Father's Day post

Before I had siblings. Aunt Nell's electric vehicle in Huntington Beach.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, "Can Dads Have It All?", The New York Times, 16 June 2019:

Sure it's true that fathers do more total work than mothers nowadays, when you add up paid work, housework, and childcare—a good 20 minutes in families where both parents work, according to the latest statistical manipulations by Robert VerBruggen of the Institute For Family Studies, or considerably more, depending on how you massage it, but I'm not resentful. After all, women's work is harder, but they probably like doing it better than I do, so it all works out. I will point out, though, that this dispensation, combined with the need to watch children all the time because we're not allowed to just order them outside while we play with our X-Box, leaves both parents exhausted, inevitably lowering marriage and fertility rates, which is very important.

Because, he doesn't add, it leads to the possibility of race suicide, or, worse, contraception.

VerBruggen's piece is pretty silly, but it also brings up the reasonable idea that women generally do all the managerial work in the household (according to a 1989 study by Linda Thompson and Alexis J. Walker), which I find pretty stimulating to think about. It suggests to me that by current Republican standards women's home responsibilities should be regarded as about 271 times more valuable than men's. I don't have that much respect for management, on principle, but since most women do more than their share of dogwork as well, I'd say it adds up to a lot.

In my own child-rearing experience, where that pattern holds (I was absolutely the primary caregiver but we'd have had pure anarchy if not for the Old Lady stepping in as CEO for the occasional intervention), I was largely OK with the drudgery from diapers to dinner (not that I did it very well except for the cooking part) but poisoned from time to time with resentment at the financial inequity of her having a career and me scrabbling by with part-time work—crudely, by the need to beg her for money—as she was scandalized by the uncleanliness of the house. We survived it, and our kids are wonderful human beings, but it lent a degree of suffering and can't-talk-about-it emotional withholding both of us could have done without while that phase lasted. And I think I have some insight from that into the plight of couples like my own stay-at-home mom and somewhat remote, harried father, raging when some kid had dropped a sock on the stairs and nobody but him would pick it up, in the days when they were poor (and they weren't poor forever, and the hilarious and hopeful father of my infancy came back eventually). Which Ross, raised by two generations of wealthy divorcées (thing I learned today is that his grandparents were divorced too), probably lacks.

Which is, I think, that rather than quantifying the amount of work parents do in terms of minutes clocked in, we might want to qualify it in terms of prestige and affection and adjust our models, from the traditional economically nonsensical household where Mom has all the executive responsibility but has to fight for the executive privilege of ordering Dad around, to a situation where everybody gets respect and warmth in relatively equal measure, and some down time too. Happy Father's Day!

Admit impediment!

Antonio Vivarini (studio of), "The Garden of Love" (c.1465-1470), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, via Australian Research Council Centre for the Study of Emotions.

And in the stupidest analogies ever department we have an extraordinary performance from Mr. David F. Brooks ("How to Repair the National Marriage"), who say that

Listening to people argue about politics these days is like overhearing people in a restaurant who are in a bad marriage. They’re always trying to use disagreements to establish superiority. It’s not merely, “We’re different.” It’s, “I’m better.”

So I thought it might be a good idea to consult some marriage books for lessons on how to repair national politics.

No, you know what? That is not a good idea. In terms Brooks might understand clearly, Jesus said, "Love thy neighbor as thyself." He didn't say, "Love thy neighbor as thy girlfriend." You should not have intimate relations with everybody. You should have respectful relations with everybody. The "national marriage" is a truly grotesque idea.

Not to mention when it's Brooks giving this lecture I keep having really inappropriate thoughts. If my relations with people I have political disagreements are modeled on marriage, should I allow myself to consider dumping them for younger, hotter opponents?

Annals of Derp: The Paul Popenoe Story

The early ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’ columns have an unpleasant chiding tone. Popenoe, along with his organisation’s marriage counsellors, thought of female clients as unrealistic babies: immature, and expecting too much glitz from their marriages. There was a strong element of intergenerational critique in their counsel – a sense that young women were seduced by popular culture, and hopelessly unable to ‘keep house’ and make sacrifices. ‘Don’t expect too much romance,’ Popenoe’s counsellors said over and over again. In treating ‘Ralph’ and ‘Alice’ (February 1953), a young couple who had four children in the space of five years, the counsellor wrote that Alice needed to be convinced to stop ‘nagging’ her husband for affection: ‘Ralph’s way of pronouncing his love was not in extravagant speech but in coming home to her and the children, and displaying his willingness – indeed, his determination – to support them.’ The happy ending was for her to provide: ‘When Alice recognised this fact and acknowledged that the language of courtship and juvenile dreams is seldom the language of marriage, she started keeping household accounts and padlocking her tongue.’ (via Aeon, illustration from Redbook.)

