Apt. 11D

Sunday Night Journal

The Blogger: Anybody read Brooks today?
The Dad: Yeah, but I can't remember what he said.
The Blogger: He's got some new way of dissecting the country. Now it's all about high school. He ended the column with Vote For Pedro.
The Brother: That's so cool.
The Dad: What?
The Brother: Vote for Pedro. You know from Napoleon Dynamite.
The Dad: What?
The Husband: What percentage of Times readers got that line?
The Blogger: So, Brooks says that all liberals were really the nerds in high school and all the conservatives were the jocks in high school. What if you are a nerd but your high school is in a red state? Do you vote for Republican, but hate yourself? Or what if you are a jock in a high school in a blue state? Or what if you are a jock, but your parents are Bobos in a college town in red state? How messed up are you then? huh? huh?
The Dad: Pass the pancakes.
Everyone: Dad! They're called tortillas.
The Brother: Well, at least he didn't call them crackers.

Getting Back On Track

The New Republic rolls its eyes at the latest installment in the Mommy Wars saga. They point out, rightly, that women are working, and it's time to figure out how to help families deal with the very real problems that arise when family life hits the corporate life in a head-on collision.

The New Republic brings in some heavy handed, clumsy class thing, which I'll just leave out. Let me just say that women work for a variety of reasons, not just necessity. Stay at home parents tend to be in lower income families. Most of the reforms the TNR cites would only help women in upper income positions.

But whatever. Reforms are needed to help protect families and kids. TNR provides a nice summary of where we're at:

The primary governmental protection for workers with new babies (read: women) is the Family and Medical Leave Act (fmla), signed by President Clinton in 1993, which guarantees just twelve weeks of unpaid leave to those who work for employers with 50 or more workers. Some companies offer paid maternity leave at their discretion, but not the federal government. It requires employees to use their sick leave instead. 

On April 7, Representatives Carolyn Maloney, Tom Davis, and Steny Hoyer--recognizing that "the current policy isn't very family-friendly"-- reintroduced the Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act, which would guarantee federal workers six weeks of paid leave to care for newborns or adopted babies. This would be a symbolically meaningful step. Let's hope it doesn't suffer the same fate as the Balancing Act, another working-mother-friendly bill that, among other things, offers increased paid fmla leave, an additional $500 million in child care subsidies, and incentives to encourage telecommuting. Representative Lynn Woolsey first introduced the bill in February 2004 and reintroduced it last April to silence from the Republican leadership. 

It comes as no surprise that aid to working parents isn't Congress's first priority: Business has been understandably unenthusiastic about the calls for increased benefits, flex-time, and other working-mom "perks." In a corporate culture that values face time and late nights at the office, suggestions of flexibility are reflexively dismissed as a drain on productivity. But, slowly, this culture has been changing--often as companies realize the brain drain of moms-in-flight. Ernst & Young, noticing a high turnover rate among its female employees, piloted a project in the mid-'90s that allowed all workers to telecommute; the firm's percentage of women partners has since tripled. Other corporations, including Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer, have created new reduced-hour jobs designed for working mothers. With women now constituting 46 percent of the U.S. workforce and receiving more college degrees than men, there are clear economic incentives for businesses to develop similar third-way options. 

But the real roadblock isn't economic; it's cultural. Republicans have long denounced federal funding for child care as a threat to the American family, as Richard Nixon argued in his veto of a 1971 bill to establish a national child-care system. Never mind that, during World War II, in response to the influx of women into the workforce, the government funded centers that offered working moms not only child care but also laundry service and packaged hot dinners. Thirty-five years after Nixon, the view persists that for the government to legislate on behalf of working women is to take sides in the culture wars. And this is the most grievous damage the mommy wars have wrought. The upper-class dilemma of whether women should choose to work or to stay at home--and the moral weight of that choice--has dominated the discussion. But how about the moral weight of working-class parents who must work and can be "one sick child away from being fired," in the words of a recent report issued by the Center for WorkLife Law? It's time to get real. The cultural revolution has already occurred. The real threat to the American family is the policies that lag behind it.

Mothers Conference

Mothers & More Launches Mother’s Day Campaign.

Judith Stadtman Tucker, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Heather Boushay, Ann Crittenden, Caitlin Flanagan, and more.

Party Dresses and The Poor

Ran three miles. Came home and ate half a cylinder of Pringles, because I was too lazy to make oatmeal.

