Kerry Howley

I am loving the contrast between Patricia Blagojevich’s private and public personas:

“Rod’s marriage to her is really what begins his political career,” said John P. Pelissero, a political science professor at Loyola University. “It was really through connections with his father-in-law’s influence that he got elected.”

The complaint also shows her participating in a phone call in which the governor discusses trading his influence over the Senate seat appointment to earn money and find Ms. Blagojevich seats on paid corporate boards.

And, in a blast of vulgar language, Ms. Blagojevich eggs on her husband when he reportedly threatens to prevent the Tribune Company from selling the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field unless The Chicago Tribune fired editorial writers who had called for the governor’s impeachment. Ms. Blagojevich is quoted in the complaint as saying that the state should “hold up that [expletive] Cubs [expletive] … [expletive] them.”

….

The Web site for the governor’s office says that in addition to raising the couple’s two daughters, Ms. Blagojevich occupies herself with typical first lady issues: raising awareness on children’s health, food allergies and literacy, and starting the State Beautification Initiative, which planted native wildflowers along state roads.

So you see, Rod runs the state, and Patricia spends all of her time worrying about peanut allergies and daisies.

This New York Magazine piece about how feminism turns you into a lush has come in for a lot of criticism, but I haven’t seen anyone point out the article’s most glaring, painful-to-read flaws. First and most obviously, the entire piece treats the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) as some kind of objective brain trust, filled with people thinking new and Important Thoughts on the relative merits of those substances called “drugs.” But CASA is a prohibitionist organizaton. When CASA publishes gems such as “Non-medical Marijuana: Rite of Passage or Russian Roulette?”, nobody cracks open the report wondering “Gosh, I wonder what they decided?” This is an organization that compares the smoking of a joint to a game with a 17 percent chance of death, and proceeds to deem this comparison worthy not of a mere footnote but of a report title. As my colleague Jacob Sullum notes:

In a 2002 report that attracted wide publicity, CASA issued “a clarion call for national mobilization” against “America’s underage drinking epidemic,” claiming that “Children Drink 25 Percent of Alcohol Consumed in the U.S.” Not only did these “children” include 18-to-20-year-olds (a.k.a. “adults”), but it turned out CASA’s estimate was off by a factor of more than two.

Thus we are treated to the following tidbit in the NY Mag piece:

“College campuses are the place where drinking norms are set for educated individuals,” says Jon Morgenstern, a professor of psychiatry and vice-president at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. “The rate of drinking is astronomical. College is really a training ground for becoming an alcoholic.”

If the rate of drinking on campus is “astronomical” relative to rates of drinking in other settings, in what sense is the campus setting norms? The rate of drinking on college campuses is clearly aberrant. I live next to a Midwestern University. My undergraduate neighbors drink Miller Lite at 7am on Saturday mornings so they can be drunk enough to watch and enjoy a football game in subzero weather. I do not expect that this behavior will continue into their 60s. I suspect that it is context dependent.

I doubt the author of the article chose to subtitle her piece: “Should gender equality extend to drinking?” But it should be mentioned that this framing — so popular among stories alleging increased girl-on-girl violence and drug use and sports-related injuries — is annoying. I happen to have a female body. It does not follow that my every vice is part of some misguided attempt to achieve gender parity. I had a beer last night, and I have to say, it wasn’t a particularly gendered experience for me.

The author’s friends drink a lot; being young and single in New York, like living in a house with a couch on the front porch in a Midwestern college town, is a context in which someone is likely to drink more than the average person. I’ve always felt that people were more willing to grant the concept of life stages for men than for women; that dude crumpled over in the frat house is just going through his few years of drunken stupification; but the 24-year-old woman in an LES apartment who’s had a few too many Martinis– well, she’s ruined.

The clear-thinking Mr. Levy bothers to respond to a Todd Seavey post comparing feminists to Nazis (or something):

I believe that it is an undesirable cultural state of affairs that married women take their husband’s last names while none do the reverse; and that if the woman keeps her last name the children almost inevitably take the father’s. I think that this custom is explicable and understandable as a social-evolutionary or ev-psych outcome, but that it is not compatible with my best sense of fairness or equality. I think that it symbolically subordinates one person to another in a way that is undesirable, and that offends a similar part of my brain to the part that’s offended by coercive political subordination, though it is not an example of such subordination.

I do not favor, indeed actively oppose, the Quebec solution of effectively prohibiting women from taking their names. But I favor, and argue in favor of, cultural change in this regard. It is not my place “qua libertarian” to argue for this view, any more than it is your place “qua libertarian” to argue for gender-complementarity, but that doesn’t make either feminism or complementarity views that are analogous to Naziism, or *incompatible* with libertarianism.

What is the name for the intellectual category into which this belief on my part falls?

