…than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
I’ve got an idea for the 2012 presidential election
Since “generic Republican” has been doing so well against Obama, can we just skip the Republican convention and say the nominee will be “a player to be named later?”
Tina Brown channels Princess Diana
One of the few benefits—perhaps the only benefit—of dying young and beautiful is that no one ever gets to see your looks fade or the effects of gravity on your epidermis.
Princess Diana, for example, died almost fourteen years ago at the age of thirty-six, and if she were alive today she’d be approaching her 50th birthday in just a couple of days. But Tina Brown of Newsweek won’t let her rest in peace and the remembered glow of youth. In an incredibly tacky and positively bizarre move, Brown has age-advanced Diana, like those lost kids on the milk cartons. Not only that, she’s shown Diana next to her future daughter-in-law, Kate Middleton, and imagined a life for Diana in the present:
The Newsweek feature also fantasizes about Diana’s Facebook page, imagining her “liking” the movie “The King’s Speech” and TV series “The Real Housewives of New York”, hanging out with David and Victoria Beckham, and sending supportive messages to spiritual physician Deepak Chopra and Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei…She also speculates that Diana would have been a defender against royal snobbery of Middleton’s non-aristocratic upbringing “and ostentatiously made Carole Middleton, Kate’s dynamic mother, her new BFF.”
One would have thought that Newsweek could not have descended lower than it already had in the business of delivering news. But with Ms. Brown at the helm, it seems as though there are greater depths to achieve than heretofore thought possible.
More on the American family’s decline
While Americans mull over the passage of a gay marriage law in New York, the decline of the American family and the institution of marriage among heterosexuals—especially less-educated ones—continues, as chronicled in this recent Weekly Standard article by Mitch Pearlstein. Here are a few of the most interesting statistics found there:
The sheer numbers are staggering. In round terms, about 40 percent of all births in the United States are out of wedlock. That figure for the entire population conceals wide variation: Thirty percent of white children, 50 percent of Hispanic children, and 70 percent of African-American children are born to unmarried parents.
Those stark and terrible numbers describe not only the decline of marriage as a way (actually, the way) to raise children, but one full of economic consequences. The article points out that it has raised the amount of money we pay out in various forms of assistance and has widened the gap between the poorer and richer segments of society. The social and psychological consequences are no less dire.
There are some lacunae in the trend. One of them involves women with four-year college degrees; their rates of out-of-wedlock births still remain quite low, although they have risen:
In the early 1980s, only 2 percent of births to mothers with four-year college degrees were outside of marriage. For moderately educated mothers the figure was 13 percent, and for mothers who didn’t finish high school it was 33 percent. The recent figures on out-of-wedlock births for these three educational groups are much higher: 6 percent, 44 percent, and 54 percent respectively.
I am actually surprised that the figure among college graduates remains this low. Nevertheless, the statistics in general are sobering, and it’s difficult to believe that, once the marriage system is broken, it will ever be put back together again.
Pearlstein advocates training young men to counter the effects of father absence:
Aimless or felonious men are not the only reason for the decline of marriage, but they are a sizable one.
Many of these young men grew up without their fathers and suffered what some call “father wounds.” Would it not make sense for such boys to attend schools properly described as “paternalistic”? These would be tough-loving places, like the celebrated (but still too few) KIPP Academies, with their Knowledge Is Power Program. Would it not also make sense to allow many more boys and girls to attend religious and other private schools, which have their “biggest impact,” according to Harvard’s Paul Peterson, by keeping minority kids in “an educational environment that sustains them through graduation”?
I think that’s a drop in the bucket. The marriage decline (which exists in many European countries that do not have large numbers of “aimless or felonious men”) is in large measure, IMHO, a result of the fact that we have simultaneously removed many of the social (although not the economic) costs of illegitimacy, and decreased the incentives to marry.
Why do people get married these days? The strength of the drive to procreate, to be able to have sex with a regular partner, to avoid the disapproval of peers and of society as a whole, and to meet with favor from organized religion (not to mention fear of dads with shotguns) used to all act as strong drivers to lead men and women to marriage. For most young people in this country, and for society as a whole, these motivations have been tremendously weakened.
[NOTE: Here’s one of my earlier ruminations on related topics, including Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown.]
Full court press on Michele Bachmann
Hold the presses! The news is that Michele Bachmann won’t ever be able to get a job teaching American history.
Neither will Obama. But of course that’s not important, and Bachmann is.
Separated at birth: Mandy Patinkin and Pinchas Zukerman?
They’re both musical; Patinkin is a singer and Broadway actor and Zukerman a famous classical violinist.