I was kind of thinking I'd take a bye on Dinesh D'Souza's newly emitted project, The Big Lie (from Regnery, already getting remaindered at $4.95 five days after publication!), aimed at persuading us that Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism was too mild, because Jonah left out the important bit about how liberals are also Nazis, which isn't how I remembered it, but this tweet kind of called out to me to find out what it was about.

Progressive eugenicist Paul Popenoe--associate of Margaret Sanger--gave Nazis the idea for "lethal chambers" to kill the disabled & unwanted pic.twitter.com/iAjfVrOFvH

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) August 12, 2017

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that the progressive eugenicist Paul Popenoe, an associate of the birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, gave the German Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei the idea of "lethal chambers" for killing the disabled and unwanted?

Answer: It's incredible how much wrong D'Souza can pack into 21 words.

Rally round the bridges, boys!

Via Pinterest.

Shorter David Brooks, "Why Fathers Leave their Children", New York Times, June 16 2017:

According to the latest research, they don't leave their children, they leave their children's mothers. This makes it difficult for them to take care of the kids as much as they would wish to do. The solution to this is to encourage people to have intercourse only with people they are in love with, and work out a budget before they have children. Also, mayors should have poems in praise of fatherhood read at their inaugurations, and some kind of government program could help but I'm all out of space again, curious how that keeps happening.

And happy Fathers' Day to you too. Got anything special planned?

No, I'm not going there. He didn't abandon the previous Mrs. Brooks until the kids were old enough to live on their own, anyway, as far as I can figure (I believe the oldest is just a year or two younger than her new stepmother), and I'm sure he's never done anything in his life without working out a budget first. Still and all, it's pretty astonishing that he doesn't know he's a character in this story, or that many readers won't be able to read it without thinking of him.

The research in question ("amazing," Brooks calls it, in his magic 150th career use of the adjective in a Times column) is "Doing the Best I Can": Fatherhood in the Inner City, a 2013 book by two Johns Hopkins sociologists, Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson, who found through ethnographic-type thick interaction with young absentee fathers in Camden and Philadelphia that there's something wrong with the stereotype of heedless and selfish men spreading their seed around town with no interest in the consequences: a pretty large majority of the men they interviewed were, to the contrary, really excited about fatherhood and anxious to do the right thing.

 Comically, Brooks blames the stereotype on the kids themselves, "when you ask them":

Mazel tov

Mazel tov to Brooks and Snyder, who tied the knot on Sunday, as reported by our trusty Driftglass, who had the date a week ago and was too nice to write anything explicit about it:

So this happened.

I sincerely wish them all the best.https://t.co/16wSo8dqFk

— driftglass (@Mr_Electrico) May 1, 2017

I'm not as nice a person as Drifty, mostly just too busy with the Trumpery, but I have followed these kids through their romance on and off for a long time now, and I don't want to let it go without saying anything.

Also the gift registry, which Driftglass discovered last week, from Zola, a marvelous name for an online trousseau supplier (one of Émile Zola's steamiest novels is Au Bonheur des Dames, a tale of the origin of Parisian luxury-goods department stores during the Second Empire), is still up, and if you hurry you can still pick up something that they will receive with gratitude, as symbols of the community that upholds them.

Welcome! Thank you for rejoicing in our marriage-to-be. We're touched by your presence in our lives. Here's a registry we put together, whose gifts we will receive with gratitude, and as symbols of the community that upholds us. Thanks for your love and generosity.

Because it's naturally not stuff they want, they have plenty of that, but symbols, like the Eucalyptus pewter napkin rings, the Graham champagne flutes, the Wildflower Study apron, with matching potholder and oven mit [sic], the Crate & Barrel Como Swirl dinner plates, the $44 apparently wrought iron cookbook holder, and the Vitamix Professional Series Heritage 750 blender ($598.99), because it's all about heritage, isn't it?

This, too:

The decay you decry

Photo by mks at dubstepforum.