And if the name is “feminist,” then I can’t help but think that feminism, while orthogonal to ‘political libertarianism’ in Rawls-speak, is a central part of some of the comprehensive worldviews that will make up the libertarian overlapping consensus– and that that’s an attractive fact, and that it’s a part of my own. And, from within my comprehensive worldview though not “qua libertarian,” I’ll venture that gender-complementarity looks mighty tribalistic and collectivist the second it becomes a normative doctrine and not a purely explanatory one.

Via IOZ, I see that Thomas Frank is troubled by the fact that women are allowed to form contractual agreements involving their own reproductivity:

When money is exchanged for pregnancy, some believe, surrogacy comes close to organ-selling, or even baby-selling. It threatens to commodify not only babies, but women as well, putting their biological functions up for sale like so many Jimmy Choos. If surrogacy ever becomes a widely practiced market transaction, it will probably make pregnancy into just another dirty task for the working class, with wages driven down and wealthy couples hiring the work out because it’s such a hassle to be pregnant.

Frank is talking about Alex Kuczynski’s much-criticized NYT Magazine story. He finds it interesting that Kuczynski only quotes “the surrogate mother” three times. I find it interesting that Frank can’t bother to call the surrogate mother by her name (it’s Cathy Hilling) and chooses to disregard those quotes Kuzcynski does include. He seems to find the lived experience of surrogate mothers irrelevant to his thesis. Here is Hilling, paraphrased:

The experience of having a baby for the New Jersey couple, Cathy said, provided her with a deep thrill, and the feeling that she was needed in a profound, unique way. There might always be other willing foster parents, she said, but there would not always be willing, able surrogate mothers.

Perhaps this is simply what one is supposed to say to prospective parents, but I think it’s fair to assume that Hilling doesn’t see herself as performing a “dirty task” and would find that framing offensive. On the other hand, Hilling seems aware that she is performing a service worthy of payment, precisely because it is a “hassle to be pregnant.” People find this transaction so unappealling in part because women are not supposed to acknowledge that pregnancy can be a burden; rather, it’s “what we’re made for,” “deeply fulfilling.” “You’re glowing!” men say, patting you on the back for a job well done, an evolutionary purpose fulfilled. Surrogacy exposes pregnancy for what it is: work.

To her considerable credit, Kuczynski didn’t spend 6,000 words trying to signal all the officially sanctioned feminine emotional responses. She writes:

AS THE MONTHS PASSED, something curious happened: The bigger Cathy was, the more I realized that I was glad — practically euphoric — I was not pregnant. I was in a daze of anticipation, but I was also secretly, curiously, perpetually relieved, unburdened from the sheer physicality of pregnancy. If I could have carried a child to term, I would have. But I carried my 10-pound dog in a BabyBjörn-like harness on hikes, and after an hour my back ached.

Obviously, this kind of thing is not allowed. The acceptable reaction would be an expression of profound loss at the inability to experience the Most Important Day of a Woman’s Life; angst at the fact that she was forced into the position of spectator, jealousy of the lucky woman growing heavy with her child. Such dishonesty would not have done justice to Hilling and the work she performed, but it probably would have appeased Kuczynski’s critics.

The Wall Street Journal reports that more women sell their eggs and rent their wombs in times of financial anxiety. I find this plausible despite the fact that none of the evidence in the article seems at all compelling. But sentences like this suggest that we are very far from a day when journalists can dispassionately discuss economic transactions involving female bodies:

Donating eggs, or carrying a baby for nine months, is by no means easy — it’s arduous enough that most agencies turn down women who are mainly in it for the money.

This is not lazy thinking. There are so many levels of confusion here that only a splendidly byzantine, aggressive vapidity could have produced this thought. Start with the implicit assumption that someone who provides a service out of material need is less likely to follow through than someone who is not “in it for the money.” Add the idea that agencies can read the minds of surrogates and egg donors in such detail that they can actually know which motivations are primary, thereby culling those women thought to be insufficiently altruistic. Throw in the assertion that donating eggs is “by no means easy” for anyone, relative to…what? Every other means of making $10,000? I suspect that it depends on the particular donor’s tolerance for fertility drugs and her financial position at the time of the donation, but I guess we can’t expect every beat reporter to act as if the world is inhabited by distinct individuals. Too many fake trends waiting to be found.

In this brief history of anti-cosmopolitanism (via Bookforum), Darrin McMahon quotes noted cosmopolite Michel de Montaigne:

I am scarcely infatuated with the sweetness of my native air. Brand-new acquaintances that are wholly of my own choice seem to me well worth those other common chance acquaintances of the neighborhood. Friendships purely of our own acquisition usually surpass those to which community of climate or of blood binds us. Nature has put us into the world free and unfettered; we imprison ourselves in certain narrow districts, like the kings of Persia, who bound themselves never to drink any other water than that of the river Chaspes, stupidly gave up their right to use any other waters, and dried up all the rest of the world as far as they were concerned.