They’re both Jewish, although Patinkin was born in this country and Zukerman is the Israeli son of Holocaust survivors.
But their marital history diverges, with Patinkin having been wedded to the same woman since 1980 and Zukerman married to his third blond wife, a cellist named Amanda Forsyth who is nearly twenty years younger than he is.
So one could assume that Patinkin and Zukerman must be two different people. But have you ever seen them in the same room?
I thought not.
That’s Zukerman on the bottom, in case you were having trouble figuring out who’s who.
Two of the violinist’s three wives have been musicians. His first wife was stunning flutist and author Eugenia Zukerman, with whom he had two daughters, both successful singers (interesting in terms of the phenomenon of multiple talents about which I wrote here; the Zukerman parents and children are all exceedingly musical, but the parents play instruments and the children sing, one opera and one folk).
And who was Zukerman’s second wife, the non-musical one? Tuesday Weld.
Yes, that’s right: that Tuesday Weld. And lest you think this was a passing fling, let me just say that Pinchas and Tuesday (Pinchas and Tuesday????) were married for thirteen years, which in this day and age is practically in golden wedding anniversary league.
[NOTE: Patinkin is now 58 and Zukerman 62, but the photos above were taken some time ago.]
Will Rick Perry…
TSA security: searching grandma’s diaper
There must be a better way to protect us than this:
Jean Weber of Destin filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security after her 95-year-old mother was detained and extensively searched last Saturday while trying to board a plane to fly to Michigan to be with family members during the final stages of her battle with leukemia.
Her mother, who was in a wheelchair, was asked to remove an adult diaper in order to complete a pat-down search.
On the other hand, the TSA spokesperson was correct when she said that even the elderly need special checking if an alarm is triggered, because ““TSA cannot exempt any group from screening because we know from intelligence that there are terrorists out there that would then exploit that vulnerability.”
The entire thing puts me in mind of the ending of the excellent movie “The Day of the Jackal” (1973 version, not the remake). I’m talking about the following clip (MAJOR spoiler alert; if you’re not familiar with the movie, do not watch because this will give away the ending. Instead, I recommend renting the whole thing):
I guess it turns out…
The second anniversary of FredHjr’s death
[NOTE: This is a slightly edited version of a post I wrote last year.]
It hardly seems possible that two years have now passed since the tragic and untimely death of FredHJr, one of the most memorable and prolific commenters here. His loss to this community is a great one, and I miss him still. We could sorely use a large dose of his wit and wisdom.
The loss his family feels is far greater, and I am thinking of them today and hoping they have found comfort in the memory of his love and faith.
And now I will reprise some words I wrote two years ago when I first heard of Fred’s death:
Even though none of us actually met Fred in the real world, most of the regulars here knew FredHjr as I knew him””a brilliant mind containing knowledge of unusual depth and breadth, and demonstrating a rare ability to articulate his thoughts with precision, grace, and logic; a staunch patriot and passionate defender of liberty who never pulled his punches; a “changer” who had been a Marxist in his youth and held a vast storehouse of expertise on how the Left thinks and operates; a seeker of truth with an almost inexhaustible interest in the world around him; and a man of strong religious faith and great and abiding love for his family.
The news of his extremely untimely and tragic death comes as a great shock. It’s also a reminder that people here can become an important part of our lives; we feel as though we know them, even though our knowledge of them is only of the virtual sort. But minds meeting minds is a very powerful thing nonetheless.
[NOTE: Here’s another post about Fred.]
Hugo Chavez…
Gay marriage: as New York goes, so goes…
…the nation?
New York has legalized gay marriage in the best way possible: at the state level, by legislation, and with exemptions for “religious organizations to refuse to perform services or lend space for same-sex weddings.”
This is far better than legislation by court rulings, and far better than a federal law. If New York changes its mind, it can always be repealed, but I doubt this will happen. I have long felt that this question will be moot in another generation or two in most states, because younger people are far more likely to support the legalization of gay marriage than older people are.
I cannot say whether this law a slippery slope, as some opponents fear. I sometimes think our entire culture and society is on a slippery slope in its jettisoning of customs that have long been its foundation (some of my views on the legalization of gay marriage can be found here), but personally I cannot work up a head of steam against gay marriage and am more or less a libertarian on this issue.
I do know that I believe that the religious exemptions in the New York law are important, and that they may indeed be threatened by challenges in the future. I also believe that gay marriage proponents such as Justin Driver, the author of this NY Times piece, who dearly love to make a comparison with interracial marriage, are using a certain amount faulty logic (one of these days I’ll write a post on that, but today is not the day; I’ve got some personal obligations that necessitate speed right now).