Concerned David Brooks is concerned about marriage inequality! Not what you're thinking: it's that apparently all the best marriage is being hogged by a happy few while the majority have to make do with what remains, and the gap between the camps is growing:

marriage is polarizing: The best marriages today are better than the best marriages of generations ago; the worst marriages now are worse; over all, the average marriage is weaker than the average marriage in days of yore.

This is a not totally inaccurate summary of some research results reported in 2014 by the social psychologist Eli Finkel in a New York Times Valentine's Day piece, "The All-or-Nothing Marriage", and as a matter of fact it's probably the most interesting thing in the column, or would be if Brooks had been capable of understanding what he was reading when he read, or looked at, that article—I'll be getting back to it shortly, as Krugman would say at this point—but Brooks himself quickly loses interest in it and moves on to his own views on what modern thought, as represented by the self-help literature in airport bookshops, has to say on the subject of marriage, which is that we have three attitudes, of course, seeing it through three distinct "lenses", psychological, romantic, and moral...

Women aren't women any more?

Any more than what? Haha.

From Beirut Yacht Charter.

Statistics

Suzanne Venker writes,

According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997 – from 28 percent to 37 percent. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent.

These numbers suggest to her that women nowadays want to get married and men don't, evidently because of their impression, discussed late on in the essay, that women are no longer women, i.e., if women were clearly women from this standpoint men would definitely want to marry them but not otherwise.

But it all depends where your head is at in relation to the yoga mat. To me, these numbers say that most people ages 18 to 34 really don't think a successful marriage is among the most important things in their lives, and they didn't in 1997 either: 63% of women to 71% of men, versus 72% to 65% 15 years ago.

Ideally, one would like to know what question Pew was asking, an open-ended one, a yes-or-no, or a multiple-choice list, or ranking a long list; and whether "one of the most important" means one of the two top factors, or five top factors, or whatever; and how many of the people in the sample were married themselves. It is however clear what these data do not show:

Believe it or not, modern women want to get married. Trouble is, men don’t.

They do not show any strong feelings either way, or any significant differences between the genders, or anything particularly interesting at all, except maybe that there is a turbulent minority that thinks about it more than the rest do. Those probably are less in need of marriage itself than they are of Lexapro.

Subculture

I’ve spent thirteen years examining social agendas as they pertain to sex, parenting, and gender roles. During this time, I’ve spoken with hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women. And in doing so, I’ve accidentally stumbled upon a subculture of men who’ve told me, in no uncertain terms, that they’re never getting married. When I ask them why, the answer is always the same.
Women aren’t women anymore.

If her website didn't classify her as "author. speaker. wife. mother." I'd suspect her of referring here to a subculture of men she dated over that 13-year period. But something tells me in any case that we're not talking about the young fellows whose intentions to marry or not are at issue—that "anymore" pointing to a time when women used to be women and so on. Men, in fact, who have been married before, and who associate feminism with that damned child support, which they wouldn't of had to pay if she hadn't of walked out on them even though they practically went down on their knees. I'm talking about you, Smitty, you lousy Republican. And no, in real life it is not actually cheaper to stay married.

Grammar

But after decades of browbeating the American male, men are tired.

It’s the women who lose. Not only are they saddled with the consequences of sex, by dismissing male nature they’re forever seeking a balanced life.

The fact is, women need men’s linear career goals – they need men to pick up the slack at the office – in order to live the balanced life they seek.

The first of those is just a garden variety dangled participle. No allegation is intended that the men are really browbeating themselves, tiring as that might be.

The second is kind of mysterious. What is dismissing male nature? ("At ease, male nature, I won't be needing you any further tonight.") Apparently it's refusing to let them "provide for and protect their families", which is "in their DNA" (And I thought I was supposed to be beating back my DNA and its will to impregnate everything within 30 feet!). Saddling them with the consequences of sex may be an elegant circumlocution for knocking them up without that all-important child support check. Is it a bad thing to be forever seeking a balanced life? Or is the implication that you could get the balanced life right away if you would only stop dismissing that male nature?

The third is really hard. I think she's trying to say that women don't need to have men's linear career goals but need men to have them, "linear" meaning with their minds fixed on the idea of a properly funded retirement and that final three-week cruise to Jordan and the Holy Land, after which they can at last just crack a beer, sit down, and spend the rest of their lives with ESPN and the wide-screen. But do they have to pick up the slack at the office because the women are slacking at home, with their girlfriends and pitchers of iced tea and vodka while the little ones toddle with their little trucks and Happy toys among the unshaven ankles? And are you saying in the end that women can have that balanced life because men don't?

