Kerry Howley

The Atlantic’s latest cover story is a collection of ideas on how to fix the world; they kindly asked me to contribute one. Here I am on Elizabeth Warren for Double X and Myanmar (along with the very knowledgeable Cari Sietstra) for Bloggingheads. And a couple of recent Double X posts can be found here and here.

My post:

Like Hanna and Meghan, I read Sandra Tsing Loh as arguing that companionate marriage involves trade-offs; that for all we gain in trading hierarchy for equity, something, perhaps, is lost. But I was most struck by the fact that Tsing Loh has such high expectations for the longevity of marriage; so high that her eventual disavowal of the institution is almost inevitable. It’s not like she got hitched late one night in Vegas and regretted it the next morning. She was with her husband for 20 years. They produced two seemingly happy kids, and Tsing Loh has managed to build a fantastically successful career while raising them. This is what failure looks like? Why is this split treated as a lack of will—“a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history”—rather than a natural, peaceful end to a happy and productive union?

As Tsing Loh says, Americans marry and divorce, and divorce and marry, and continue to attend endless engagement parties without deeming the institution a waste of everyone’s time. Tsing Loh thinks we’re deluded, but perhaps we’ve adapted to the fact that modern unions can be both meaningful and temporary. Surely, given the reality of serial marriage, we can come up with a better metric for determining a successful partnership than “does/does not last forever”? Tsing Loh asks “why we still believe in marriage,” but I’d like to know why she still believes that the only successful partnership is one you’re in when you die.

And Amanda Marcotte’s characterization of my post:

Kerry Howley suggests that marriage would work better if people treated it like a business partnership that is still a success if dissolved, as long as you have happy children as a result.

Look… I have a lot of weird opinions, but believing that meaningful relationships require children is not among them. I wrote a long, extensively reported Reason cover story in opposition to natalism and have composed myriad blog posts against the cultural pressure to have children at all. (Nor do I think loving 20-year partnerships are much akin to marketing deals, but anyway…) It’s one thing to spend your time playing ideological policewoman. It’s another thing altogether to mischaracterize someone’s opinions and then declare said person out of bounds.

I have a piece up at Double X on the subject. Here’s a taste:

The story is much bigger than the woman it stars. And so to Westerners who work inside of Myanmar, amidst the 48 million Burmese who are not international celebrities, the American cult of Suu Kyi can seem like remote, self-referential performance art. (I was an editor of the Myanmar Times from 2003 to 2005 and was refused entry to the country last December.) Suu Kyi’s list of vocal supporters includes Laura Bush, Jim Carrey, Sylvester Stallone, and hundreds of placard-wielding college kids around the country. The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate is inevitably described as “petite,” “well-spoken,” and most of all “elegant.” “She is like a beautiful flower,” John McCain told Brian Lamb in 2004. There are candlelight vigils in Dallas and protest rallies in Toronto. There is the claim that the National League for Democracy, Suu Kyi’s erstwhile party, is a vital force rather than the tired circle of septuagenarians one actually encounters at its Yangon headquarters. On Facebook, one can send a form e-mail to Than Shwe, a dictator who lives in paranoid isolation, requesting that he stop oppressing his fellow Burmese and concluding with “I look forward to hearing from you.”

Also, kindly note that I do not write my own headlines.

Start with Katie Roiphe’s fantastic piece on mothers who hide behind their kids; I endorse every word of it. Here I am on Sotomayor. And don’t miss Susannah Breslin’s impassioned takedown of Kate Gosselin’s hair. 

In CJR Walter Pincus complains that “much of the news Americans get each day was created to serve just that purpose—to be the news of the day.” He also alludes to the fact that it is in the interest of most journalists to report such “news” as if it were not spoonfed to them, as if some muckraking or at the very least googling were involved in the process of information-gathering, as if they had not, in fact, arrived at this spot on the campaign bus with the implicit understanding that the government’s PR machine would be duly revered. Joan Didion’s 1988 piece “Insider Baseball” is the best account of this quid-pro-quo ever written:

On the day that Michael Dukakis appeared at the high school in Woodland Hills and at the rally in San Diego and in the school-yard in San Jose, there was, although it did not appear on the schedule, a fourth event, what was referred to among the television crews as a “tarmac arrival with ball tossing.” This event had taken place in late morning, on the tarmac at the San Diego airport, just after the chartered 737 had rolled to a stop and the candidate had emerged. There had been a moment of hesitation. Then baseball mitts had been produced, and Jack Weeks, the traveling press secretary, had tossed a ball to the candidate. The candidate had tossed the ball back. The rest of us had stood in the sun and given this our full attention, undeflected even by the arrival of an Alaska 767: some forty adults standing on a tarmac watching a diminutive figure in shirtsleeves and a red tie toss a ball to his press secretary.

“Just a regular guy,” one of the cameramen had said, his inflection that of the union official who confided, in an early Dukakis commercial aimed at blue-collar voters, that he had known “Mike” a long time, and backed him despite his not being “your shot-and-beer kind of guy.”