As I was running (and watching an interview with Amy Fisher on the Insider), I thought more about the TNR article on The Times Style section. Can you have a social conscience and still like nice things? Admittedly, I'm a very neurotic blogger, but these things worry me. Can you still love your hand hewn dining room table, your sassy boots, your new CD and also say that you care about the poor?

Feminism already grappled with a similiar question awhile ago. Bitch PhD probably has written about lipstick feminism before, but I'm too lazy to look through her archives. Libertarians with a social conscience, like my friend Jane Galt, don't see any conflict between consumption and conscience. In fact, consumption brings relief to the poor. Me? I'm not that sure about the magic hand of capitalism, and I worry that liking party dresses and the patina in our old wood floors, while it may not directly lead to world misery, is at least a distraction.

Perhaps as a reaction to the TNR article, the Times has an article today on rich people who consume in all the wrong ways -- MTV's Super Sweet 16.

Question of the Day

I went to a lifetime achievement award ceremony last night, and it put me in a terrible funk. It felt like a funeral. I am going to the gym to run it off, but in the meantime....

Question of the Day Who's the Decider in your house?

Spreadin' Love

Fun discussion about Britney Spears and her uterus from DeanDad subbing at Bitch.

Multi-blog discussion about Equal Pay Day. See Elizabeth for all the links.

Green Days

In the beginning of the week, we were weighed down by worry over Ian. Yes, he's making big improvements, but there is still a lot going on -- still not talking enough, still irked by sounds, still stressed out for unknown reasons, still frustrated. Rather than having one ailment, it seems to be more of a little of this and a little of that. There's also the uncertainity about next year. Will he be able to go into a regular Kindergarten?

But damn. It's nice out. These kid worries, which every parent has, flow in and out like waves. And right now, the weather has supplanted worries with awe.

How can you describe these blue skies and crisp air? The lilacs, dagwoods, and cherry trees exploding with supernaturally large flowers? The cloudless skies? It's a David Lynch movie! A David Hockney painting!

Ah, I'll be lazy and let my camera do the work for me...

Luxury Porn

I love it! I hate it! I love it! I hate it!

No, I'm not talking about Caitlin Flanagan, though she is definitely in the "hate it" camp lately for that inexplicable remark about men being the head of the household on the Colbert Show. That's not even funny as a spoof.

Tonight, it's all about the Style section of the Times. From the New Republic:

The Times is hardly breaking new ground with its foray into what may be best described as luxury porn. Most metro areas with the proper concentration of wealth boast at least one slick glossy peddling the luxe life. And, hot on the heels of "Thursday Styles," last September The Wall Street Journal introduced its own shopping-on-steroids section, suggestively titled "Pursuits." But it's one thing for a bunch of glorified ad vehicles--or even the rampantly capitalist Wall Street Journal--to be hawking designer duffel bags and skin cream priced higher than Jack Abramoff's legal team. After all, these publications unabashedly promote--and generally cater to readers who share--a Trump-esque mine-is-bigger-than-yours attitude toward wealth and consumption. It's quite another matter, however, for the venerable Times to lend its imprimatur to a genre so awkwardly at odds with its own high-minded liberal sensibility and intellectual pretensions. This, after all, is the same paper that, last year, ran an eleven-part series on class in America, in which it described economic mobility as "the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream" and exhaustively pondered its apparent decline. Social consciousness for The Wall Street Journal may mean crushing the welfare state, but, for the Times, it means earnest editorials packed with noblesse oblige. (Classic snippet from last Thanksgiving: "There is no shame in the poverty Americans suffer today. The shame adheres to those who do nothing to change it.") Wretched consumer excess may be the American way, but is it really the paper of record's business to lend it respectability? The disconnect is jarring enough that even "Thursday Styles" appears to be grappling with this question. 

Yeah, but how cool is this dude? Like he's got his own home museum. Damn, I want one, too.

More About Ian

I have a huge list of chores to take care of this morning, but I'm too distracted to pick them off. Ian is on my mind.

Madeleine Channels MoDo

Anybody else catch this man-slam by Madeleine Albright in the Times on Sunday?

It has become a cliché to say that powerful women scare off husbands and lovers. Do you think it is true?
I don't think I ever would have been secretary of state if I had stayed married. But I loved being married. I was married for 23 years. I was very sorry when it ended.
Will you marry again?
I doubt it.
Why not?
Why?
Companionship?
I have lots of companionship. I am about to be 69 years old, and I have three daughters, three sons-in-law and six grandchildren. I am not looking to meet men. I also truly can't imagine who is out there who might be interested in someone like me. I'm intimidating, don't you think?