All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs. 

If they do, marriageable men will come out of the woodwork.

And you'll be able to take the vacuum cleaner to them. Or just swiff them up. 

Cruise wedding dress, from Lanvin Cruise Collection 2010.

Argument

There's definitely an argument, but trust me, you've heard it before. Suzanne Venker is the niece of Phyllis Schlafly, and it hasn't really changed in 50 years, except for the economics getting more and more improbable.

Can abortion save marriage as an institution?

Ridicule has been heaped on the heads of the American Taliban for their insistence that same-sex marriage is going to "destroy the institution of marriage":

Some ancient civilizations that recognized same-sex "marriage" collapsed as a result, while some that refused to recognize it escaped that fate. However, Correlation is not causation, and there is not even a large enough data set to get a correlation. (Conservapedia)

(The second sentence is social-sciencese for "However, the previous sentence would be an unjustified inference even if the evidence existed, which it doesn't." I.e., never mind.)

Did the Nephites recognize same-sex marriage? King Mormon bids farewell to his destroyed nation from Cumorah Hill, near present-day Palmyra, New York, 385 C.E., in the celebrated rendering by Arnold Friberg. You can tell the Nephites' Jewish ancestry by the way Moroni has decorated his helmet with shofars.

Legalization of same-sex "marriage" is correlated with social dysfunctions that states and countries banning it have avoided. States and countries legalizing same-sex "marriage" have markedly different levels of quality of life from those that have banned it....

In Norway and Sweden, the adoption of same-sex marriage has led to a loss in respect for the marriage institution itself even for traditional couples. In Massachusetts, the imposition of same-sex marriage led to a decline in property values and an exodus from the state by many. Also in response to the introduction of same-sex marriage the State Department of Public Health changed marriage certificates to read "Party A" and "Party B" instead of husband and wife.

(Indeed, the quality of life in Norway is markedly different from that in Arkansas. The only actual evidence Dr. Google can find suggests gay marriage is good for the real estate market. What your marriage certificate calls you is surely not a central issue in your quality of life, though you might object to a ceremony where they asked whether you, schmuck, take this woman...?)  Let's just say that they have had some difficulty explaining what it is they fear will happen and how.

Just because it's only Chicken Little shouting that the sky is falling, however, does not mean that there is nothing worrisome going on. Marriage really is in a kind of crisis in the U.S., but it has nothing to do with same-sex marriage: it's caused by harsh abortion laws.

This may sound like a paradox. After all, pregnancy was for a very long time a key component of preserving marriage here and in much of Europe; pregnancy and the metaphorical shotgun. Wouldn't abortion—alongside the invention of effective methods of birth control that do not involve the erotically challenging procedure of putting a fellow's thing in a sous-vide bag—

This all-belly porchetta will be deep-fried after its 36-hour bath. Yum! From Serious Eats.

—wouldn't abortion, I was saying, by eliminating the most powerful reason for marriage, tend to depress its frequency?

And the answer is, not at all. Abortion was in fact for centuries the key element to making the marriage system work, particularly among the less wealthy classes—that is, among those who could not afford to keep their daughters in convents. Because the shotgun is only useful when the scalawag in question is a likely lad, one Dad doesn't mind having dinner with a few times in the year; and indeed the shotgun is hardly needed, as the young folks so often make that graceful bow to the inevitable under their own volition. But when the young woman has made a serious misjudgment about her young, or perhaps not so young, man, she and Dad both need some kind of safety valve to leave her able to marry somebody that suits the two of them better, and that is the role abortion traditionally plays.

Hormonal birth control has merely simplified the process, standing in for the shotgun in the way a quick cloture vote in the Senate stands in nowadays for the traditional ritual of the filibuster. The young woman need literally stop taking her pills only in the most recalcitrant of cases; normally, it's enough to say, "I think I'm a bit late," and the well-bred suitor knows what to do. In certain social classes this has had a huge pro-marriage effect, because it has enabled women to postpone marriage until an age when most people in my generation were already getting over their first divorce—and these late-selected partnerships are mature and secure enough to last, so that any minor reduction in the total number of marriages is more than made up for by a large reduction in the number of marital breakups. And abortion hardly even comes into question.