“I’d say he was a regular guy,” another cameraman had said. “Definitely.”

“I’d sit around with him,” the first cameraman said.

…not until I read Joe Klein’s version of these days in California did it occur to me that this eerily contrived moment on the tarmac at San Diego could become, at least provisionally, history. “The Duke seemed downright jaunty,” Joe Klein reported. “He tossed a baseball with aides. He was flagrantly multilingual. He danced Greek dances….” In the July 25 issue of U.S. News & World Report, Michael Kramer opened his cover story, “Is Dukakis Tough Enough?” with a more developed version of the ball tossing:

“The thermometer read 101 degrees, but the locals guessed 115 on the broiling airport tarmac in Phoenix. After all, it was under a noonday sun in the desert that Michael Dukakis was indulging his truly favorite campaign ritual—a game of catch with his aide Jack Weeks. “These days,” he has said, “throwing the ball around when we land somewhere is about the only exercise I get.” For 16 minutes, Dukakis shagged flies and threw strikes. Halfway through, he rolled up his sleeves, but he never loosened his tie. Finally, mercifully, it was over and time to pitch the obvious tongue-in-cheek question: “Governor, what does throwing a ball around in this heat say about your mental stability?” Without missing a beat, and without a trace of a smile, Dukakis echoed a sentiment he has articulated repeatedly in recent months: ‘What it means is that I’m tough.’”Nor was this the last word. On July 31 in The Washington Post, David S. Broder, who had also been with the Dukakis campaign in Phoenix, gave us a third, and, by virtue of his seniority in the process, perhaps the official version of the ball tossing:

“Dukakis called out to Jack Weeks, the handsome, curly-haired Welshman who good-naturedly shepherds us wayward pressmen through the daily vagaries of the campaign schedule. Weeks dutifully produced two gloves and a baseball, and there on the tarmac, with its surface temperature just below the boiling point, the governor loosened up his arm and got the kinks out of his back by tossing a couple hundred 90-foot pegs to Weeks.”

Didion makes quite clear that anyone who notes the fact of the set-up would be considered pitiably naive. Such a person would seem not to understand what a privilege it is to convey the news that a campaign wants conveyed, how hard these men have worked to be part of this bus-bound elite, how lucky they all are to be witnessing this or that photo op, how their very presence is validation of their superior intelligence and exceptional reportorial capacities. Like my friend Dan Akst, I don’t know that any of this has much to do with the death of newspapers. But it does say something about the redundancy of most political reporting; we can all just as easily read the press releases online.  

My friend Alex Massie tags me as someone who does not blog with adequate frequency. (Alex, by the way, is someone who blogs just enough. There’s always something new when you visit, but nothing slap-dash or ill-considered.) I do in fact blog, but I have failed to alert people who still find their way to this neglected, weed-grown space. For the time being you can find me at Slate’s XX Factor. Here I am on torture, on Elizabeth Edwards, and on the feminism of Penicillin. I’ll be blogging here a bit as well over the summer.

Jeffrey Gray in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Of the hundreds of entries my associate editors and I received from scholars of American poetry of all periods, some of the most satisfying discussed pre-20th-century poets and included characterizations like the following:

Nathaniel Evans (18th century) is “noted by most historians as a ‘fledgling versifier’ whose occasional verses were wholly ‘unremarkable.’” Elizabeth Akers Allen (19th century) “was considered a minor Victorian poet even by her contemporaries.” Her sentiments were “expressed competently, but with no attempt at innovation in style or content.” William Byrd’s (18th-century) “contribution to poetry is not at all significant.” Indeed, “he published merely a few short, uninteresting poems.”

My own favorite entry, on Gertrude Bloede (19th century), sums up a poet’s bad dream of posterity: “Interest in her work, always limited, declined after her death.”

Curiously, it is almost impossible to find such modest assessments when one turns to contemporary poetry. Indeed, the problem of neglect or insignificance evaporates in a situation in which, in spite of the vast numbers writing (800 to 1,000 books of poetry are published in the United States per year; thousands of other poets publish in journals and quarterlies), we have no minor poets. Everyone today, like those above-average children of Lake Wobegon, is brilliant and sui generis.

Everyone is or would like to be outside the system: “Throughout his career, Bill Knott (1940-) has maintained outsider status in American poetry. This is largely due to the fact that no literary camp can adequately house … his body of work.” Michael Burkard’s writing “does not fit comfortably within either of these categories [i.e., confessional and Deep Image poetry].” And Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s works “defy easy categorization.”

May it never be said of any of you that your work “transcends genre.”

Encounters at the End of the World gratifies on three levels: it is apocalyptic, it has cute penguins, and it stars a man with a German accent berating us because we are inadequate.

My attention span is such that I am unable to sit through a 7-hour vestigial taste-making ritual, but this A.S. Hamrah Oscar column is so entertaining I wish it were twice as long.

