.” It is not surprising “hold” is the center of the previous list. It is somewhat surprising “we do” is central in the list of seven, but then again, that’s the opening of the sentence which contains the child. It’s not clear exactly what she turns her back on. It is true that she’s turning her back on the world and sky she created. But it’s also true that people who think life is a puzzle you solve and get a clear picture have turned their back on the world in a more fundamental manner. Is our speaker in a position to grow up herself, or is dealing with necessity only what it is?

The problem with Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid isn’t that we can’t pay for these programs. We can, although there has to be significant reform. The problem is that they speak to our priorities, and our priorities are an amazing mess. Instead of helping people save on their own for retirement and making sure they have very large nest eggs so they can give if they like, we encourage people to retire early and not save enough. While Medicaid does not necessarily include the aged, it is about 10% of the budget. At least 30% of the budget is only going to one segment of the population, and the basis of class warfare between the young and old is right there, right in front of our faces. What is taken away from younger workers in Social Security to pay for the aged is taken away from the aged in the form of state and local taxes for education, and there are extravagances on all sides. Not every public high school needs a brand new football stadium; some Social Security recipients would be wise to sell the yacht.

Moreover, things like foreign aid and national defense – the things that enable us to be secure and peaceful, the first priority of any government – are almost treated with disdain by all sides of the political aisle. It is not possible to debate issues politically without some sense of shared value. When people have the strong suspicion that other people in their own country would like to see their own country lose wars, that country is in trouble, to say the least. One of the most frightening phenomena in American life is the fact that people from “blue states,” Democratic strongholds, by and large do not fight and die for their country. This isn’t to say that the Right is without excess, partly because of what seems to be an excess of patriotism: witness the Oathkeepers.

The failure of the job market to provide for all Americans, the failure of our populace to recognize and correct the problems of massive entitlement spending, the failure to understand that the first priority of government is defense, which benefits all equally, all point to a need for unity. The greatest irony of the Obama campaign was that we needed something like post-partisanship desperately; even I, in writing this, am only looking at other Americans through ideological lenses. It would be a noble thing to see other Americans simply as they are, and for us to work for each others’ needs. But that is going to require more than charity. We are going to have to learn how to deliberate (myself included), and learn that politics isn’t about getting what we want all the time (again, applies to me too). We’re going to have to make massive sacrifices for each other, because the sheer amount of wealth in the United States covers up a magnitude of problems.

The World Bank some years back talked about intangible wealth, which is fairly self-explanatory:

If one simply adds up the current value of a country’s natural resources and produced, or built, capital, there’s no way that can account for that country’s level of income.

The rest is the result of “intangible” factors—such as the trust among people in a society, an efficient judicial system, clear property rights and effective government. All this intangible capital also boosts the productivity of labor and results in higher total wealth. In fact, the World Bank finds, “Human capital and the value of institutions (as measured by rule of law) constitute the largest share of wealth in virtually all countries.”

Once one takes into account all of the world’s natural resources and produced capital, 80% of the wealth of rich countries and 60% of the wealth of poor countries is of this intangible type. The bottom line: “Rich countries are largely rich because of the skills of their populations and the quality of the institutions supporting economic activity.”

I think the concept of intangible wealth is a starting point for our discussion; it is not the end of it. It is true that the US as constituted does a lot of things right, but I’ve painted a picture above where things don’t seem quite as cozy. The easy way to see what I’m getting at: the goal of life is not to be rich, but happy. Government isn’t there to solve existential crises citizens may have. But it also doesn’t exist just so everyone makes a lot of money and it shoots people trying to steal that money.

When we consider where economic activity in the US is directed, it is quite obviously overfocused on practical things. Our actions demonstrate that we are only concentrating on being rich; the full sense of economics, “household management,” implies at the least things like “family” (as opposed to individual freedom only) and “competence” (as opposed to brute power). It is no wonder political factionalization is centered less around value, and more on what actors can grab for themselves. And it is very clear that deliberation cannot occur if one focuses on wealth in this most necessary but ultimately limited sense alone.