But only in certain classes, where the young women don't have to fight to get hold of the birth control. When Dad, himself insecure, can't deal with the idea of their making their own choices, the old system with abortion at the center is still relevant, and when they stigmatize abortion away it's a catastrophe. Unmarried motherhood is de-stigmatized in return, and alongside a welter of totally unsuitable, doomed marriages you get a plague of teen motherhood, girls who will never go to college, radiating waves of permanent poverty, and all the rest.

Okay, okay, it's not all black and white, if you will. Especially in Norway.

Thus the well-known correlations of Red State to anti-abortion state, to state that takes more Federal aid than it contributes Federal taxes, to state with higher rates of teen single motherhood, teen marriage, and divorce. Of course correlation is not causation, as they say, and to demonstrate that the lack of clean, safe abortion brings these bad things about we would require some actual research, of which little appears to have been done.

All the same this, picked up by Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly, is pretty suggestive: the Turnaway Study, of about a thousand women who were or were not given abortions because they were under or over their clinic's gestational limit, found after five years that

•  Most women (86%) who carried their pregnancy to term kept their baby; 11% gave the baby up for adoption.
• Being denied an abortion appears to have impoverished women and had a negative effect on their employment status. Researchers say that at the beginning of the study, there weren’t any economic differences between those who got an abortion and those who were denied one. However, after a year, “[W]omen denied abortion were more likely to be receiving public assistance (76% vs. 44%) and have household income below the FPL [Federal Poverty Level] (67% vs. 56%) than women who received an abortion. The proportion of women denied an abortion who were working full time was lower than among women who received an abortion (48% vs. 58%).” 
• Anti-abortion advocates often claim that women who abort are more likely to develop drug problems. However, the study suggests that that is not the case; abortion did not increase the risk of drug use.
• One year later, those denied an abortion were significantly more likely to have experienced domestic violence in the past six months and significantly less likely to rate their relationship with their child’s father as good or very good. At the study’s baseline, there were no differences in these areas between the two groups.

(The study hasn't yet been peer reviewed or published, but it looks methodologically very good.) You want to bet after ten years the women who had abortions will be more likely to be married?

Don't get familial with me

Futurist lace-ups by Evan Schultz, ArtKicks.

David Brooks writes:

At some point in recent history people all over the world started acting as if "freedom" meant adults doing whatever they wanted, as long as it didn't hurt anybody.*  Thus, they began refusing to allow their parents to immure them in monastic foundations or marry them off to strangers. More generally, they began to reject any arrangement that might close off their personal options. 

This brave new world brought with it some fairly amazing changes. Society no longer wielded the shotgun that it had used virtually throughout human history, from Austen to Updike, if you will,** to commandeer its young people into mixed-doubles child-rearing teams; and all sorts of bizarre new living formats arose, from single mommitude to Boston marriages and cages aux folles à la provençale, from the strictly single-sex Spartan dorm to the violently heterosexual Negev kibbutz, from the horizontal parental pluralism of polygyny and polyandry to the vertical pluralism of moving back in with grandmamma, it had become an Age of Possibilities. 

And increasingly the family possibilities included the possibility of having no family at all. Nearly 20% of American women in their 40s have never had children, as compared to 10% in 1976, and a Pew Research Center study found that children were 37% less important as a factor in a successful marriage in 2007 than they were were in 1990, while sex was 4% more important, and shared political opinions 9% more important. It is common knowledge that in Washington, D.C., if you want to have a friend you should get a dog. 

Nor is this happening only in America. It is estimated that more than 20% of Italian women born around 1965 will never have children, and I'd guess that by now that one is not likely to go wrong, given that they're turning 60. Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese birth rates are among the lowest in the world. Among middle-aged German men, 48% insist that one can have a happy life without children, three times as many as in their fathers' generation (who were of course famous for their devotion to the KKK of Kinder, Kirche, und Küche***). The world is rapidly turning from dominance by the two-parent family into a cafeteria of options in which you can pick up the main dish of progeny, the starch of housekeeping, and the side salad of some occasional sex in any ridiculous or excessive combination you like with any number of like-minded or complementary partners. 