From the Proceedings of the National Congress on Medical Quackery, held October 6-7, 1961, sponsored by the Food and Drug Administration and the American Medical Association:

“The Keys to Quackery”
William H. Gordon, M.D.
Luncheon speaker

—

There is an abiding belief among “con men” that the easiest “mark” is one who believes himself to be “hep.” They demonstrate the soundness of this premise countless times each day. Most people living in the United States believe themselves to be “hep.”

…

Our…scene takes place in a girl’s bedroom, one that could be found in many homes throughout this land. Our star is a girl in her early teens. Invading her privacy, which had been insured by securely locked doors and tightly drawn curtains, one encounters a scene, which if it were not filled with such bright dreams and destined to end with bitter tears of chagin and dissapointment, would be highly ludicrous.

Our player, unattractively clad only in a pair of panties draped over winged hip bones, has knobby knees, spindly legs, and a thin little body with all the curves and contours of a match. She is standing in front of her dresser, looking not in the mirror, but down at two little nubbins on her chest that for all the world have the appearance of two fried eggs. With the magic lotion that arrived only today she is carefully massaging these tiny protuberances, and as she does, her glance falls upon the printed label, “Bust-O-Fill,” price $3.95. What a fitting title! What a reasonable price!

….

The third scene takes place in a second floor back bedroom in a third or fourth rate hotel. Our player, a  man no longer young but refusing to accept this obvious fact, has devoted his life exclusively to horses and women. Things have been going rather badly of late. He had cashed in on a lucky pick in the third at Narragansett, but who could remember when he had cashed in on a dame.

While these sobering thoughts were flashing through his mind, he was standing in front of a cracked mirror attached to a knobless dreser. He touched some gret showing through at the temples, removed frayed threads from his cuffs, and casually brushed the toes of one shoe on the back of the other leg.

Our player thoughtfully thumbed through a men’s magazine to something that last night had caught his eye. He read it again: “Men! Why Grown Old? Regain Your Youth. Youth is Yours if You Act Now.”

Into an addressed enveloped went two well handled ten’s and a coupon with a return address. His key was desperation — cold, soul chilling desperation.

Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls is the best bit of migration-related reportage I’ve read in years. A snippet:

Height was a universal Chinese obsession. In a country that had experience malnutrition and even famine in living memory, heigh signaled fortune, and it functioned as a proxy for class: On any construction sight, the armies of peasant workers were a head shorter than the city people whose homes they were building. For women, height requirements were attached to the more glamorous trades. “If I were only ten centimeters taller,” a young woman who worked in a hair salon told me once, “I could sell cars.”

I can’t say that I really understand “Octuplet Outrage.” Are we outraged at the $300,000 in medical bills? Or the fact that Nadya Suleman is single and lives with her parents? The desire to produce litters of children does not seem to me a widespread phenomena, and I’m not really worried about an epidemic of aspiring Jon-and-Kates bankrupting the country. I’m more concerned about this impulse, courtesy of Time:

Nadya Suleman said that she wanted lots of children because she had grown up an only child in a dysfunctional family.

How could doctors let her bring so many babies to term?

If there is a problem here, I’m pretty sure it is not that doctors are insufficiently judgmental in matters of female reproduction. Fertility specialists are medical service providers, not religious counselors, not ethicists. I would no more ask a GP whether it is ethical to bring 8 babies to term than I would ask her to hold forth on the existence of souls.  Language matters in unequal power relationships, which is why it’s best not to talk of doctors “letting” women terminate pregnancies, “letting” women use hormonal birth control, or “letting” women give birth to whatever it is they want to give birth to. Women are paying for these services; they’re customers, not infants begging for another piece of cake.

Does anyone in Iowa read this blog? Tomorrow night I’ll be giving a short lecture on migration. The talk is sponsored by Iowa Advocates for Liberty and is part of the university’s Human Rights Week. Assuming that someone other than Will shows up, I expect there will be a contentious discussion afterward. Here’s the info:

“Migration and Human Rights: How Global Apartheid Keeps the Developing World Poor”

Monday, January 26th at 7 pm

1505 Seamans Center, University of Iowa

This is exciting:

Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

The study has not yet undergone peer review, and two academics who read it on Thursday said they would be interested to see if other researchers would be able to replicate its results.

It seems hard to believe, but all studies that reveal stereotype threat seem hard to believe, and yet there they are. This kind of thing is why I get so frustrated with social niceties like “I won’t vote for Hillary just because she is a woman” or “I would never vote for a man because of the color of his skin.” Well, why not? “Serious” voters focus on policy and ignore symbolism. But assuming the findings are valid, what educational policy works this well? 

Here I am opining about the week’s news on the penultimate edition of Weekend America. The show is a victim of global economic implosion, and I am sad to see it go. I guess my friend Reihan and I will have to find new ways to embarrass ourselves on the national stage. 

Well, there’s always bloggingheads! And here I am chatting with our greatest living essayist, Richard Rodriguez.