Lovely. I suppose it’s late to list things we are thankful for, but Montaigne reminds me that I am thankful for the freedom to choose my commitments.

Every Mother’s Day, we hear a lot about how “undervalued” domestic labor is. So it’s interesting that when a mother attaches an actual price to pregnancy–say, $23,000–she is deemed “revolting” by other women.

In the first of a sure-to-be-great series of posts on Singapore, Bryan Caplan writes:

Singaporean bureaucrats are less afraid to criticize their government than American bureaucrats are to criticize theirs.  Neither group would be afraid of legal punishment; but the Americans would be more worried that saying the wrong thing would hurt their careers.

and

Even more impressive than IQs: The ubiquity of critical and creative thinking.  Talking to Singapore’s Civil Service is like giving an academic seminar where the audience actually pays attention.  Multiple people actually asked me, “What is the ideal form of government?”

I don’t doubt that your average Singaporean bureaucrat is more economically literate and intellectually curious than her American counterpart. You don’t get such sane health care, immigration, and trade policies by putting a bunch of Huckabee-level intellects in charge. But surely the willingness to speak openly has something to do with a constrained press? A Singaporean official could trash the policies of his superiors to Bryan confident in the knowledge that his remarks are not going to show up in the Straits Times the next morning. If someone working in the DEA starts questioning the drug war in the presence of strangers, he has a hungry, liberated press corps to worry about.

When I was in Singapore researching this story about guest workers, a couple of people mentioned that the government was about to impose new regulations on the provision of worker housing. How did they know? The Straits Times had just reported a story on guest workers living in substandard apartments. The fact that the newspaper had been given permission to write about the problem indicated that the governments was ready to do something about it.

Anyway, here is a picture of the Dalhousie Obelisk, Singapore’s monument to free trade:

Great stuff from New York’s Jennifer Senior:

“Every 20 or 30 years, we have a lament about the decline of community, and it’s usually due to cities and urbanization,” says Robert Sampson, the criminologist who chairs Harvard’s sociology department, when I visit him one sunny morning this fall. He mentions one of the classics of the genre, Louis Wirth’s Urbanism As a Way of Life. “It’s all about the impersonal way of life in the city—how it almost deranged people, led to this sort of schizoid personality, to psychosis and loneliness.”

Yet the picture of cities—and New York in particular—that has been emerging from the work of social scientists is that the people living in them are actually less lonely. Rather than driving people apart, large population centers pull them together, and as a rule tend to possess greater community virtues than smaller ones. This, even though cities are consistently, overwhelmingly, places where people are more likely to live on their own.

Via AL Daily.

Robert Cottrell in The Economist:

Whatever their provenance, the public intellectuals of 2009 will want to be fluent in the obvious issues of the moment: environment and energy, market turmoil, China, Russia, Islam…. [A] rising generation of bloggers is terrifyingly young and bright: expect to hear more from Ezra Klein, Megan McArdle, Will Wilkinson and Matthew Yglesias.

As my terrifyingly young and bright friend Alex Massie would say: Quite so! I conclude that the nation’s two most important loci of intellectual activity are Northwest DC and Northeast Iowa City.

I hijack Free Will yet again this week, this time with the lovely and lucid Kenan Malik. It should be noted that I have, in the words of one bhtv guru, “tiny elfin ears” and am thus forced to hold the earpiece in place the entire time. Why I keep adjusting my glasses I can’t explain, but it might be to distract viewers from the ear issue.

Michel Houellebecq, connoisseur of contempt:

Here, Bernard-Henri, is the first reason (the one I consider honorable) for my nonengagement: an ideological modesty, bordering on atheism. The Russians certainly don’t feel as though they are living under democracy; I believe that they generally don’t give a damn, and who am I to tell them otherwise? For years, I lived in the country—France—where I had the right to vote; I seldom exercised it. Measures were constantly taken in the political sector, notably in the domain of public health, of which I disapproved completely. I will cite, among many other things, the stupid, stubborn prohibition of substances considered “drugs”; the incessant and unrelenting campaigns against alcoholism, advocating condom use, against cocaine, sugary foods, and what have you; the absurd impossibility of buying without a prescription the majority of commonly used medications; and more than anything, as well as symbolic of all the rest: the slow, merciless closing in on smokers. All of this contributed greatly to my isolation from the world and made of me someone who does not consider himself a citizen.

You see, I have never had the impression of living under democracy; I always had the sense that I lived in a sort of technocracy, although I have never been persuaded that this was necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps the technocrats are sensible, and fair. Perhaps I should give up alcohol. Perhaps I should even quit smoking.

That’s excerpted in the latest Harper’s. Houellebecq would find the idea of an engaged anti-statist absurd. In any case, the symbolic value of the Persecuted Smoker Artist — forced into the raw vulgarity of the smokeless bar, stymied by the philistinism of the anti-tobacco censor— really is a gift.