A deft analysis of this global phenomenon has recently been put together—just last month, in fact—in the Internet pamphlet The Rise of Post-Familialism, by a crack team of researchers under the leadership of noted urban futurist Joel Kotkin of Chapman University, Orange County, California while he was working a holiday gig at the Civil Service College, Singapore.**** Some of the reasons, Kotkin suggests, might be the decline of religion in many people's lives, the decline in fascism (especially in Spain), or the increasing opportunities for women in managerial positions now that they are being admitted to first-class colleges like Harvard, Yale, Radcliffe-Brown, and the Air Force Academy, leaving them clearly less time for violin lessons and lacrosse practice. “In Singapore,” notes demographer Wolfgang Lutz, “women work an average of  fifty-three hours a week. Of course they are not going to have children. They don’t have the time.” 

The situation is Singapore is especially interesting, because being Asians, Singaporeans have always had a fanatical devotion to the two-parent family.***** Nevertheless they now have one of the lowest birth rates in the world, at a rate of 1.15 births per female in 2010, while 37% of the males and 25% of females in the 30-34 age cohort remain single.****** 

These new trends are bound to have enormous repercussions in social life, as inveterate "singlists" concentrate in the dense urban environments where they can hook up for anonymous sexual quickies without leaving their buildings, while breeding pairs continue their traditional spread out into suburbs to raise their free-range organic babies. The former will inevitably vote Democratic and the latter Republican, and it seems likely that we are all on the road to social and biological collapse as the numbers of the former grow and those of the latter shrink. 

But then perhaps the Age of Possibilities is based on a misconception. It may be that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, and what we really need is to be enshrouded, in commitments that, like actual shrouds, we do not freely choose but inherit, commitments to spouse, pets, God, and country. It is through such commitments that we learn to worry about others and about the future, when we will be well and truly enshrouded, and whatever children we have produced will be coping with whatever tax policies they have inherited from us. 

And then who knows? Why does it have to be a two-parent family? Perhaps some of these new forms of commitment will leave their victims feeling just as trapped and desperate; isn't that what really counts?

*As opposed to more traditional definitions like

"Freedom is the power rooted in reason and will to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform some deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. Human freedom… attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude." (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1731)

or more concisely

freedom for the Christian is to choose Jesus Christ and to follow His ways. That is what freedom is.

**I, obviously, won't. What Brooks is thinking of is not actually most of human history but merely a kind of Long Victorian Era, when married middle-class women in Europe and North America had as little sexual freedom as single ones—beginning at the moment in Europe and North America when they stopped farming out their babies to wet-nurses, shamed by the polemics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  and ending when the use of infant formula became respectable. Thanks to chemical birth control single women achieved sexual freedom for the first time in history at around the same time.

***In fact according to Wikipedia the Nazi régime did not use this phrase, associated with Wilhelmine Germany and the loss of World War I. They did however offer rewards for fertility, as of 1933, giving a very substantial loan to the parents of a first child which was forgiven in installments on the births of a second, third, and fourth.

****Here, after giving you the impression that he has mastered all this data in the course of his extensive reading, is where Brooks reveals the source it all came from; not this time slipped into his Kindle by an anxious publisher, because the thing is not exactly published (it exists in 40 pages of  PDF), but perhaps communicated to Brooksie by Fieldstead and Company, the Orange County nonprofit that funded it, which exists to manage the philanthropic programs of the Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr. family "as part of a Christian worldview." A humble little corner in the land of wingnut welfare, running for example this:

Orange County Rescue Mission is a non-profit organization that uses Biblical principles in programs such as relationships, finance, and parenting. They accept homeless men, women, and children from any faith and do not require the homeless to participate in religious services to receive services such as food.

Ahmanson himself is a former member of C.J. Rushdoony's Christian Reconstructionist movement who left over such issues as Rushdoony's call for the death penalty for homosexuals, which Ahmanson has never supported; a Touretter whose wife takes care of most of his public communications; a major backer of the anti-Darwinist Discovery Institute; and, since 2008, a member of the Democratic Party (like the Christian Reconstructionists, California Republicans are too right-wing for him). 

Way more complex than a Koch brother, as you see, as well as "moderate" in a half-assed Brooksish way, but we are not talking about cutting-edge research environments here. Chapman has no graduate school and issues mostly business degrees; the Civil Service College includes course offerings like Emails@Work for Support Officers (8 hours), Developing Personal Confidence through Public Speaking (24 hours), and Creating Positive Bodies and Minds in Mid-Life and Beyond for Division 1 & 2 Officers (for Women Only) (16 hours).