I want to end this short address with some thoughts by Mark Slouka, some very radical thoughts. We’ve tied our desire for getting everything not just to how we conceive of politics, but even how we conceive of education. We want learning to be practical entirely, to serve our ends. What’s funny to me about the current state of our politics is that we have lots of pundits, lots of reasonable-sounding voices, but few real troublemakers. I’m not clear where people stand; I’m not clear on what independent thought is, because I see so little of it. You know something is strange when Leftist activism is about funding the status quo even more. I’ve been saying so far that something is fundamentally corrupt about the status quo, and that real reform is going to be hard. I don’t know that even I’m aware how hard things will be for us; reason used well is probably the most disconcerting of human activities. To quote Slouka, on education’s preoccupation with math and science today:

…there are many things “math and science” do well, and some they don’t. And one of the things they don’t do well is democracy. They have no aptitude for it, no connection to it, really. Which hasn’t prevented some in the sciences from arguing precisely the opposite, from assuming even this last, most ill-fitting mantle, by suggesting that science’s spirit of questioning will automatically infect the rest of society.

In fact, it’s not so. Science, by and large, keeps to its reservation, which explains why scientists tend to get in trouble only when they step outside the lab. That no one has ever been sent to prison for espousing the wrong value for the Hubble constant is precisely to the point. The work of democracy involves espousing those values that in a less democratic society would get one sent to prison. To maintain its “sustainable edge,” a democracy requires its citizens to actually risk something, to test the limits of the acceptable; the “trajectory of capability-building” they must devote themselves to, above all others, is the one that advances the capability for making trouble. If the value you’re espousing is one that could never get anyone, anywhere, sent to prison, then strictly democratically speaking you’re useless.

Again, I’m not sure how much I personally could stomach genuine troublemakers. But I’m willing to learn, mainly because the acquisition of wealth is only one small part of human life. The State of the Union is at its best when we are united in working to be diverse in good ways; it does not shock me that Madison speaks of a number of different types of property for different sorts of talents in Federalist 10, as if squabbling over one type of property perpetually was the mark of the petty.

Be Mine the Doom -
Sufficient Fame -
To perish in Her Hand!

Comment:

The speaker sounds like a flower that has been plucked; the sexuality of the poem is perhaps too obvious. But “Her Hand?”

“Doom,” “Fame,” “perish:” with “Doom” (fate) and “perish” this poem seems to have Biblical weight. It moves from “Doom” to “perish,” however, and “the Doom” contrasts with the infinitive “to perish” both in terms of its finitude and capitalization. This is in addition to a supposed contrast between “Mine” and “Her” that may be developing over the space of these 11 words. A quick google search reveals an awful lot of Bible verses that begin “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord” or some such thing. I think it is safe to say that “Be Mine the Doom” is a statement of Biblical certainty. It sounds like noble resignation at the least, or more likely a lament.

“Sufficient Fame” is the bridge between the two other lines of the poem. It is the Doom, and one wonders if Dickinson is alluding to flowers being plucked. It is conceivable some “gentleman” used the speaker and another girl and now has ditched one for the other. All that’s left for the former girl is ill-repute. “Sufficient” is what is so curious: did one have to be “plucked” to have some self-esteem? Perhaps 19th c. America was more like Jersey Shore than I realize.

But “Sufficient Fame” is probably also a reference to the theme of Dickinson as poet, which shows up not infrequently in her work. I sometimes like to take “Fame” as the issue of self-knowledge, and that identification will work here: shame, as in a blush, is a very public display of the most private matters. Those matters may be so private that one may not always realize why one is blushing at times. And yes, this implies that “Fame” could involve only one person. Someone could say something that made you blush, and no one else noticed but you.

Which is why I think – despite the sexuality of the poem, and the intensity of feeling that brings – “Her Hand” is the speaker’s. The distance between “Mine” and “Her” is created by “Sufficient Fame:” who caused the perishing, exactly? Who put you in the situation where you felt known, exposed? It’s possible for the “plucking” to be entirely imaginary, and we note that loss of innocence has nothing to do with actually going out and doing something wrong. In Christian terms, we are accountable for adultery just by looking at someone a little bit too long. The poet’s quest for “sufficient fame” has her thinking the unthinkable; the poem now has the feel of a dark joke, and I think for a first read, that will suffice for now.