*****More accurately known as the three-grandparent family in the ideal case for Chinese or Malay-Muslim families, organized around a patriarch with two wives (even though Muslims are permitted to have up to four wives and there is no explicit limit for Chinese). It was partly doomed when the government banned polygamy, under British influence, and when government housing policy began to plan only for four-person households (plus a maid, for the affluent, but in general a Filipina and hence not a suitable concubine). 

******This crisis is indeed one of the reasons for the establishment of the Singapore Civil Service College: it is hoped that in the more relaxed but nevertheless work-oriented atmosphere of, say, a lecture on familialism by Mr. Kotkin, colleagues will feel emboldened to ask one another out on dates, thus reversing the trend of socializing primarily on line. Undoubtedly the College's course offerings include instruction in dating behavior as well. 

Umberto Boccioni, Futurist Evening, 1910.  From Counterlight's Peculiars.

Better wed than dead

Times runs an enormous feature by Jason DeParle on life in the universe in which marriage is the key variable ("Two Classes, Divided by 'I Do'") from which everything else follows; Ms. F and Ms. S, who work in the same day care center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, are practically the same person, but Ms. F is married and Ms. S is not, so naturally Ms. F finished college, became the boss, and has the time and money to give her children a spectacularly nurturing and yet stimulating environment to grow up in, while Ms. S dropped out, became the employee, and consigned her own kids to a life of sensory deprivation and food stamps.

In other words, it's a dispatch from Brooksland, where income inequality is caused by sluts who persist in giving it away for free, thus creating poverty in an otherwise pretty cushy little society. Hold out until you see that ring, girls! The poverty you don't create may be your own.

Girl, Appalachian house. From America Watch.

Or, as DeParle puts it,

Notes from the growing bifurcation

Shorter David Brooks:

The poors are very different from you and me.

No, really; David Brooks has been hearing about social inequality in America, what he calls a "growing bifurcation of American society," and he's very worried. He's been hearing about it from Robert Putnam, author of the famous Bowling Alone, and I figure he's been hearing about it at the Aspen Ideas Festival, where Putnam just gave a talk on his recent research.

The research is pretty hot, too, and nowhere near publication, but if like me you just couldn't make it to Aspen this year (oops! I forgot all about that gosh darn mortgage and all them credit card bills, and I didn't have anything to wear anyhow), you can still read about it in writing by someone who is not David Brooks; I found a very nice liveblog by David Weinberger at Joho the Blog, and I imagine there's more out there too.

From Tales from the Lou's Blog.

Putnam has been looking at children, and seeing hard class differences right from infancy, when more women who haven't finished college are giving birth than women who have, over the past 30 years, and more kids (obviously) are getting brought up in single-adult homes. The numbers are pretty much the same, by the way, for white Americans on their own as they are for people of all races (Putnam's study is limited to white people).

Parents from the upper level invest more money in their kids and they invest more time as well; up to an hour a day of additional quality time. Their kids are more active in sports, lessons, volunteering for the community. Kids from the lower level have fewer people they can trust, are less trusting anyway, and—of course—do worse on the reading and math tests.

Color me not terribly surprised by any of this, and why? I guess I always thought poverty was more of  a problem than teachers' unions. But Brooks is pretty shocked, almost to the point of understanding, briefly, what is going on: notice how he pulls back as if in terror at his own audacity from reality into surreality between paragraphs:

A long series of cultural, economic and social trends have merged to create this sad state of affairs. Traditional social norms were abandoned, meaning more children are born out of wedlock. Their single parents simply have less time and resources to prepare them for a more competitive world. Working-class jobs were decimated, meaning that many parents are too stressed to have the energy, time or money to devote to their children.

Affluent, intelligent people are now more likely to marry other energetic, intelligent people. They raise energetic, intelligent kids in self-segregated, cultural ghettoes where they know little about and have less influence upon people who do not share their blessings.

(Yes, it can't have that much to do with unemployment, can it? Must be those selfish intelligent people marrying their own kind and leaving the rest of us stranded.)

From The Final Edition (and a very funny though slow-starting Brooks parody from sometime last year).

And in the end, as he's trying to establish his left-right equivalence for the day, he really loses control:

Liberals are going to have to be willing to champion norms that say marriage should come before childrearing and be morally tough about it. Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept tax increases or benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class.

That's all he wants us to do? I'll take it! If you can't afford to get married you shouldn't have a baby. It would also help if Brooks's friends would loosen up some on abortion....